The Kissing Shield: A Patented Membrane for Germ-Free Affection

US5727565 was granted on March 17, 1998, to Delores B. Barnwell. The title is "Kissing Shield and Method of Use Therefor." The invention is a thin, flexible membrane stretched across a frame — heart-shaped, in the patent's drawings — with a handle, held up between two people so that they may kiss through it without any actual contact, and therefore without exchanging germs.

The patent lays out the concern plainly. Kissing, it observes, transmits bacteria and viruses. Colds, flu, and other illnesses pass readily from mouth to mouth. Yet kissing is a deeply valued human gesture of affection, greeting, and ceremony that people are understandably reluctant to give up. The kissing shield resolves the tension: the membrane, thin enough to preserve the sensation and symbolism of the kiss, forms a hygienic barrier that blocks the germs. The patent even suggests applications beyond romance — a politician, for instance, kissing many babies on a campaign trail, or any situation requiring "sanitary" kissing at scale.

Serious, apparently

What lifts the kissing shield above simple novelty is that its inventor appears to have meant it. The application is drafted with full professional seriousness, complete with figures, claims, and a genuine articulation of the public-health problem it addresses. In an age increasingly conscious of germ transmission, the underlying worry is not even unreasonable — it is the solution that tips into the absurd, because a heart-shaped membrane on a stick is not a thing most people will ever hold up before kissing someone they love.

The kissing shield was awarded a share of the 1999 Ig Nobel Prize — the prize for achievements that "first make people laugh, then make them think" — an honor it shares with the centrifugal-force birthing machine also featured in this archive.

The pandemic footnote

There is a coda that the patent's 1998 authors could not have anticipated. When a global respiratory pandemic arrived two decades later and the entire world became suddenly, intensely concerned with barrier protection against airborne and contact transmission, the kissing shield enjoyed a small second life as a viral curiosity — passed around online as the patent that had, in its own ridiculous way, seen it coming. It remained as impractical as ever. But the instinct behind it — that human closeness and human hygiene are sometimes genuinely at odds, and that someone should really invent a way to have both — turned out to be more prescient than anyone laughing at it in 1998 would have guessed.

See the original

The full text and figures of US5727565 are on patents.us.