Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

Louis Pasteur and Beer Making

Beer was first made by the Sumerians, and the technology was absorbed into the Babylonian and ancient Egyptian cultures.  The practice of the Sumarians was to bake grains into bread, and the bread was moistened to begin the process of making beer.  The baked bread was a way to preserve the grain for later use in the beer making process.  A Sumerian beer was recreated recently by the folks at Anchor Steam Beer, as an experiment.

In more recent times, Louis Pasteur studied beer and wine making  and patented a process for making beer which resulted in a better beer.  Previously the wort was boiled and exposed to the air for cooling.  In Pasteur's process, the wort is kept in closed vessels and cooled by spraying the outside of the vessel with water.  A special yeast was introduced into the mash after it cooled, thus preventing contamination of the wort with stray wild yeasts floating through the air.

Free Standing Dome Tent, 1948

This may be the mother of all free standing dome tents.  It is a free standing tent, which uses arched poles attached to the floor of the tent, with the tent body attached to the poles along the length of the poles.  At the top a line attaches the tip of the tent to the poles.  The poles are made in sections for compact size when transporting the tent.  The patent was filed in 1948.

Gears for Drive Shaft Bike

In the late 19th century many bicycle industry pundits thought that drive shafts would be the bicycle power train of the future.  The patent below was a way for the bevel gear of a drive shaft bike to engage a selected gear, and to change to another gear for more gearing options.  This system might have been in use today had not derailluers been developed to allow a chain to be moved from gear to gear.

   

Sylvester Ropers Steam Automobile, 1860s

Sylvester Roper was an early automobile designer in America.  His cars were steam powered, and he made a steam motorcycle which had to be the first motorcycle ever made, and a steam powered buggy, or automobile as they were called later.  The photo shown below is from the Staten Island Region Antique Automobile Club of America, where a number of photos of other vintage cars are located.   Copied by permission.



Roper was a prolific inventor, and patented many versions of his vehicles, as well as the first repeating cartridge shotgun.

Bicycle Front Suspension 1891

This appears to be a front suspension bike, patented in 1891.  The seat and cranks are attached solidly to the rear wheel, but if the front wheel hit a bump it would be allowed to raise up against the spring located near the crank.  Interesting.  Many other early suspension designs are in the Bicycle Technology section of the Patent Pending blog.  In the top version of this bike, steering is by handles by the saddle, which is connected to the front wheel by cables. There is no traditional handlebar.   I think the inventor was trying to allow the rider to sit upright and not have to lean forward to steer the front wheel. That might really relieve some back strain.

Hedy Lamarr, Inventor of Radio Controlled Torpedo

Born in Austria as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Hedy Lamarr was an A list actress in the 1930s and 40s, and was billed as the most beautiful woman in the world.

She and a co-inventor also concieved of a way to control torpedoes by a constantly changing radio frequency so that it could not be jammed.  The shortcoming of radio controlled torpedoes was that the control signal could be jammed on any particular frequency.  Ms. Larmar and her partner thought of the way to get around a jamming signal, by having the controller and the receiver in the torpedo change frequency in unison and continually, so the signal could not be jammed.  The controller and the receiver on the torpedo would change frequency at predetermined times, to predetermined frequencies so that a jamming signal could not follow the sequence.  The exact configuration of coordinating the frequency changes that Lamarr came up with was not used, but the idea of frequency changing is used in many technologies today.

Early Driveshaft Bike, 1893

Here is a good way to have multiple speeds on a bike without using a derailleur.  This bike has two gears on either side of the front sprocket, and a driveshaft for each of them.  One driveshaft would be disengaged while the other was engaged. the driveshafts engage bevel gears on the rear wheel.   This might be a little heavy, but should work just fine. 



Other driveshaft drives were patented in 1897 with a transmission and a gear shift knob, and in 1891 with a single drive shaft.  Alexander Pope also patented a driveshaft bike.  Don't visit the Bicycle Technology Section of the Patent Pending blog or you'll spend a lot of time there when you should be working.

Henry Ford's first Automobile

Henry Ford's first gasoline powered car (his very first car was a steam car) was finished in 1896, and called the Quadricycle.  The Quadricycle had a 4 hp two cylinder engine, a leather belt, and ran at a top speed of 20 mph.  He sold two of them for $200 each, and later bought one of them back for $65.  The positive response to the Quadricycle enabled Ford to get financing to found the Ford Motor Company in 1903.

 

The Inventor of Television, Philo T. Farnsworth

As a 14 year old farm boy plowing his family's fields in Rigby Idaho, Philo T. Farnsworth of was thinking of electron beams and Einstein's theory of relativity.  He science teacher recognized that Philo had an unusual intellect and helped him learn as much about science as he could.  As he plowed his fields he concieved of drawing a picture with an electron beam just like he was plowing the field, one line at a time, from top to botton and side to side. 

After two years of high school, and after finishing two years of college at Brigham Young University, he turned to designing his television system, including an electronic camera, a transmitter, a reciever, and a screen.  By 1927 he had built the components of his sytem and successfully demonstrated them to investors. He filed a patent on the working system in 1927.

The problem was that Russian immigrant Vladimir Zworykin was working on the same problem, and filed a patent on parts of his system in 1923.  However, his device did not work.  Zworykin worked for RCA, and in later years as Farnsworth technology developed, RCA used Zworkykin's filing date as the basis of its claim that RCA should not have to pay royalties to Farnsworth.  Farnsworth's patent issued in 1930, and that same year Zworykin visited Farmsworth's lab and was heard to say "I wish that I might have invented it."   However, RCA claimed that Zworykin's Iconoscope preceded Farnsworth.

Both sides presented their case for priority to the U.S. Patent Office in a proceeding called an Interference.  Farnsworth's evidence for priority of invention was ruled clear evidence of earliest conception. 



However, during WWII the government suspended development of television, and by the time the war was over Farnsworth's patents were almost expired. 

The Roman Navy and the Grappling Hook

In the mid 3rd century BC Rome had conquered all the other states of the Italian peninsula, and looked abroad to the islands of the Mediteranian for further conquest. But those islands were subjects states to the city of Carthage of North Africa.  Carthage was a Phoenician colony located about where modern Tunis is today.  The Phoenician's had a naval and seafaring tradition that dated back to antiquity, having sailed a fleet around Africa in 600 BC, having been the naval arm of Xerxes during his invasion of Greece, and having been the naval arm of Egypt for millenia.

When the Romans bumped into Carthage the Romans had almost no navy,  and no experience fighing naval battles.  Their largest  ship was the trireme, with three banks of oars, and they didn't have many of them. The Roman trireme was no match in numbers, size, speed or armament to the Carthaginian quinquereme, with five banks of oars.  But the Romans didn't know how to build the larger more advanced vessel.  Then one day a storm wrecked a Carthaginian quinquereme onto an Italian beach, and within two years the Romans had a fleet of 120 of quinqueremes. 

The Romans still didn't know how to fight a naval battle, but they knew hand to hand fighting on land.  In the first battle with the new Roman navy, in 260 BC, the Carthaginians were confident of victory.  They bore down on the Roman navy and were surprised by two new inventions and a new tactic in naval warfare.  Using newly invented grappling hooks and boarding bridges, the Roman lashed the attacking ships to their own, boarded them, and converted the battle to their forte, a hand to hand mellee.  In one battle the Carthaginian mastery of the sea was overthrown, and the Punic Wars began.

Drawing from the History of the World, Ridpath.