Marcus Feld
Marcus Feld writes about the technical and legal corners of the patent record for GreatPatent.com — the engineering that made an idea finally work, the courtroom fights over who got there first, and the gloriously pointless devices that somehow still earned a federal patent.
He has a particular soft spot for the sincere and slightly ridiculous inventions that fill the archive: the machines for patting yourself on the back, the umbrellas for beer, the patents whose only flaw is that no one ever needed them. He is interested in what the strangest filings reveal about how the patent system actually works.
69 stories by Marcus Feld
Ernő Rubik Needed About a Month to Solve His Own Cube. An American Court Later Found It Infringed an Earlier US Patent.
Rubik built the first cube in Budapest in 1974 as a way to think about three-dimensional movement. The clever part is how it holds together when most of its pieces are not attached to anything. In the United States, a chemist named Larry Nichols had patented a related puzzle in 1972, and his company sued.
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The Ouija Board's 1891 Patent Calls It an 'Egyptian Luck-Board' and Never Says How It Works
Elijah Bond's patent describes a board and a small pointer on legs, and makes no claim about what moves the pointer. The popular legend says the patent examiner demanded a demonstration first. The science, worked out decades before the patent, says the players are moving it themselves without realizing it.
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Coca-Cola Asked Glassmakers for a Bottle You Could Recognize in the Dark, or Broken on the Ground
In 1915 Coca-Cola had an imitation problem, since competitors used the same straight-sided bottles and borrowed-sounding names. It challenged glass companies to design a bottle identifiable by touch alone. The winner came from a small glassworks in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the name on the patent is not the name of the man who drew it.
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Fermi and Szilard Filed a Patent on the Nuclear Reactor in 1944. It Stayed Secret for More Than Ten Years.
The patent is titled Neutronic Reactor, which is a very flat name for the machine that produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. It was filed during the Manhattan Project, buried under a secrecy order, and not published until 1955, six months after Enrico Fermi died.
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The 1868 Patent Behind the First Successful Typewriter Had Its Keys in Alphabetical Order. QWERTY Came Later, and Nobody Fully Agrees Why.
Christopher Latham Sholes and two partners patented a typewriter in Milwaukee in 1868 with keys arranged like a piano, roughly in alphabetical order. Over the next several years the letters were shuffled into QWERTY. The popular explanation for that is a distortion of a better one.
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The First Electric Guitar You Could Buy Was Nicknamed the Frying Pan, and Its Patent Took Three Years
In the big band era, guitarists could not be heard over the horns. George Beauchamp set the strings inside a pair of horseshoe magnets, wound a coil beneath them, and mounted it all on a round aluminum body with a long neck. It looked like cookware, and the magnetic pickup it used is still how electric guitars work.
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Frank Zamboni Spent Years Building a Machine So His Ice Rink Didn't Need a Crew of Men With Scrapers
Frank Zamboni ran an ice rink in Southern California, and resurfacing the ice by hand took several workers more than an hour. His machine did the whole job in a single pass. Its most important trick is the one people least expect: it lays down warm water, not cold.
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LEGO Bricks Were on Sale for Nine Years Before They Held Together Properly. The Fix Was a Row of Hollow Tubes.
The first LEGO bricks had studs on top and an empty space underneath, so models tended to come apart when you picked them up. Godtfred Kirk Christiansen's 1958 design put tubes inside the brick, and a brick molded that year still fits one molded today.
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A Factory Mechanic Got Tired of Burnt Toast in the Company Cafeteria and Patented the Timer That Ejects It
Electric toasters already existed in 1919, and they all required a person to stand there, watch, and flip the bread by hand. Charles Strite's patent added the two things that made toast automatic: a timer, and a spring that throws the toast out when the timer runs down.
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He Invented the Intermittent Wiper, Ford Put It on Its Cars, and He Spent the Next Three Decades in Court
Robert Kearns showed Ford a wiper that paused between sweeps. Ford examined it, declined to do business, and started selling cars with intermittent wipers a few years later. Kearns represented himself for much of what followed and won, and it cost him nearly everything else.
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Clarence Birdseye Watched Inuit Fishermen Pull Fish From a Hole in the Ice and Worked Out Why Frozen Food Tasted Bad
Frozen food existed long before Birdseye and it was considered close to inedible. What he figured out in Labrador is that the problem was never freezing. It was freezing slowly, and the difference comes down to the size of the ice crystals.
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Super Glue Was Discovered Twice by the Same Man, and He Threw It Out Both Times
Harry Coover found cyanoacrylate in 1942 while trying to make gun sights, and dismissed it for sticking to everything. He ran into it again in 1951 doing jet canopies. It took nine years and a second accident before anyone recognized that sticking to everything was the product.
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The Revolving Door Was Patented as a Storm Door. It Was Built to Stop Air, Not Move People.
Theophilus Van Kannel's 1888 patent is titled 'Storm-Door Structure,' and that title explains the whole design. The revolving door exists because a hinged door on a tall building leaks heat every time it opens, and Van Kannel worked out a door that is never actually open.
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The Tin Can Was Invented in 1810. The Can Opener Showed Up in 1858.
For nearly fifty years, the instructions on a tin can told you to open it with a hammer and a chisel. Ezra Warner's 1858 patent was the first American attempt to do it with one tool, and it was so dangerous that grocers had to operate it for you.
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The Lawn Mower Is a Carpet Mill Machine Somebody Pointed at the Ground
Edwin Budding worked in an English textile mill where a bladed cylinder trimmed the nap off finished cloth. He decided grass was the same problem lying down. Amariah Hills brought the reel mower to America in 1868.
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The Fire Hydrant Patent Was Destroyed in a Fire
Frederick Graff is usually credited with the post hydrant around 1801. Nobody can check, because the Patent Office burned to the ground in 1836 and took roughly ten thousand patents with it, including his.
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A Saloon Owner Built the Cash Register to Catch His Own Bartenders Stealing
James Ritty ran a bar in Dayton and could not stop his staff pocketing the takings. On a steamship to Europe he watched a device count the revolutions of the propeller shaft, and realized a machine could count sales the same way.
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The Umbrella Barely Changed for Two Thousand Years, Then Somebody Made It Fold
Parasols existed in ancient Egypt, China, and Rome. The object stayed roughly the same until the nineteenth century, when steel ribs made it light enough to carry and hinged struts made it collapse into a bag.
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The Phillips Screw Is Designed to Slip. That Was the Whole Point.
Everyone who has stripped a Phillips head assumes it is a flaw. It is not. The driver was built to climb out of the socket at a set torque, because in 1936 nobody had a reliable way to stop an assembly line worker from overtightening a screw.
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Burroughs Built an Adding Machine That Printed, Then Smashed the First Fifty With a Window
Bank clerks added long columns by hand and had no way to check their work except doing it again. William Burroughs built a machine that printed every entry and the total. The first production run only worked for him, so he threw them out a window.
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The Lock on Your Front Door Copies a Design the Egyptians Used Four Thousand Years Ago
Linus Yale Jr. did not invent the pin tumbler. Ancient Egyptian locks used wooden pins dropped into a bolt and a toothed key that lifted them. What Yale did was shrink it, make it out of metal, and put it in a cylinder small enough for a door.
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Garrett Morgan Saw a Crash at an Intersection and Invented the Yellow Light
Early traffic signals had two states: go and stop. Switching instantly between them caused collisions, because nobody had time to react. Morgan added a third position that halted all traffic before the change — the ancestor of the amber light.
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It Took a Century to Figure Out That the Staples Should Come in a Strip
Early staplers held one staple at a time. You loaded it, squeezed, and reloaded. Every improvement for decades tried to make the mechanism better. The actual breakthrough was gluing the staples together so the machine could hold hundreds.
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Microwave Popcorn Doesn't Work Without the Bag, and the Bag Is the Actual Invention
Popcorn was one of the first foods anyone microwaved, back in 1945. It stayed bad for forty years, because microwaves heat unevenly and half the kernels never got hot enough. The fix was a strip of metallized film glued inside a paper bag.
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The Bottle Cap Made Him Rich. Then He Told an Employee to Invent Something People Throw Away.
William Painter solved the problem of sealing carbonated drinks with a crimped metal cap that cost almost nothing and was ruined by opening. He then gave a struggling salesman named King Gillette one piece of advice, and it created the razor business.
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Every Metallurgist Told Gillette His Razor Blade Was Impossible. It Took Six Years and an MIT Machinist.
King Gillette wanted a steel blade thin enough to throw away and hard enough to shave with. Experts at MIT told him it could not be made. He kept at it for six years, sold 51 blades the first year, and 12 million four years later.
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The Trampoline Was Built From a Circus Idea, Named After a Spanish Word, and Used to Train Astronauts
George Nissen was a teenage gymnast who watched trapeze artists bounce off the safety net and wondered why the bounce was the boring part. He built a rig in his garage, and the military and NASA found uses for it he never intended.
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Silly Putty Was a Wartime Attempt to Replace Rubber. It Failed at Everything Except Bouncing.
Japan captured the rubber-producing regions of Asia and the United States needed a synthetic substitute urgently. A General Electric chemist dropped boric acid into silicone oil and got a substance that stretched, snapped, bounced, and was useless for tires.
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A Father Cut Holes in a Plastic Ball So His Son Could Throw a Curve in a Small Backyard
David Mullany watched his twelve-year-old wreck his arm trying to throw curveballs with a taped-up tennis ball. He took some plastic spheres from a perfume-packaging factory, cut slots in them with a razor, and solved it on the eighth try.
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The Pull-Tab Can Fixed One Problem and Created a Litter Crisis
Ermal Fraze forgot the church key at a family picnic and pried a beer can open on a car bumper. His fix put a tab on every can in America — and then put several billion sharp metal tabs on every beach, park, and roadside in it.
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The Mousetrap Is the Most-Patented Device in American History. Almost None of Them Work.
More than four thousand mousetrap patents have been granted in the United States, and thousands more rejected. Roughly twenty have ever made money. The one that won was patented in 1894 and costs about a quarter.
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The Ice Cream Cone Has at Least Five Claimed Inventors and One Very Convenient Legend
The story says a waffle vendor at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair rescued a neighboring ice cream seller who ran out of dishes. It is a wonderful story. It is also contradicted by a patent filed in New York the year before.
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The Etch A Sketch Was Rejected Everywhere, Then Bought for $25,000 at the Last Minute
A French garage mechanic invented a drawing screen that worked with aluminum powder and static electricity. Toy companies turned him down for years. Ohio Art passed on it twice before an executive took a second look on the way out the door.
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Norway Built a Monument to the Man Who Invented the Paper Clip. He Didn't Invent It.
Johan Vaaler patented a paper clip in 1899. It was not the clip we use, which was already being manufactured in Britain. Norway made him a national hero anyway — and during the Nazi occupation, the clip became something more than office equipment.
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The Frisbee Began as a Pie Tin, a Flying-Saucer Hoax, and a Man Selling Discs in a Costume
Fred Morrison sold his plastic disc at county fairs by pretending to sell an invisible wire — 'the disc is free, the wire costs a dollar.' The saucer craze gave him a name. Then a toy company renamed it after a pie company.
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Before the Crash Test Dummy, They Used Cadavers — and Sometimes Volunteers
Car safety research needed to know exactly what a human body does in a collision. For years the answer came from human corpses, live animals, and a colonel who repeatedly strapped himself into a rocket sled. The dummy was built to end all three.
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The Slinky Was a Failed Naval Instrument That Fell Off a Shelf and Walked Away
Richard James was designing springs to stabilize ship instruments in rough seas. He knocked one off a shelf and watched it step end-over-end down a stack of books, onto a table, and onto the floor. He went home and told his wife he thought he had a toy.
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A NASA Engineer Invented the Super Soaker While Trying to Build a Better Refrigerator
Lonnie Johnson was working on an environmentally friendly heat pump that used water instead of Freon. He hooked a prototype nozzle to a bathroom sink, fired a stream of water across the room, and thought: this would make a great water gun.
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The 1891 Patent That Settles the Toilet Paper Argument: It's Over
Households have argued about whether the roll should hang over or under for more than a century. The original patent drawing, filed by Seth Wheeler in 1891, shows the paper coming over the top. The inventor's own diagram is not ambiguous.
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Someone Patented the Little Plastic Table in Your Pizza Box
The three-legged plastic stool in the middle of a delivered pizza has a name, a purpose, and a 1985 United States patent. It exists because a hot cardboard lid sags, and a sagging lid ruins the cheese.
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The Escalator Was Patented in 1859. Nobody Built One for Thirty Years.
Nathan Ames patented 'revolving stairs' before the Civil War. He admitted he wasn't sure what would power them, never built one, and died four years later at thirty-nine. The moving staircase arrived a generation after he did.
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Buckminster Fuller Patented a Dome That Gets Stronger as It Gets Bigger
Most structures get weaker and heavier as they scale up. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome does the opposite — it grows more efficient the larger it becomes. It was too strange for mainstream architecture, but it went to the South Pole, the World's Fair, and the cover of the future.
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The Greenhouse Helmet: A Patent to Grow Plants on Your Own Head
In 1986, the USPTO granted a patent for a clear domed helmet, worn over the head, containing live plants — so the wearer could breathe air freshened by their own personal, portable garden. It is exactly as wonderful and impractical as it sounds.
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The Kissing Shield: A Patented Membrane for Germ-Free Affection
In 1998, the USPTO granted a patent for a thin membrane stretched across a heart-shaped handle, held between two people so they could kiss without exchanging germs. It won an Ig Nobel Prize. It was also, its inventor insisted, entirely serious.
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Bell Called It His Greatest Invention. It Sent Speech on a Beam of Light — in 1880.
Alexander Graham Bell thought the photophone, not the telephone, was his finest work. It transmitted the human voice on a beam of sunlight, with no wires at all. It was also a century early: the world had no use for it until fiber optics arrived.
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The Santa Claus Detector
In 1996, the USPTO granted a patent for a Christmas stocking rigged with a light that switches on when Santa arrives. The patent's stated purpose is to give children 'a visual indication' of Santa's visit — filed, apparently, in complete earnest.
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Edwin Armstrong Invented Static-Free Radio. Then the Industry He Threatened Destroyed Him.
FM radio was better than AM in every way — no static, higher fidelity, less power. That was exactly the problem. The company that dominated AM spent two decades in court to bury it, and the inventor spent his fortune fighting back before jumping from his apartment window.
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The New York Times Mocked Goddard's Rocket. It Apologized 49 Years Later — Mid-Flight to the Moon.
Robert Goddard patented the fundamentals of the liquid-fuel rocket in 1914. When he suggested a rocket could reach the Moon, a newspaper editorial declared he lacked 'the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.' The correction ran during Apollo 11.
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The Patent for a Mask That Physically Stops You From Eating
In 1982, a patent was granted for an 'anti-eating face mask' — a cup-shaped cage strapped over the mouth and locked, intended to prevent the wearer from eating between meals. It is one part diet aid, one part muzzle, and entirely real.
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The Beerbrella: A Tiny Umbrella Whose Only Job Is to Shade Your Beer
In 2003, the USPTO granted a patent for a miniature umbrella, roughly the size of a saucer, that clamps onto a beer bottle to keep the sun off it. The name in the official patent title is, in full legal seriousness, the 'Beerbrella.'
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Chester Carlson Invented the Photocopier. Twenty Companies Said No.
A patent attorney tired of copying documents by hand invented dry photocopying in his kitchen in 1938. IBM, Kodak, GE, RCA, and the US Navy all turned it down. The company that finally said yes became Xerox.
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Tesla Patented a Way to Beam Power Through the Earth. Then the Money Ran Out.
Nikola Tesla believed he could transmit electricity wirelessly to anywhere on Earth, using the planet itself as a conductor. He built a 187-foot tower on Long Island to prove it. The patent was granted the same year the tower's funding collapsed for good.
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The Patent for Patting Yourself on the Back
In 1986, the USPTO granted a patent for a device consisting of a simulated human hand on a spring-loaded arm, mounted so that a person could reach up, pull it down, and administer a congratulatory pat to their own back.
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The Patent for a Machine That Kicks You in the Rear
In 2001, the USPTO granted a patent for a coin-operated amusement device whose entire function is to let a user pay to have a rotating boot kick them in the buttocks. It is real, it is fully illustrated, and it is exactly what it sounds like.
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The Patent for Keeping a Dog's Ears Out of Its Food
In 1980, a patent was granted for a set of tubes that slip over the long ears of breeds like spaniels and setters, holding them up and back so they don't drag through the food bowl. It is deeply silly and, if you own such a dog, deeply reasonable.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Patent for Birthing a Baby by Centrifugal Force
In 1965, a New York couple named George and Charlotte Blonsky received a US patent for a machine that spun a woman in labor on a rotating turntable, using centrifugal force to deliver the child. They were entirely sincere. They had detailed engineering drawings.
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Philo Farnsworth Sketched Television in a Potato Field at Fourteen
A Mormon farm boy in Idaho realized in 1921 that an electron beam could scan an image one row at a time, just like the rows under his plow. Six years later, at age twenty, he filed the patent. The fight to keep it from RCA consumed the rest of his life.
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Doug Engelbart Patented the Mouse and Made Ten Thousand Dollars
In 1967, Douglas Engelbart filed a patent for a small box with two metal wheels underneath, which his colleague William English had built out of wood. The patent expired in 1987, just as the device was about to become the most-used input mechanism on Earth.
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The Patent on Pointing a Laser at a Cat
In 1995, the USPTO granted Kevin Amiss and Martin Greenstein a patent on the act of exercising a cat by getting it to chase a moving spot of light. The patent was real. The cats did not pay royalties.
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Tesla Built a Drone in 1898. The Navy Said No.
Nikola Tesla's 1898 patent describes a radio-controlled boat with multi-frequency channel hopping to defeat jamming. He demonstrated it at Madison Square Garden. The military passed. Drones would not become real for another century.
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The Comb-Over Patent
In 1977, two brothers in Orlando, Florida received a US patent for a method of combing one's hair to disguise baldness. It is among the most-cited examples of why the patent system needed reform — and a winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize.
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The Five-Year-Old Who Patented Swinging on a Swing
In 2002, the USPTO granted Steven Olson, age five, a patent for a 'method of swinging on a swing.' His patent-attorney father had been making a point. The point landed.
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A Toilet for Automatically Exhausting Odious Air
Nat Thompson's 2002 patent hides a fan inside the toilet bowl. It switches on when you sit down and sends the smell down the drain with everything else, instead of into the room.
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