Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

Pitotubes - Its Rocket Science for Your Packing

 

Alisa Caviness-Driscoll is the founder of AMD Travel Accessories, Inc. and the creator of Pitotubes. Alisa grew up living and sailing in the Caribbean and continued exploring the world with 15 years of discovery in the travel industry. Alisa's experience as a flight attendant fed her passion for travel and put her in direct contact with thousands of business and leisure travelers.

The Challenge

In her years of travel, Alisa has heard one common complaint from all of her globetrotting friends. Whether it's shampoo, lotion, or that pricey perfume, "the top came off and it got all over EVERYTHING!" Men and women on business or leisure travel have all had the experience of personal care products leaking in expensive bags and ruining valuables. It's no way to start, or end, a trip.

The Solution

Alisa's idea was simple...find a travel bottle that is airplane proof and capable of withstanding ALL the rigors of travel. After spending a year at cosmetic and personal care packaging tradeshows and countless hours at market research, Alisa realized that the product she was looking for didn't exist. And so the lifelong traveler's entrepreneurial journey began. With the help of the industry's finest engineers, Alisa created Pitotubes.

The Benefits

Pitotubes are sleek, luxury, airless travel bottles that transport personal care products with elegance and ease. Travelers of the world can now customize their shaving kits and cosmetic bags with our signature bottles. Simply transfer your personal care products into the Pitotubes and forget about searching for travel sizes or cleaning up after the big spill.Alisa says, "My energy and inspiration comes from inventing and enhancing products that all travelers of the world want and need." AMD Travel Accessories, Inc. was launched in 2004 and continues to develop new and exciting products for fellow travelers.

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.

Early Can Opener

The process of canning food was invented long before a method of opening the cans was invented.  Canning was invented by 1795 by Nicholas Appert, a Frenchman working to win the 12,000 franc prize offered by Napoleon for a method of preserving food for use by the army.  The military secret was later spread as a food technology to England and the rest of the world.  The instructions for opening a can were to basically use whatever you had to get it open, whether a hammer and chisel, knife, axe, shovel, rock, or whatever.  Englishman Robert Yeates invented a can opener in 1855, #1577 (can someone get a jpg of a figure from that patent?), and this one was a version patented in the U.S. in 1870.  Some familiar pocket or field can openers are at p-38, and P-38.

Better Than Sliced Bread

Before 1928, no one said something was better than sliced bread, because the bread slicer was invented in 1928.  It was invented by a jeweller, Otto Rohwedder. He had been working on it for 16 years, having started in 1912.  He learned that a bread slicer was doomed to fail unless it was combined with a bread packager, because when bread is sliced it dries out a lot quicker.  When he asked bakers if a bread slicer was a good idea, he was told by all that it was a dumb idea.  When the slicer was built, he found it very hard to get a baker to use his machine, much less buy one. 

In the patent figure, 33 is a loaf of bread, and the bands 47 are like little band saws, each one slicing two cuts in the bread. 

The Hand-Crank Ice Cream Maker

In 1843 Nancy Johnson got a patent on a machine to make ice cream by hand.  This was an ingenious device that provided a real treat to everyone in the U.S., if not the world.  Milk, sugar and flavoring, such as vanilla, were placed in the inner can, and a rotating paddle was placed in the milk. 

The inner can was placed in the outer bucket, and ice and salt were placed between the inner can and outer bucket.  The salt lowered the freezing point of the ice, and contact with the inner bucket made a thin layer of milk freeze on the inside of the inner can.  The rotating paddle, turned by a crank, scraped off the frozen milk, and let a new layer freeze.

Sneaky adults let the kids do all the work, but it was worth it because the ice cream was so good. 

When enough of the milk had frozen, it became stiff, and was spooned out to eagerly awaiting kids, like me, my brother Mike, and sister Sue in the photo below, from about 1955, with our Mom and a farm cat watching. .