Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

The 1911 Colt Semi Auto

During fighting in the Phillipines almost 100 years ago, the Army decided that a handgun with more stopping power was needed. The insurgent group the Moros made fanatical charges while on drugs, and the 38 caliber handgun in use at the time just wasn't stopping the drug induced charge. The Army tested several guns to replace the 38 revolver. The test consisted of first firing 6000 rounds, with 100 rounds being fired rapid fire, then 5 minutes of cooling allowed. At every 1000 rounds, the pistols would be cleaned. After firing the 6000 rounds, a group of misshaped and defective rounds was fired, and then the guns were soaked in acid and rolled in sand and mud, and test fired again. The Colt model 1911 pistol, made be John Browning, came through with flying colors, and was selected as the Army's sidearm in 1911. The Colt model 1911 served in WWI, WWII, and continues to be made today, with only small modifications to the original design. A good site for Colt Model 1911 history is 1911 History.

Build a Better Bush

Sometimes you just wish you could change certain parts of a politician. Now you can change George Bush at least, at the site Build A Better Bush.

Science Facts 1

There is about 9 million tons of gold dissolved in the ocean, which is 180 times the amount that has been mined in human history. The gold in the oceans is very dilute, and a process for recovering it has not been found yet.

Damascus Syria is the oldest continually inhabited city, and has been inhabited for about 2000 years.

The ancient Spartans used a secret code machine to send messages from one commander to another. Each officer had a carefully made staff that was a precise diameter. A strip of cloth was wrapped around the staff, and a message was written on it. When the strip was unwound, it was unreadable without first being wrapped around a staff of the same diameter.

A flush toilet, drain pipes, and supplies lines of water were found in the palace of Knossos, dating from about 2000 BCE.

The ancient Mayans calculated the path of Venus to an accuracy of within fourteen seconds per year.

The Great Wall of China was not built to keep nomadic invaders from entering the Chinese homeland. They were built to keep out the horses of the invaders. Without their horses, the nomadic tribes were not that formidible. The Wall also slowed down the invading army, allowing nearby garrisons to respond before the whole army could penetrate the Wall.

The 2000 Year Old Computer

In 1901 Greek sponge divers found an odd looking piece of coral encrusted brass gears on the site of a sunken Roman vessel from the first century BCE. The wreck was off the coast of the island of Antikythera, near Greece, and the device has become known as the Antikythera device. The device was cleaned up, x-rayed, extensively studied, and it appears that is was a mechanical computer that displayed the position of the stars, planets, and moon.

A reconstruction of the device has been made, on paper, as computer animation, and out of brass, the material of the original device.

The device consists of a number of geared wheels that are mounted on a bronze plate. A shaft was turned by a handle, which caused the large crown-gear wheel to turn. The crown-gear wheel moved the large four spoked drive wheel, which in turn moved two connected gears and a set of gear wheels and shafts connected to them. The movement of the gears and shafts resulted in moving three pointers on the exterior of the machine, which indicated star positions, planet positions and lunar positions. Only one dial is unobstructed by the encrusting material, and it shows a dial with the symbols of the zodiac and the months of the year.

This dial showed the position of the sun in the zodiac, and the main risings and settings of brights stars and constellations during the year. The gears were made with triangular teeth, which is a primitive type of gear, but one that could be made by a craftsman with a triangular file. The device appears to have been repaired at least twice, which indicates that it actually worked, and was used for a period of time. Its existence also indicates a technological skill that was not known to exist in that time, and did not exist in modern times until tens of centuries later.

A Car That Runs on Wood

In WWII, Europe was in a real fuel shortage. Oil imports were largely blocked, and what oil was available was used for aviation and tank fuel. Germany had a lot of coal, but no oil deposits. To make up for their huge lack of oil, German ingenuity turned to gassification of coal to make synthetic fuel. To run cars without using their precious oil, the German government and many European civilians tried a method of running a car by burning wood, and it apparently worked! Ford, GM, and other car manufacturers made kits, and many cars were converted to run on wood, either using a mass produced conversion kit, or a homemade version. A car using a factory built kit would run for 100,000 miles fairly problem free.

The way this worked was that wood was heated until it began to break down chemically. When wood burns in a normal fire, the wood decomposes chemically due to the heat, and some of the gasses produced by the wood are flamable, and they burn as they are released. That is the flame that you see.

With the WWII era wood burning cars, wood was heated to a temperature hot enough to decompose the wood, but the gas was not allowed to burn. It was stored in a chamber, and injected into the cylinders of a regular internal combustion car. Some of the government made cars were similar to a WV Beetle, and a small military runabout, shown in the photos above. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared a very complete manual on how to build these units, written by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, foreword by Thomas B. Reed. The site is called Gengassidan.

The Patterson Colt, World's First Revolver

The story goes that when working on a sailing ship as a boy of seventeen, the young Samual Colt noticed how the ships wheel was locked into a selected position. This concept somehow fit with the idea of a cylinder with multiple chambers that lined up with the barrel of a handgun. He carved a wooden cylinder, and later built a revolver around it.

When he returned home, he worked for several years on the design of the revolver, and got a patent in 1836. He convinced some financial backers of the potential of the idea, and started a factory in Patterson, New Jersey. The patent figures are shown below.

This gun became known as the Patterson Colt, and had some unique features besides the rotating cylinder. Colt devised caps that go outside the cylinders and send a spark through a tube into each firing cartridge. The caps have a cover to protect them from the elements. A pin connected to the hammer locks the cylinder in place. Thus, when the hammer is pulled back, the next cylinder is locked in place.

The Patterson Colt was a huge hit with a few people, but not enough to keep the company in business. The factory closed its doors in 1942. Some sales of the gun were to the Texas Rangers, which adopted the Patterson Colt as their regular issue firearm.

The gun was reloaded by placing black powder in each chamber, placing a round bullet in each chamber, then using the built in ram lever to press the bullet down the chamber. Then new caps would be placed on the back side of each cylinder. Although a nightmare to reload compared to cartridge guns, it sure beat a single shooter! The Patterson Colt became beloved by the Texas Rangers after saving Ranger's necks in several skirmishes with Indians.

Quit Complaining About Your Job!

If you think you have a bad job, how would you like to be a target holder at a shooting range, or even worse? An article in the November issue of Popular Science, titled "The Worst Jobs in Science", lists some really bad ones,
such as anal wart researcher, tampon squeezer (that is, USED tampon squeezer), lab animal veterinarian, landfill monitor, radioactive building demolition, ecologist at St. Johns Harbor, in Newfoundland, where the city of 130,000 dumps 100% of the municipal sewage into the harbor, Iraqi archeologist, and several other really bad ones.

Drip Irrigation

Drip irrigation is when water is dripped onto or near a plant.  The drip is usually on for a period of time (several hours), then off for a period of time.  Drip irrigation was first practiced in India using bamboo tubes with small holes drilled in them.  Water dripped through the holes onto plants. 

The next reference to drip irrigation was when Dr. Lester Kellar introduced his method of dripping water onto avocado trees from a pitcock in a water line.  This was at a symposium in Riverside, California, in 1917.

In 1956, Ludwig Bass's patent issued, with drip emitters placed on a pressurized line, which dripped 1 gallon per hour or less from each emitter.  The slow but steady drip of water causes the water to penetrate deeper, without spreading across the surface of the ground.  The emitters reduced the flow of water from a pressurized spray to a slow drip.

Great Technology Site

Please check out Hans- Peter's technology/ science site, called Mathematick Technick Algorithmick Linguistick Omnium Gatherum. It contains his unpublished papers, some of which try to match scientific and technical areas which sometimes seem to be far apart. "They try to open your mind for solving convential problems with unconventional methods. Some seemingly difficult questions have trivial answers - if you see structures others don't see. Some apparently simple questions may lead directly into a black algebraic abyss. Some solutions which seem to work are simply misleading. This site could be understood quite well as a history of flaws and wrong arguments and of the development of modern science.

This site is a collection of nonworkable machines, stupid ideas, riddles, open questions - and spurious useful algorithms, historical remarks and unconventional mathematical approaches, which are placed here for discussion." Some articles are in German, some in English. Enjoy!

Picking a President

I think the president should be chosen based on what he and his vice president look like in drag. I hope you agree.