Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

Richard Trevilthick's Steam Automobile

The American inventor Oliver Evans developed the concept for a high pressure steam engine in 1794.   Evans steam engine was a high pressure engine, which was a vast improvement in power over Watts low pressure engines.  In high pressure steam engines, steam pressure is used to press a piston down, as opposed to pulling down in a low pressure system, with the low pressure created when the steam cools and contracts in volume.  Evans sent his plans to England for scientific review, and many feel that their teachings were read and understood by Englishman Richard Trevilthick. 

Trevilthick first built a steam engine to operate a water pump in Cormish mines,  and later built a locomotive in 1807 (the first in the world) and still later an automobile. 

The Schrader Valve

August Schrader immigrated from Hanover, Germany, to New York in 1843.  Within a few years he started a small company making brass fittings for the rubber industry, which had been started only a few years before. 

In l890, pnuematic tires were in use on the bicycle racing circuit, and soon bikes with pnuematic tires began winning the races.   A tire manufacturer asked Schrader to design a better air valve than the one they were using, and Schrader did so.  Schrader and his son George applied for a patent on their design in 1893, and made many improvements over the years.  Every car today uses Schrader valves to keep the air in the tire, whether tube or tubeless tires.  Most bicycles today use Schrader valves, with certain tubes using an alternative valve, the Presta valve.  The Schrader valves used  today are very similar to the 1893 version.

The Velocar, Charles Mochet

Charles Mochet of France first set out to build a four wheel bicycle, because his wife (just a tad overprotective, are we?) thought that bikes of the day (the 1930s) were way too dangerous for her precious baby boy.  So Charles made a little 4 wheeled car that his son could not fall off of.  However, he found that the little car was very fast, and son George was leaving the other kids on their bikes in the dust.  That observation started Charles on his next project.  The first was to make more pedal cars, and there was a mini craze over pedal cars. 

From the childs pedal car, Mochet went on to improve a recumbent bike design to a world speed record setting form.

Motorized Skates

The Clark Pedmobile was an early motorized skate.  I didn't find a patent on it, but you can bet he had one.  The current incarnation of motorized skates is the MotoSK8®, which will set you back about $700.  Photo below:

Nifty Snow Cars

I just thought these snow vehicles were cool.  They are from US Patent 1,454,911, from 1919, and another early 20th century vehicle patent.  As far as I know, they were never commercially built. 

Tyco's Terrain Twister, What a Concept!

Wow, Tyco's new Terrain Twister radio controlled vehicle is way cool! How do they come up with ideas like that? I have no idea! Any relation to the Russian GPI-16 screw drive vehicle, circa 1967, is purely coincidental.

The First Float Plane

The first float plant was patented in 1922 by Glenn Curtiss. It was designed to take off from and land in water.

Besides being an inventor, a pioneer aviator, Curtiss was also a motorcycle racer.

The Snow Mobile

There seem to have been two paths to development of the modern snowmobile.  One started when Carl Eliason of Sayner Wisconsin built what is basically a motorized toboggan in 1924, which was patented in 1927.  The other path started when Joseph Armand Bomdardier of Valcourt Quebec built a snow coach in the 1930s. 

From the first motorized tobogan, Eliason began to make his machine larger and less like a toboggan and more like a modern snowmobile.  The Eliason's motorized toboggan started out with a 2.5 hp motor, and by 1937 used a 25 hp motor.

Meanwhile, in Quebec Bombardier built a propeller driven snow buggy in 1922.  Not entirely successful, his father made him take the propeller off so it would not decapitate any of his siblings. 
More development led to a 1927 snow vehicle which resembled a Model T on skiis.

His next effort led to the successful B-7 model in 1937, which was more of a car on tracks and skis.  This was the first model that Bombardier patented.  Bombardier then made a number of tracked snow vehicles, include a school bus version, and other larger industrial vehicles.

In 1953 the Eliason machine was the K-12, which was the last production model.  Eliason went out of business in 1963, but a number of other companies, like Polaris, made machines based on the expired Eliason patents.

It wasn't until 1959 that Bombardier marketed the Ski-doo. 

Bombardier became a huge company, with activities in aerospace and transportation, with subsidiaries like Challenger and Global.  Bombardier bought the Lear Company, of Lear Jet fame, and also Rotax, makers of engines.  In general, in anything to do with transportation, a Bombardier subsidiary is involved.

 

The Dymaxion

Buckminster Fuller is remembered as the inventor of the geodesic dome, but he also invented a unique automobile, called the Dymaxion Car. The Dymaxion was a three wheeler, with the rear wheel doing the steering. Because of the rear wheel steering, it could do a U turn in its own length. Unfortunately, its length was 20 feet. It was a real torpedo of a car, seating 11 people, and capable of doing 120 miles per hour on the freeway. It weighed less than 1000 pounds, and got 30-50 mpg. Invented in 1933, it was completely revolutionary. I have a personal connection with the Dymaxion car, as Fuller lived in Wichita Kansas when he built it, where my uncle lived. Fuller started parking it in my uncle's unused garage, until my uncle asked for a parking fee. After that, he parked it somewhere else.

The First Automobile in the US

You may have thought that Henry Ford made the first car in the U.S., or Duryea, or Olds. However, the first patent on an internal combustion on a 4 wheel vehicle was filed in 1879, and issued in 1897. George Selden was a civil war veteran, with skills and interests in engineering and law. After the Civil War, he entered engineering school, but had to drop out. He later took up law, and filed his patent. He knew that he would not be manufacturing cars before the term of the patent expired, so he did all he could to delay its issuance. It finally issued in 1897, at a time that other car makers were in production.

He licensed his patent, and the company that owned the rights to it licensed it to the other car makers. Selden also began making cars, the Selden Motor Car.

Henry Ford refused to pay the license fee on the Selden Patent, and lost an infringement lawsuit. He appealed the decision, and won. The Selden patent was accused of not being "enabling". To determine if the patent enabled one skilled in the art to build it, a mechanic used the Selden patent as the blueprint to build a car, the first Selden car ever built. It ran, barely, but Selden's patent was determined to cover only the three cylinder, two stroke engine that it disclosed. Ford and all the other car makers used a four stroke engine, and so were not infringing. When the lawsuit was over, the Selden patent only had one year to go before it expired anyway. Over the years, licensing the Selden patent had been a real money maker for Selden. Selden later made automobiles, then trucks, and his company lasted as the Selden Truck Sales Company into the 1930s.
    Ford also had another car built from a patent, a gasoline car patented by Lenior in 1860, a Belgian.  Ford's goal was to show that Selden's patent was invalid, because a car had been patented earlier.  Both Lenoir and Selden were only the first gasoline powered cars, because earlier steam cars had been built by Evans in the U.S. in 1805 , Gurney in the U.K. in 1829, Bollee in France in 1875 and Cugnot in France in 1768.  The Duryea Brothers car was the first production car, first designed in 1893,