Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

Harry Houdini's Diving Suit

Harry Houdini obtained a patent on an improved diving suit in 1921.  The  object of Houdini's diving suit was to allow a diver to get out of the suit while underwater in case the air supply failed.  It also allowed a diver to don his suit without assistance.  It accomplished this by being formed in two halves, with a locking joint in the middle.  The  diver could reach this joint and release it, and then escape from the suit.

Zeppo Marx's Cardiac Monitor

Herbert "Zeppo" Marx was the youngest of the vaudeville and movie act of the Marx Brothers.  He also had quite a mechanical inclination.  When he left the Marx Brothers, he first joined his brother Gummo in a talent agency.  Later he coinvented a wrist worn device to warn the wearer of irrigularities in heart rythms.  Thousands of these were sold.  He later developed a type of clamp for securing cargo in airplanes, and his cargo clamp was widely used by the Army Air Corps in WW II.

Glenn Curtiss Just Needed a Little More POWER!

Glenn Curtiss had an early interest in bicycles, and opened a bicycle shop in Hammondsport, New York.  Not content to sell bicycles, he was soon building his own products, and designing new models.  When small, one cylinder motors were put on bicycles, he left the world of bycicles and entered the world of engines and motorcycles.  He designed his own lightweight engines, and the motorcycles they powered.  In 1907 Curtiss drove a motorcycle with an air cooled V-8 engine to a speed of 136 miles an hour.  The engine delivered 40 hp, and weighed 275 pounds.  According to a Scientific American article of the day, the motorcycle experienced a broken universal joint at 90 mph, which buckled the frame.  The record made him the fastest human on a motorcycle or car, until a car beat that speed 11 years later.  A motorcycle would not beat that speed until 1930.  Curtiss' speed was actually slower than an earlier Stanley Steamer that achieved 140- 150 mph, but that run was not an officially timed event.  Looking at the picture below, I'm not sure I'd want to go 136 mph on bicycle wheels.

Cutriss was drawn into the field of avaition because of his lightweight yet powerful motors, and competed with the Wright brothers as pioneer avaiator and airplane designer.  He designed the first float plane, aelerons, and many other new features in airplanes.  Curtiss airplanes served in WWI,  and Curtiss' company became Curtiss Wright when it merged with the successors of the Wright Brothers.

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The Game of Monopoly

In 1935, Charles Darrow was an unemployed salesman in Germantown Pennsylvania. At that time vast numbers of people in the United States were unemployed during the Great Depression, and there were no jobs to be had of any kind.

As Darrow got what odd jobs he could, he made a board game to play in the evening.  Soon friends and neighbors were playing the game, in which every player could buy and sell real estate with names based on properties in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  Not having any real money or chance to be real estate investors, the game gave the hard pressed people some diversion.  Soon he was selling a few copies of the game to neighbors and to local stores.  He was turned down by the large game and toy company Parker Brothers, because the game was critiqued as having 52 fatal faults in game design.

Darrow kept selling the game, and it was soon in department stores in the area.  One customer who bought the game was the daughter of the  founder of Parker Brothers, who recommened the game to her father.  Parker Brothers changed their mind about the game and licensed the patent from Darrow.  Darrow received a royalty for every game sold, and became a millionare from sales of Monopoly. Within a month of the licensing agreement, Parker Brothers was selling over 20,000 copies of the game per week. 

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.

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.

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 First Electric Motor

Thomas Davenport was a blacksmith in Brandon Vermont.  He was fascinated by the newest scientific device at the time, the electromagnet.  These were horseshoe shaped pieces of iron, wound with insulated wire, and charged by a battery.  A small one could lift a horseshoe, and a large one could lift an anvil. This was the first time that it was shown that magnetism and electricy were related, and electricity could produce magnetism.

Davenport purchased an electromagnet, and at home carefully unwound and dismantled the device.  His wife Emily took notes as to its construction as Davenport took it apart.  Then using wire insulated with the silk of his wife's wedding dress, he built his own electromagnets.  It was then that he went beyond the existing technology of electromagnets.  He attached one of his electromagnets to a wheel, and fixed another to a stationary frame.  The attraction of these magnets caused the wheel to rotate one half revolution.  He learned that he could reverse the wiring to one magnet, and get the wheel to complete another half revolution, for one complete revolution.

Then he designed a segmented conductor that supplied current to the wheel mounted electromagnet, and the sections reversed the current at the right time to cause the polarity to reverse automatically, and caused the wheel not only to complete one revolution, but also to rotate continuously.  He had invented the electric motor.   

He applied for a patent, but his application was rejected because turning a wheel by electricity was totally unknown and unbelievable.  He submitted a working model, but it was destroyed in a fire.  He submitted a second working model, with review and analyis by scientists of the day, and his patent was approved in 1837. 

The technology that was required to fully realize the potential of the electric motor was that a spinning motor could also generate electricity.  That piece of the puzzle was supplied by the invention of the dynamo. 

Rebuilding New Orleans

On Sept 7, 1900, a huge hurricane hit about the same area of the United States as Rita in 2005.  It hit Galveston, which at that time was an island 9 feet above sea level.  The hurricane was a category 3 or 4, and with winds of 140 mph drove a sea surge 16 feet high across the island on which Galveston was built.  Killed by the hurricane were 6000-8000 of the city's population of 37,000.  3600 buildings were destroyed.  The thriving port industry of Galveston was destroyed. 

The city decided to rebuild.  A 16 foot tall seawall was built around the city, and it was decided to raise the height above sea level of the city.  To accomplish that the house and building owners raised their houses into the air and built piers of stone, brick and wood under them.  Then pumps dredged up sand from the bay, and pumped water and sand onto the land.  The ground was thus raised to the new level of the houses.  2000 houses were raised in this way, as shown on photos on the Galveston and Texas History Center of the Rosenberg Library.

The history of the Galveston flood of 1900 raises some interesting points:

Did authorities in New Orleans 2005 know that their levies could not withstand a category 4 hurricane and that they were 9 feet below sea level?

Galveston of 1900 funded most of the restoration themselves, withsome help from the State.  The port industry that had been in Galveston went to Houston and never returned.

Can New Orleans could repaired as Galveston was, by raising the ground level?

Is this an example of the saying that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it?

The Otto Engine, First Four Stroke Engine

Nicolaus Otto was a traveling salesman who at age 30 began testing his ideas of how to build an internal combustion engine.  He had seen an engine built by Lenoir and thought he could see how to improve on the Lenoir engine.  His design was not very good, but he met Eugen Langen, owner of a sugar factory, and together they made an improved engine.  Entered in the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris, their engine won a gold medal for the most economical engine for business.  The Otto engine proved to be powerful and light compared to steam engines, and in the next decade over 10,000 engines were produced. 

The Otto engine was of the four stroke type which utilized the new concept of compressing the gas mixture before ignition.  The up and down motion of the piston in the cylinder performed 4 steps in two revolutions of the crankshaft: intake of new gas mixture into the cyinder, compression of the gas to the top of the cylinder, explosion of the gas that pushes the piston down, and expulsion of gasses from the cylinder.   Here is a fun animation of a 4 stroke engine cycle, by Matt Keveney.  Another animation shows a graph of pressure as the piston performs its tasks. 

One worker at the Otto Engine Works was Gottleib Daimler, who later put engines like the Otto engine to work to drive vehicles.