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England Salutes 150 Years of Eccentric Patents
jonerik writes "Want to patent a moustache protector? Or perhaps you've hit upon the idea of improving chickens' lives by giving them eyeglasses. Well, don't bother - they've already been invented. The BBC has this piece today on the bizarre ideas that have trickled into the U.K. Patent Office on a regular basis since it opened 150 years ago this month. Other doozies which are saluted are a rifle fitted into a helmet, 'the recoil [of which] broke a man's neck during early trials' and the parachute hat. According to Steve van Dulken, who oversees the patent archive at the British Library, 'For every 100 applications lodged, I'd say that 10 are a bit whacky.'"
has finally figured out step 2 for the underwear gnomes:
1. Steal underwear
2. Get wacky Brittish Patent
3. Profit!
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
m00.
My favourite is the patent about attaching a wind turbine to the roof of your car to take advantage of a resource that, otherwise, goes completely to waste :-)
the phrase "dead ringer" has a similar origin: they'd set up a bell above ground and tie a string or something to it when they buried someone, who could ring the bell and alert everyone that they would like to be dug up as they weren't dead . . .
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
Here's a funny one...
One click electronic buying, oh wait..
From the article
It must have seemed like a great idea at the time: an alarm to be fitted inside a coffin, just the thing to guard against premature burials.Why is this a bad idea now?
But see, if that hadn't happened, people from South Dakota wouldn't be able to say: "Well, at least one of us got a Nobel prize." Referring, of course, to Ernest Orlando Laurence, born in Canton, SD.
BTW, Laurencium, element 103, is named after him.
...and 100 years later, geeks are still having trouble figuring out just exactly how to remove the damn things.
Correction: I should say, Just exactly how to get near the damn things.
There is no spork.
I heard that during the civil war they cut down on these "presumed deaths" by shipping bodies in air tight coffins.
If you weren't dead when you were put in, You were by the time your body arrived home!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Something about a way to connect most of the industrialized nations in the world in order to better exchange information and form a community....naaaaaaaah. Way too idealistic. It'd never work (It still doesn't work if you ask me).
Zech Harvey, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
Why am I not surprised that when you get something like the Prior-Art-O-Matic from the UK that they would take it just one step too far.
Among these was a cat flap connected to an atomic bomb in space. The device was fitted with a colour sensor, designed to admit his ginger cat but block the passage of a neighbour's black moggie
:)
Hmm. Looks Like This Company is Infringing on a patent
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The terrorists will pick them up, put them on and run into battle with American Forces(TM). First shot fired; they fall to the ground with a broken neck! War over!
America's Freedom Force(TM) - 1, Axis of Evil(TM) - 0.
Game Over, man
This idea is patent pending ©2002 Teamhasnoi. Unauthorized use will be turned over to Panip, Inc.
When I was young(er), we had a game that included much of these patents. It was titled "Inventors" or "The Incredible Machine" or something. Each invention was on a card, and had a certain base value. You could buy patents from each other, roll the dice right and get into the "royalty track", have silent partners investing in your holdings, and best of all it came with a little machin that rolled the dice for you and rang a little bell.
It was all in a turn-of-the-century theme, and was a lot of fun. Perhaps a modern version of the game could include Rambus-style tactics...nah. If we'd had that, my sisters would have started pulling each others hair, and someone would be running crying to Mom.
One of my favorite inventions was the automatic hat-tipper.
...
When I first read the title, I thought England was saluting 150 years of eccentric PARENTS.
IP law isn't as bad as you think, just imagine the safe and secure world we'd be living in today if this evil technology had remained a secret.
You do realize that if the patent had been granted, it would have disseminated the information more *widely*, due to the fact that patents are available for anyone to read?
You also realize that a cyclotron is about as useful for making nuclear weapons as pocket lint would be?
I know, I know, IHBT...
Lawrence reportedly got the idea for the cyclotron after looking at the pictures in a foreign (German?) engineering journal. An engineer had come up with the idea of making high voltages by linking pairs of cylinders at opposite phase of a HV AC cycle into a line. Lawrence basically coiled the idea up into a circle. The fact that charged particles in a magnetic field always circulate with the same period allows this to work efficiently.
It is claimed that Leo Szilard independently came up with this idea about 6 months before, but didn't do anything with it.
It's akin to software companies - they can sell their games without any copy-protection whatsoever, and just hope everyone follows copywrite laws, but this obviously doesn't happen very often.
Actually, the point of eyeglasses for chickens is to worsen their vision, not improve it; the purpose being to reduce territorial fighting between roosters in overcrowded coops.
To be really silly, you need to patent contact lenses for chickens: http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/chickens/
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
The parent is untrue. See other posts in this thread for details.
Oh - I though it read 150 years of Eccentric pants Which could be a celebration coming up if you look here.
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
We have our share of patent zaniness on the left side of the Atlantic as well.
Wacky patent of the month
For example . . .
space monkeys, i dont know what they are, but i want one (some?)
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Moderators, realize this guy is a troll and nowhere close to a "Physics Genius".
The first cyclotron patent was awarded to Ernest Lawrence in 1934, after being prompted to file for the patent by investors and being told that another scientist at Raytheon was about to patent the same thing.
Search Google, you'll find that there is nothing that indicates a cyclotron patent was rejected for any such reason.
Since there was a patent granted on the cyclotron, the rest of your arguments fall apart. Not surprising since they're full of shit.
Moderators - feel free to mod me down. But mod down the idiot parent post first.
Heck! If you don't like it, just add us to the Axis of Evil or something. That'll teach us!
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
They're spectacles, you unbespectacled freaks!
true && more || less
Four words: IP over pneumatic tube.
Here
I especially like the "Horse Masturbation Preventer". (Seriously, look at the page!)
You're confused. That's no longer the national dish. You should have been eating a curry. That's something that somwhow comes out bland in the USA.
'For every 100 applications lodged, I'd say that 10 are a bit whacky.' ... which is itself a whacky way of saying that 1 out of 10 applications is whacky.
If you're rich, you can be eccentric. If you are poor, you're just crazy. :)
LOL - I suspect you're meant to season it yourself.
:)
Mind you you're probably right - that's probably why we all eat Indian, Chinese and Italian food in the UK....
If you think the fish and chips was an experience - try a doner kebab next time you're over
From The American Heritage Dictionary:
"ETYMOLOGY: Middle English wakien, waken, from Old English wacan, to wake up and wacian, to be awake, keep watch; see weg- in Appendix I."
The word "wake" is just related to the word "watch" and has to do with a vigil and essentially doing the same kind of thing we do nowadays at a wake.
Oh, I see! So that's why a "dead ringer" is someone who looks just like someone else!... er huh?
From takeourword.com (as well as other places that aren't email forwarded urban legends):
"The term dead ringer is one of the terms which means 'lookalike'. It dates in writing from about 1891 and arose from ringer 'a horse entered fraudulently in a race'. It is thought that ringer came from the British expression ring in 'to substitute or exchange fraudulently' (1812). Some believe that ring in is related to ring the changes 'to substitute counterfeit money in various ways', a pun on ring the changes 'go through all the variations in ringing a peal of bells.' The dead in dead ringer is probably the same as that in dead heat or dead on, i.e., it means 'exact'."
I feel like the Internet has really caused word etymology urban legends to flourish in the past few years.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Indeed. Moderators should look at PhysicsGenius's other posts. Merely sounding convincing should not be a +1, people.
This is the reason we have a Great Britain team at the olympics, the Northern Irish are part of the Eire team.
In summary:
I think maybe PhysicsGenius may not be 100% accurate, but I don't think he's trolling.
;)
Here's a quote from an article claiming that this quote was a response from a patent officer about the patent application from Leo Szilard, which was applied for in 1928:
"Patents can be given only for inventions that permit a commercial use. However, the submitted procedure apparently has only a scientific value. Whether, in accordance with the invention, any commercially useful material can be produced by accelerating artificially- produced positively-charged corpuscles, appears from our present knowledge ruled out. In the whole application, no hint is found that the applicant has produced, or can produce, such material. Obviously the yield would be so tiny, as with atomic disintegration from the natural alpha rays of radioactive substances, that even in the future the prospect of using the invention in commerce has the highest degree of improbability.
So it was initially rejected, maybe not for the same reason the parent though, but the patent office gave him a hard time about getting the parent.
Moderators, please mod the parent of my post down as a troll. You can mod me as informative though
The company commander sported a goatee & a long moustache. He made the facial hair a part of the uniform for his men. Troops had to keep the moustaches trained, they had to have the proper upward curve, and protected at night. To accomplish this, they were all given a moustache protector that they were required to wear at night. They were taught during basic training to tie it just right to achieve the proper look.
When my father got back home after the war, he threw his uniform, boots & everything else into the river. Somehow the moustache protector survived, travelling from Germany to Czechoslavakia where he barely survived an ambush, a POW camp in Poland, back home to Hungary, to East Germany, West Germany, and finally to the US.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
...And I tried to submit a story about it at the time. I guess jonerik has more luck than me.
My origonal submission, I think it is still relevant:
The Japanese have managed to publish 3 books focusing on whacky inventions. They, however, refuse to admit to the whackiness, hence the title "Unuseless".
(This post does not contain emoticons or l337.)
Oh, he's trolling... just take a look at his posting history.
Regarding Szilard's patent application - according to this page it's likely that his first patent on accelerators was rejected due to "prior art". Of course, file the same thing today and I bet you get a patent.
From that page it's not clear if his cyclotron or betatron patents were granted or not.
As for moderation - I didn't expect to get modded up. PG just deserves to get modded into a -1 hole.
There's always the idea of patenting 'evil' or 'world domination' techs to prevent Bill G, Monsanto etc... from taking over everything.
e.g. Patent business models &co that you believe might exist in the future because of genetics, or DRM or advances in medine.
That way you could charge a high license fee to the company if they don't sell there drugs etc... cheeply or don't generally toe the line. or just not let them pratice at all.
Patents, keeping inovation alive!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Well, it will get watched if there is a sniper driving about killing people. Then they catch the guy before he kills double-digits.
What is wrong with Braille street signs? May places have them, giving directions to blind folk, yes, in a place you can touch them. Damn good idea if you ask me. Lord knows how they find them though...
Subject says it all.
l
http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/britain.htm
This doesn't sound hugely idiotic. Attaching a few mini-turbines on locations where wind-resistance and/or drag are high anyways might actually work. Putting one on the roof would add drag, putting on somewhere near or just in your front grill shouldn't add any resistance that isn't already there.
I was actually thinking of this whilst noticing a bicycle wheel spinning quite quickly - probably due to air flow (on a hitch behind the vehicle, where wind is not really significant. I've been considering designing a fan/capacitor array to generate power and seeing how much it would make, any reasons why this shouldn't work?
What good is Braille on ATMs anyway? (drive-in or otherwise). The screen is not Braille...
sudo eat my shorts
You are correct, it is called the Inventors. Some of these inventions don't look that crazy when compared to things like Onc Click SHopping though :)
He may be trolling, but he's one of the best I've seen. This man puts more effort into his posts than the vast majority of /. 'ers. This is satire at it's finest. Now you might not care for wit, and you might mod him down, but some of us look forward to his posts. A cursory glance tells me that he has roughly twice the fans you do.
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Yes, and he has roughly 20 times or so the number of foes I do. Would've been ~30x, but you just became my 3rd freak. Shrug.
I enjoy wit. I enjoy satire. PG has a poor grasp of them.
If his posts were modded up as Funny (which they occasionally are) then that'd be one thing. But there's a whole lot of idiot mods out there that mod them up as insightful/informative.
Well, I agree with your point about the idiot mods.
However, I disagree that PG has poor grasp of satire, and it may be a little rude, but I can't help but laugh when I see him modded up for being informative.
You might think his jokes are disruptive to the discussions, and based on his karma and number of freaks, you may be right, but hey, he makes me laugh. His description of why we see things in 3D (the longer it takes light to reach your eyes, the further away objects appear) is about the funniest pseudo-scientific explanation I've ever read.
Guess all I'm really saying is he does a good job, and I hope he keeps it up.
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England was the land of the "Anglo-Saxons."
Britain is from the Welsh name for Wales-- "Prydain" (pro: PRU-dain). Etym is O. W. Prydain -> L. Britanium -> Mid. Eng: Britaygne (however you want to spell it). -> Mod. Eng. Britain.
UK is short for "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."
As for those wacky English, though-- I have a cousin near London who says that Oracle owns a mansion near there with a sizable park around it. He imagines that someone from Oracle US told some one from Oracle UK that "We need to buy some real estate: and so they went and bought a real estate...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm not talking about powering the car off of this however, that would be dumb. Using it to power a capacitor array for some low-consumption internal electronics might be useful however.
Because the power generated will be less than the power required to overcome the drag.
If you read my original post, you will see that I was talking about using turbines, etc at points where drag is already there, so adding something to take advantage of it probably won't add to it overly.
Unless you've got a superstreamlined nearly drag-free car. Mine's an 88 Corolla, old boxy design, the front end catches wind like a reverse sail at times...
Second law of slashdot: read the damn post fully, think a few times, then hit "Submit" - phorm
"Ahhhh, those Brits might have the lock on bizarre and useless patents. AHHHHH, but now that the internet is around, lets see how they fare with the combined eeeeevil of the US Patent Office! MuuuUUUUAAAAaaahhhaahahahaha!"
"FIRE THE EULA BEAM! NOW! NOW! I TELL YOU!"