History offers a wealth of interesting innovations, including inventions by famous individuals who will astound you with the depth and breadth of their creativity. And those innovations have resulted in some very curious patents. Most surprising is that many of these inventions have little to do with the primary occupations of their progenitors, although certainly not in all the examples that follow. The USPTO has granted many curious patents.
Abraham Lincoln was awarded a patent for his method for “buoying (lifting) vessels over shoals.” Lincoln himself was a patent lawyer, and also had a lifelong fascination for all things mechanical. He learned river navigation early by captaining a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Lincoln was a restless tinkerer. In 1848, while making his way home to Illinois, the boat on which he was traveling became stranded on a sandbar. After watching the crew work long hours to force a quantity of loose planks, barrels and boxes under the ship to free it, Lincoln considered alternative methods to more effectively overcome the cumbersome process. The patent, filed in 1847 and awarded in 1849, was never actually manufactured, but made Lincoln the only U.S. President to hold one. Unfortunately, President Lincoln’s innovation was such that the extra weight his design added to the boat actually ensured that it would get stuck.
It is interesting to consider how the mind of some of our most creative personalities actually must have functioned in generating some of the following curious patents. In some, one can readily see a direct correlation to the filer’s line of work. In others, one must understand hobbies and other interests as the curious patents have seemingly no direct application. Let’s look at a few examples of what made celebrity inventors tick:
“Scratching an itch is a very common task in everyday life. It can be especially difficult, however, for a person to scratch his or her own itch when the location of the itch is in a hard-to-reach spot such as the back. Presently, absent a device such as a scratching stick, a person with an itch in a hard-to-reach location must ask a second party to scratch the itch. This, in turn, requires orienting the second-party-scratcher by using a series of directions, which are often being misunderstood by the second party. For example, these instructions might include “Could you scratch lower? To the left…No, the other left. Now, down lower. To the right. No, no…Too far! Back to the left.” This situation may arise for people in normal health and dexterity or for people with limited flexibility, such as those having spinal injuries that prevent them from bending or twisting to any significant degree. Thus, there is a need for an object that assists a person in precisely identifying a location on the person’s own body for a second party.”
How does one go from filmmaking to backscratching?
Garment for identifying location on body of the garment wearer
There is a tremendous universe of diversity in the inventor community, as evidenced by some very curious patents. There are also very strong principles surrounding intellectual property rights established by governments around the world, including those of the U.S. Patent Office. It is appropriate to express a deep admiration and appreciation to those Presidents founding and fighting for a strong Intellectual Property system, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. Their work and the work of so many others spawned an unbelievable creativity bonanza here and abroad.
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