Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

The Lambert Automobile, 1891

Many people assume either Henry Ford or the Duryea Brothers built the first automobile in the United States.  However, both Oliver Evans and Sylvester Roper had earlier developed steam powered automobiles.   

John Lambert of Ohio City, Ohio built the first gasoline powered automobile in the U.S. in 1891.  Working alone in a workshop in a grain elevator, he converted a three cylinder engine to one cylinder for use in the three wheeled car, and he also invented a carburetor for the engine. The car had two forward speeds and no reverse, and traveled at 5 or 15 mph.

Elwood Haynes automobile 1893

Benz automobile of 1886

Oliver Evans amphibian steam vehicle 1805

Duryea automobile 1893

Selden's 1897 vehicle

Sylvester Roper's 1869 Motorcycle

Lambert's first model was crashed into a tree stump.  He built another model, and its backfire caught the grain elevator on fire and destroyed the shop and the two autos.  Lambert went on to build cars, trucks, fire engines, and tractors, and became Indiana's first millionare.

Saddam Hussein Plays Rock Paper Scissors

Recently Saddam Hussein's trial has degenerated to the Judge, Saddam, and a member of the audience playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.  More info on this unusual turn of events on the JibJab Oddities page.

Also check out the JibJab page for more information about your next job, at the Big Box Mart.

North Face Tent Uses Wind to Stand up to Wind

Popular Science has an interesting article in the September issue and the online Popular Science magazine about a new North Face tent, the Spectrum 23.  The Spectrum 23 has a wind scoop which faces into the wind and scoops air into the tent.  As the wind increases, the volume of air scooped into the tent also increases, so the tent is inflated by the wind and does not get flattened by the wind. In wind tunnel tests the tent never flattened but failed in winds of 130 mph when the anchors holding the tent down failed. In the online article there is a movie of the tent in wind tunnel testing.  You would not want to be in the tent when it is carried off by the wind.  Not only is the tent stable in high wind, it only weighs 4 lbs 3 oz.

Steam Car Sets Land Speed Record! (1906)

In the early part of the twentieth century steam cars were considered far superior in many ways to gasoline powered cars.  Their operation was simple, quiet, and reliable compared to the internal combustion cars' mess of oil, stink of gas, clashing gears, and especially hand cranking to start.  In 1906 Fred Marriott set the Land Speed Record of 127.66 mph in a steam powered automobile built by Stanley.  He also drove a different steam car at about 140-150 mph the following year, but the vehicle crashed before the official speed was recorded.  Ford's cheap prices for autos, and the invention of the electric starter in 1912 were the final doom of steam cars.   

More information about Stanley automobiles and Fred Marriott are thebirthplaceofspeed2006.com. More Stanley information at the Stanley Museum, where James Merrick is the archivist.
 

Harry Lawson's Bicyclette

James Starley's Rover of 1885 was the first successful bike in which pedals and a crank drove the rear wheel with a chain, but he was not the first with that design.  In 1879 Englishman Harry Lawson  designed and patented a version of a large front wheeled bike with a smaller rear wheel driven by cranks and a chain.   Lawson's bike was not very well received, and he went on to design bikes using levers for power transmission.  The Bicyclette was a commercial failure, but he had hit upon a superion design feature. 

This artwork of the Bicyclette is a version featured on cigarette cards.  This and other bicycle art is found at bicyclegifts.com.  Framed versions of these beautiful cigarette cards, posters , cards, and other bicycle art  recognize that brilliant design is art. 

The Colossus of Rhodes and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

In the fifth century B.C. Greek writers listed the most astounding man made structures they knew of.  The list was modified a bit over the ages, and from the Middle Ages on the list has remained unchanged and has been known as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  The Wonders include:

The Colossus of Rhodes
The Pyramids of Egypt
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
The Lighthouse at Alexandria

These places became major destinations for well traveled Greeks and Romans.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a large bronze statue of the Sun God Helios built in 282 B.C. to commemorate the defeat of a beseiging army from Macedonia.  Rhodes was a Greek state on the Island of Rhodes in the Mediterranian. The Colossus had a stone pedestal 55 ft. tall, and the bronze skin was supported by an iron and stone inner structure.  Only 56 years later the statue was toppled in 226 B.C. by a strong earthquake and lay in ruins for over 1000 years, when it was dismantled for scrap.  The Rhodesians had the means to rebuild it, but an oracle advised against it. It was described by the Greek historian Pliny as standing 33m or 110 ft high.  It stood on a 55 ft tall pedestal. When it fell, "few people can make their arms meet round the thumb." Even after it fell, it continued to be a travel destination for about eight centuries. Some depictions  show the Colossus straddling an entrance to a harbor, but others believe Helios was in a conventional standing position.  Most views show one arm raised, either shading his eyes or holding a torch.  Its actual pose is unknown.   This image is from John Clark Ridpath's History of the World, 1915.

The Colossus compares pretty favorably to its modern equivalent, the Statue of Liberty.  The Statue of Liberty is 151' tall, and stands on a 150 foot base, so the two statues were roughly comparable in size and separated in time by about 2000 years. 

The Petzl/Charlet Snoscopic Ice Axe

Ice axes started out in the 19th century being long staffs with a point at one end, and were called alpenstocks.

By the 1970s the typical mountaineering ice axe was much shorter, but was still long enough to be used as a walking  aid, especially on sidehills.  In the 1980s and 90, ice axes got shorter and shorter, lighter and lighter.   However, the short ice axes were not much good for walking, but great for overhead chopping.  Petzl/Charlet has a model which is the best of both worlds.  It is very light, fairly short, but has an extension with a ski basket which makes it a great walking aid.  It is called the Snoscopic.  I used this little gem on a climb of Mt. Shasta and Mt. Borah last year, and really like it.  The only drawback is that when you use the ice axe point as a rudder when glissading (sliding down the mountain on your butt) the basket pops off, so you have to remove it for glissading.

Here is the Petzl/Charlet Snoscopic helping me scramble up an ice chute on 14,100' Mt. Shasta in northern California.

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.

Early Motorcycle

Here is an early motorcycle which is an adaption of a bicycle.  The motor is below the frame, and the gas tank is attached to the seat tube.  The motor grabs the bicycle chain in front of the chainwheel, and takes over from the bike rider.  It appears that the pedals would be furiously spinning as the motor drove the bike, so I don't know what the rider did with his feet.  Maybe the motor didn't turn the pedals so fast that the rider could not keep his feet on the pedals. There is a throttle on the handlebar.