GreatPatent.com
Stories from the US patent record — unusual, notable, and historically significant inventions, retold for the general reader.
A Toilet for Automatically Exhausting Odious Air
An 1898 patent for a self-venting toilet seat that drew foul air directly into the chimney — a Victorian solution to a Victorian problem.
Recent stories
The Wright Brothers' Patent Nearly Grounded American Aviation
The 1906 patent on the 'Flying Machine' didn't just protect the Wright brothers' invention. The way they enforced it triggered a decade of litigation that left American aircraft design years behind Europe's by the time World War I began.
A Nurse in Queens Invented Home Security in 1966
Marie Van Brittan Brown worked irregular nursing shifts in a high-crime neighborhood and didn't feel safe answering her door. So she and her husband designed — and patented — the first home security system with closed-circuit cameras, a remote door release, two-way audio, and a panic button. Decades before any of it was commercial.
He Made the First Cell Phone Call to Gloat at His Rival
On a Manhattan sidewalk in April 1973, Motorola's Martin Cooper placed the first handheld cellular phone call. He dialed the head of the competing team at Bell Labs — specifically to tell him he'd lost the race. The patent was filed six months later.
The Patent for Surviving a Fire by Breathing Through the Toilet
In 1982, an inventor received a US patent for a fresh-air breathing device intended for high-rise fires. The device was a snorkel. You inserted it past the water in the toilet bowl and breathed the fresh air drawn down the plumbing's vent stack.
Cohen and Boyer Patented the Tools That Built Biotech
In 1980, Stanford University was granted a patent for a method of splicing DNA from one organism into another. The patent generated roughly $255 million in licensing fees before it expired — and made every recombinant drug in modern medicine legally possible.
Spencer Silver Invented an Adhesive No One Wanted for Twelve Years
In 1968, a 3M chemist named Spencer Silver was trying to make a stronger adhesive. He accidentally made a weaker one that didn't stick permanently. The product it eventually became — Post-it Notes — did not ship for another twelve years.
Smucker's Patented the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
In 1999, the J.M. Smucker Company received a US patent on a 'Sealed Crustless Sandwich.' For seven years, the company sent cease-and-desist letters to small-town caterers, school lunch programs, and competing sandwich makers, before the patent was finally pulled apart on reexamination.
Sarah Goode Patented a Bed That Hid Inside a Desk
Sarah E. Goode was born in slavery in 1855. By 1885 she owned a furniture store on Chicago's South Side and held the first US patent ever granted to an African-American woman — for a folding cabinet bed designed to make tenement apartments livable.
Maria Beasley Earned Twenty Thousand a Year in Patent Royalties in 1880. Her Life Rafts Were on the Titanic.
Maria Beasley was a thirty-something widow in Philadelphia when she patented a folding, fireproof life raft that could be deployed in seconds. She made roughly twenty thousand dollars a year from it at a time when the average American worker made four hundred.
They Patented the Barcode and Sold It for Fifteen Thousand Dollars
In 1949, two graduate students at Drexel filed a patent for a 'classifying apparatus' that used printed concentric circles to identify items at a checkout counter. The patent expired in 1969 — five years before the first barcode was ever scanned in a grocery store.
Mary Walton Made New York Quieter
By 1881, the elevated trains running through Manhattan had made the city deafening. Mary Walton — an inventor in her sixties — patented a system that absorbed the vibration before it could resonate through the iron structure. She sold the rights to the railway for ten thousand dollars.
He Patented Video Games in 1971. Nobody Knew What They Were Looking At.
Ralph Baer was a senior engineer at a defense electronics company in New Hampshire when he wrote a four-page memo in 1966 proposing that televisions could be used to play games. His employer was the only one who took him seriously. The patent eventually built a two-hundred-billion-dollar industry.