Tag: invention
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Uncle Sam’s Patents Reach The Million Mark
The public radio program This American Life did a fantastic episode a few weeks ago about how the patent system is deeply flawed, at least where software patents are concerned. The episode aired almost exactly 100 years after the millionth patent was issued. You can read Patent #1,000,000 here. The first patent was issued in…
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How A Great Invention By Edison Was Lost
And the moral of the story is: backup backup backup. HOW A GREAT INVENTION BY EDISON WAS LOST: Separated Fiber by a Liquid Compound, But an Assistant Threw the Secret Away (PDF) From July 9, 1911
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Inventors Who Take No Profits From Their Work
Fans and practitioners of open source intellectual property and creative commons licensing can look to these inventors as their predecessors in spirit. Each of them donated their inventions to the public. In fact, if you look at the patent for Logan Waller Page’s new form of concrete, discussed in this article, you will see that…
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A Day’s Meal In A Can The Size Of A Cake Of Soap
Today’s military MRE (Meals Ready-to-Eat) is a descendant of this military meal in a can. The description is not exactly mouth-watering, but is a pretty entertaining read: War breaks out, say, with the Japs, the Germans, or the bloomin’ British. Each Yankee brave in khaki has one of these cans of first-aid-to-the-empty dropped into his…
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Making Street Cars Comfortable
Remember a couple years ago when the MTA announced they would be experimenting with standing room only subway cars during rush hour? Well, 100 years ago, an inventor pitched that very idea to a reporter at the Times Magazine. “For example I have what I call the Rush-hour car. This pattern is without seats, but…
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Freak Patents That Have Come In With The Aeroplane
The illustrations and descriptions of crazy flying contraptions that people applied for patents on (sometimes successfully) are fantastic. I managed to find one of the actual patents for a machine mentioned in the article that’s powered by birds. I think the technical drawings in the patent are even better than the illustrations shown here. Check…
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