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Without doubt, the QWERTY keyboard sits right up there as one of the great design icons of the modern age. Christopher Sholes actually came up with the QWERTY layout in 1863, but his first commercial keyboard in 1868 was based on a page-numbering system featuring two rows of keys that took one half of the alphabet each.
‘Whatever key is struck, the corresponding letter or character will be printed on the upper side of the paper, and as each letter is printed, the paper is moved forward by the action described, ready for the next letter or proper space,’ explained Sholes. The most this description could elicit today is a ‘so what?’. In the 1860s, however, it was revolutionary. With two colleagues, Sholes took the model to firearms manufacturer Remington, but it was found that once a typist had got up to speed, the system often produced clashes between the bars holding the letter-stamps. Unsurprisingly, the invention didn’t take off. Early predecessors were also a pretty disparate bunch: a 1714 British patent from Henry Mill was too sketchy to fathom its mechanics, and an 1829 effort from William Austin Burt was slower than handwriting. While Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s 1865 Writing Ball became the first ever commercial typewriter, the biggest breakthrough came from Sholes.
He continued tinkering with the basic idea and, with the aid of brothers Amos and James Densmore, investigated the possibility of splitting up more commonly used combinations of letters. It is a popular myth that the QWERTY design emerged from user-based thinking when in reality the entire objective was to avoid mechanical jams by placing the keys in order of frequency, not to make typing a more comfortable experience. After a period of time in which any rival who saw the layout could have claimed it for his own, Sholes finally included it in a patent for an improved typing machine – the Remington No. 2 (1878) – which featured lowercase letters, and a key for shifting back to caps (US 207,559). QWERTY was now safely enshrined in IP lore, and with only Sholes credited, his legacy was assured.
The layout has few critics today, despite the fact that right-handed typists suffer more than left-handers. Alternative QWERTY layouts exist in countries such as Norway, where specific characters peculiar to a language are required. Challengers to QWERTY’s domination came and went. In 1932, Dr August Dvorak patented the ‘Dvorak keyboard’, which placed vowels and commonly used consonants in the ‘home row’ (the one beginning ‘ASDF’ in QWERTY). It didn’t catch on, and QWERTY has cemented its place as the king of keyboards. Brunelleschi's Monster Patent: Il Badalone
The world’s first patent was arguably granted in 1421 to Filippo Brunelleschi for an improved method of transporting goods up and down the river Arno in Florence (a notoriously tricky business). In contrast to modern patents, the document is singularly vague about the nature of the invention. This is because Brunelleschi, architect of the magnificent dome of the city’s cathedral, was so revered by the authorities that he was able to strike a deal on his own terms: he would only reveal the details of his brainchild once he had been granted a three-year monopoly.
The machine seems to have been a flat-keeled boat with paddle wheels, designed to be towed by smaller boats. It was unveiled in 1428, long after Brunelleschi’s initial patent had expired. Nicknamed ‘Il Badalone’ (‘The Monster’), the vessel was launched from Pisa with a cargo of 50 tonnes of Carrara marble. After 25 miles, disaster struck. Il Baldalone sank and the entire load was lost. Brunelleschi never fully recovered.
Below are the salient portions of the patent:
‘The Magnificent and Powerful Lords, Lords Magistrate, and Standard Bearer of Justice: Considering that the admirable Filippo Brunelleschi … has invented some machine or kind of ship, by means of which he thinks he can easily, at any time, bring in any merchandise and load on the river Arno … and that he refuses to make such machine available to the public … [but would] if he enjoyed some prerogative concerning this…and desiring that this matter… shall be brought to light to be of profit to both said Filippo and our whole country … they deliberated on 19 June 1421;
That no person alive, wherever born and of whatever status, dignity, quality, and grade, shall dare or presume, within three years…to commit any of the following acts on … any … river, stagnant water, swamp, or water running or existing in the territory of Florence: to have, hold, or use in any manner… a machine or ship or other instrument designed to …transport on water any… goods, except such ship or machine or instrument as they may have used until now for similar operations,… and further that any such new or newly shaped machine, etc. shall be burned;
Provided however that the foregoing shall not be held to cover, and shall not apply to, any newly invented or newly shaped machine, etc. designed to ship, transport or travel on water, which may be made by Filippo Brunelleschi or with his will and consent.’-
Until the late nineteenth century, when the concept of copyright began to be extended to ‘the substance and not the form alone’, American law defined ‘copying’ very narrowly. In 1853, a federal circuit judge rejected Harriet Beecher Stowe’s allegation that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had infringed her copyright.
‘By the publication of Mrs Stowe’s book,’ he ruled, ‘the creations of the genius and imagination of the author have become as much public property as those of Homer or Cervantes... All her conceptions and inventions may be used and abused by imitators, playwrights and poetasters... A translation may, in loose phraseology, be called a transcript or copy of her thoughts, but in no correct sense can it be called a copy of her book.’ Celebrity Inventors: Abraham Lincoln
In 1849, future president Lincoln patented not the stovepipe hat, nor his distinctive beard arrangement, but ‘a manner of buoying vessels’ (US Patent No. 6,469). At the time, he was still an Illinois congressman. The invention was never taken up commercially, but there is a model in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.- On April 13 2004, Libya suddenly disappeared from the internet. For four days, all .ly domain names were mysteriously inaccessible, to the considerable chagrin of the 12,500-odd organisations that had paid $500 a pop for internet addresses registered in Libya. It later transpired that the source of the problem had been a dispute within the country about who owned the rights to sell the suffix.
Five colour marks registered in the US
1. The copper band at the top of a Duracell battery
2. The translucent tips of Shakespeare fishing rods
3. McDonald’s striped, red, white and gold french fry container
4. The green body, yellow wheel combination of John Deere tractors
5. Burberry plaid-
In 2002, The New Scientist reported the findings of a study carried out at UCLA into how the human brain deals with brand names. ‘It is surprising,’ said Eran Zaidel, head of the project. ‘The rules that apply to word recognition in general do not necessarily apply here.’
The study confirmed that brand names engage the ‘emotional’ right-brain more than other words. A London brand strategist told the magazine: ‘This is very intriguing indeed. It supports our instinctive belief that brands are a special class of word – they are like a poem all in one word in their ability to evoke and express ideas.’ Fair Use, But Not in the Movies
As many film-makers have discovered to their cost, US Trademark and Right of Publicity laws make no formal provision for ‘fair use’ (Copyright law is a different matter entirely). This is a blessing in terms of combating the practice of product placement, but the law has caused the use of real world objects in movies to become fraught with difficulty. Here are a few of the casualties, as noted by the author Lawrence Lessig:
Batman Forever – In one scene, the Batmobile was shown driving through a courtyard. Its architect claimed copyright violation and demanded compensation. His suit was rejected, but the release of the film was delayed.
Twelve Monkeys – The film was stopped by a court 28 days after its release when a furniture designer claimed that a chair featured in the film illegally resembled one of his own.
The Devil’s Advocate – The release was delayed by two days after a sculptor complained that one of his pieces appeared in a background shot without his consent.Football and IP: the Gospel According to the Corinthians
In 2000, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) ordered Sallen Enterprises, the operators of a website devoted to St Paul’s correspondence with the residents of Corinth, to hand over the domain name corinthians.com to a Brazilian soccer club.
The fact that the Pauline epistles predated the Sao Paulo team (founded in 1910) by some 1865 years cut little ice with WIPO. A one-man panel found that ‘the posting was fabricated to divert consumers, or more generally the public interested in visiting what they think is the site of the well known Brazilian soccer team.’ Naturally the decision went down like a lead balloon in Christian circles.- When the California Milk Processing Board launched the first of its celebrated ‘Got Milk?’ advertisements in 1993 and trademarked the expression during the same year, it inadvertently sparked off a linguistic phenomenon. Americans are now inundated with ads, T-shirts and mail shots enquiring whether they’ve ‘got’ just about everything under the sun. Choice examples include ‘Got Firewall?’, ‘Got Vote?’, ‘Got Water?’, ‘Got Jesus?’ (popular as a bumper sticker), ‘Got Elk?’ and ‘Got Parking?’ (as used by the town of Castle Rock in an official mailing).
Celebrity Inventors: Zeppo Marx
Zeppo Marx, the youngest of the family, tended to play the ‘straight man’ in the brothers’ films. He was also, in his time, the holder of two patents. The first was a coupling device for World War II bombers. In 1945, it was used to release the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Twenty four years later, Zeppo patented an altogether nicer invention, a wristwatch heart monitor, together with Albert D Herman.It’s amazing no one thought of it before
The coffee filter was invented in Germany in 1908. Melissa Bentz simply pierced some holes in a tin container, placed a circular piece of absorbent paper in the bottom and plonked it over a coffee pot.Just One Cornetto, Give it to Me...
When the famously foul-mouthed British Chef, Gordon Ramsay, dished up a new pudding known as the ‘home-made-mini cornetto’ in one of his London restaurants, it didn’t take long for Unilever, the real makers of Cornetto, to take notice. Unilever lawyers warned Ramsey, star of the celebrity cook-up programme Hell’s Kitchen, to remove the item from his menu, as it was likely to ‘damage the distinctiveness of our Cornetto mark.
Ramsey was reportedly reluctant to agree, remarking ‘If anything we are improving the image of Cornetto in giving it a new twist’. In the summer of 2004, a Unilever spokesman revealed that the company had ‘received a telephone call from the restaurant apologising and stating that they had removed the name from their menu and website.’-
In July 2001, George Lucas, fiercely protective of his movies, filed a trademark infringement suit against medical-instruments makers Minrad, Inc. for calling a line of laser-guided surgical scalpels ‘Light Sabers’. Lucas had come up with the phrase, which described a luminous weapon wielded by the sinister Darth Vader and the Jedi Knights, prior to the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977.
‘Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant’s goods,’ his lawyers declared, ‘are likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services marketed under its Light Saber mark.’ Minrad countered that they couldn’t honestly see their product reducing revenues from the sale of ‘toy swords’. The suit appears not to have been followed up; presumably the dispute was settled out of court. - Mr Potato Head was invented and patented by George Lerner of New York City in 1952 and subsequently sold to Hasbro Inc, which continues to manufacture him. ‘MPH’ has played a surprisingly active role in American history. The first toy advertised on television, in 1984, he also managed to win four votes in the mayoral election in Boise, Idaho.
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Music producer Mike Batt is best known to British audiences as the composer of the theme tune to The Wombles, a 1970s children’s show about a clan of litterobsessed furry creatures living on Wimbledon Common. More recently, he found himself enmeshed in a curious legal battle after the release of The Planets’ album Classical Graffiti.
Batt had inserted 60 seconds of silence to separate the 12 main tracks from four supplementary remixes, naming it A One Minute Silence in honour of John Cage’s seminal noiseless symphony 4’33" (1952). Two months after Classical Graffiti’s chart debut, Mr Batt received a letter from the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS). ‘It informed me’ as the producer dryly put it ‘that my silence was a copyright infringement on Cage’s silence’. The letter added that an initial payment of around four hundred pounds had been made to the administrators of the Cage catalogue.
In the end, the opposing parties agreed to stage a concert, thereby allowing the public to assess the respective merits of the compositions. Batt went first, leading The Planets through a spirited rendition of A One Minute’s Silence. Then a Mr Riddle, representing the Cage camp, introduced a young clarinettist, who proceeded (not) to play 4’33". The occasion, however, failed to dampen Mike Batt’s sense of grievance. He has subsequently registered silent compositions varying in duration from one second to ten minutes, and is particularly jealous of the rights adhering to 4’32" and 4’34". ‘If there’s ever a Cage performance where they come in a second shorter or longer,’ he has warned, ‘then it’s mine.’ -
Since 1 January 2005, anyone has been be able to bring out a song that has been on release in Europe for over 50 years without alerting the copyright owner of the original recording. This means that, unlike the US, where songs are protected for 95 years, the owners of recordings more than 50 years old will no longer benefit from European royalties. Since 1955 was a seminal year for rock and roll, we must brace ourselves for a torrent of boy and girl-band covers. Among the first songs to be affected are Elvis Presley’s That’s All Right and Bill Haley and the Comets’ Shake Rattle and Roll. Beatles’ songs, which form one of the most lucrative catalogues in history, are the next great targets on the horizon.
They start to come out of copyright on the 1 January 2013. However, before you go out and record your own version of Love Me Do, bear in mind that while the recording will no longer be protected, the song still will be for another 20 years. Writers and composers will still be entitled to royalties, even when performers and record companies no longer are. So European covers won’t be free – they’ll just be cheaper. -
‘It’s much too good for him. He didn’t know what to do with it!’
George Friderich Handel (1685-1759), when asked why he had borrowed music from the composer Giovanni Maria Bononcini (1642-78) -
Not, apparently, the lowercase form of the seventh letter of the alphabet, but a trademark belonging to the hip-hop performer Warren g. In 1997, lawyers representing the said rap artist sued country star Garth (or garth) Brooks for the unauthorised use of their client’s little ‘g’. Brooks then countersued, claiming that the rap star had stolen the idea from him. The musicians settled out of court in March 1998, with each agreeing to allow the other to continue using his particular version of the troublesome letter (g’s accompanied by the words ‘funk music’, Brooks’ enclosed within a circle).
Brooks later explained the reason for his change of heart ‘I learned from Warren g and Wrong (the star’s manager) that the letter “g” has a special significance to them and to some members of their community in that it symbolises kids and young people who have risen above drugs and violence and who are worthy of respect because of their positive contributions to the world…Now knowing how much the symbol “g” means to Warren, I will strive to reach the standard that the “g” represents to him and to his community.’ Medieval and Renaissance trademarks
Twelfth century: Trade guilds begin to use distinguishing marks.
Thirteenth century: Bell makers start using marks. Watermarks first appear in Italy.
1266: Earliest English law on trademarks: The Bakers Marking Law. Some bakers stamp a mark on the bread, others prick it.
1353: Statute passed enabling merchants whose goods had been pirated to provide evidence of ownership using marks.
1365: The Cutlers obtain protection for their monopoly and their marks in London, requiring registration with city officials.
1373: Bottle-makers are required to place a mark on bottles and other vessels for identification purposes.
1452: Earliest known trademark litigation: A widow is granted the use of her husband’s mark.
1618: First recorded case of trademark infringement (Southern v. How). A cloth manufacturer is found guilty of appropriating the mark of another clothier and using it on lower quality material.-
The Hannah-Barbera cartoon show Wacky Races, first televised in 1968, featured 11 competitors. None had better credentials than Professor Pat Pending, creator of the awesome, metamorphosing Convert-a-Car.
According to one compulsive archiver, Pending won three of the 34 races featured in the original series. He finished second twice and a creditable third on five occasions. Cumulatively, however, the Professor finished an embarrassing ninth of 11. The overall winners were the Neanderthal Slag brothers, Rock and Gravel, in the Boulder Mobile – so much for technology.
For the record, the Anthill Mob came second in the Bulletproof Bomb, followed by Rufus and Chainsaw in the Buzzwagon. The delicious Penelope Pitstop was seventh in the Compact Pussycat and the Army Surplus Special finished tenth. Dick Dastardly and his cackling hound Mutley brought up the rear. Patents that have made a difference: Adrenalin
Patent No. 4785 (Japan)
The Japanese chemist Jokichi Takamine is credited with being the first to isolate and purify a human hormone. In 1901, he successfully isolated the crystalline hormone adrenalin (epinephrine), making commercial preparation possible. He obtained patent rights to the manufacturing method he invented. Epinephrine is used to treat symptoms of cardiac arrest, the treatment of shock, asthma and glaucoma.-
His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand is a man of many talents. An accomplished jazz saxophonist and enthusiastic radio ham, he is also the holder of three Thai patents.
The first was awarded for his ingenious contraption for oxygenating polluted water - a major health hazard within Thailand. During the 1980s, the King had addressed the problem by promoting the use of two simple techniques: ‘good water chases bad water’, which diverted fresh water to dilute tainted supplies, and ‘evil overcomes evil’, where water hyacinth and assorted aquatic plants were grown to filter waste.
Neither, though, was a match for the Chaipattana Low Speed Surface Aerator. Loosely based on a traditional luk or water-wheel, the device won King Bhumibol the ‘Best Inventor’ award at the prestigious Brussels Eureka show in 2000. According to an official website, the King, concerned about his subjects’ lackadaisical attitude to intellectual property registration, decided to patent the aerator to provide them with a positive example.
His Majesty’s second patent is for a cost-saving fuel based on a combination of regular diesel and palm oil. Unlike ethanol based alternatives, the fluid can be used in trucks and other machines without their engines requiring modification. The monarch’s formula was expected to save the country hundreds of millions of Baht per annum.
The third patent is the fruit of the King’s most grandiose project to date: cracking the age-old puzzle of how to control the weather. His ‘supersandwich’ rain-making technique relies on aircraft simultaneously ‘seeding’ clouds at different altitudes/ temperatures with chemicals known to trigger precipitation. King Buhmibol’s technique is believed to direct rain to specific targets more efficiently than any previous rain-generating method. The 75 year-old ruler was presented with the patent at his seaside palace in Hua Hin on 2 June 2003.
A king who can rain out your picnic – no wonder his subjects treat him with reverence. -
In September 1996, Ronald McDonald, a 61-year-old retired history teacher from Westhill in Aberdeen, threatened burger giant McDonald’s with legal action for pinching his name. ‘Frankly, I always feel a bit annoyed that my name is the same as a clown, especially when I read of this action by the company,’ he announced. ‘As far as I’m concerned they have stolen my name and my father’s name for commercial purposes. To me it’s an attack on the Scottish clan system. They have no right to claim the prefix Mc or Mac as theirs.’ Mr McDonald wrote to the company’s managing director to tell him: ‘The prefix Mc and the name McDonald has been used in Scotland and spread worldwide many centuries before your firm was ever in existence.’ He also enclosed a Doric poem.
The catalyst for McDonald’s intervention was the burger company’s threat to sue a small Buckinghamshire corner shop called McMunchies. But a spokesman claimed that he had misunderstood what they were doing. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the Mc prefix, other than in a food service context. We believe Ms Blair, the owner, is certainly seeking to confuse customers into thinking that there may be some association with McDonald’s, particularly with our unique stylised writing, and we hope she will remove the Mc prefix from her shop. Of course the Mc isn’t copyright when it’s a family name, or a shoe shop or whatever.’ Faced with the financial might of the restaurant chain, Mary Blair appears to have backed down.
Interestingly, Mr McDonald is known to his friends as ‘Big Mac’. - In 1996, a group of intellectual property lawyers wrote an article for the US National Law Journal, arguing that athletic manoeuvres were appropriate subjects for patents. A method for skiing 10% faster, for example, was clearly a ‘useful process’ in certain contexts, such as trying to win a race. Similarly, athletic techniques could undoubtedly be non-obvious and novel. Technically speaking, Robert M Kunstadt, F Scott Kieff, and Robert G Kramer certainly had a point, but their proposal seems unlikely to be taken up by the sporting world in the foreseeable future. The patenting of manoeuvres would play havoc with competition. As the Brits say, it just wouldn’t be cricket.
Five Inventors who Chose not to Patent
Wilhelm Roentgen: refused to commercially exploit his discovery of X-rays.
Jonas Salk: when asked who owned the patent for the polio vaccine he had developed in 1952, he replied ‘The people. Could you patent the sun?’
John Walker: declined to patent the matches he invented in 1827, or ‘sulphuretted peroxide strikables’ as the yard-long sticks were described.
Pierre and Marie Curie: refused to patent their process for refining radium. Marie declared that radium ‘is a natural chemical, it is for the people’.
Volvo: the Swedish car manufacturer made its ‘lap and diagonal’ seatbelt freely available to competitors.Harry Potter and the Russian Chamber of Secrets
In 2003, it was reported that a Russian law firm had been instructed to commence proceedings against Warner Brothers for using President Vladimir Putin as the model for the character of Dobby the house-elf in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. This was difficult to confirm, as both parties declined to comment, but many Russians assumed the story to be true. Ever since, Harry Potter websites and chatrooms have been bombarded with angry messages.- Ireland’s first patent, issued in 1929, was for a starter cage for greyhounds and racing breeds of that ilk. Some wags commented that the country was going to the dogs.
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The leotard came into existence in the 1880s. It was named after a young French acrobat called Jules Léotard, who invented the flying trapeze act by stringing some swings over his father’s swimming pool. Léotard performed in a tight, self-designed one-piece costume. Unsurprisingly, his scantily dressed flying act was immensely popular with the tightly-corseted young ladies of Victorian England. His notoriety as a lover was sealed when George Leybourne wrote a hit music hall song entitled The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze:
Oh, he floats through the air
With the greatest of ease,
This daring young man
On the flying trapeze;
His actions are graceful,
All girls he does please,
My love he has purloined away!
Sadly, reality failed to live up to the legend. Jules died at the tender age of 30, probably from smallpox, just as the term ‘leotard’ was gaining popular currency. Had he been alive to trademark his scandalous gym wear, he might well have ended up swinging from the rooftops of the largest banks in Europe. -
Although the Montgolfier brothers are rightly credited with the invention of the hot air balloon, the version used for the first demonstration of the new technology in Paris was designed by a rival scientist (Jacques Charles) and filled with hydrogen. When the unmanned gas balloon landed near Gonesse, just outside the capital, on 27 August 1783, the terrified villagers assumed it was something demonic and set upon it with pitchforks. Anticipating this kind of reaction, the French government had issued the following proclamation to quell public anxiety:
Announcement to the People on the Ascent of Balloons or Globes in the Air
A discovery has been made, which the Government deems it right to be made known, so that alarm be not occasioned to the people.
On calculating the different weights of inflammable and common air, it has been found that a balloon filled with inflammable air* will rise towards heaven until it is in equilibrium with the surrounding air. This may not happen until it has reached a great height.
The first experiment was made at Annonay in Vivrais by the inventors Messieurs Montgolfier; a globe formed of canvas and paper, 105 feet in circumference, filled with inflammable air**, reached an uncalculated height.
The same experiment has just been repeated in Paris (27 August at 5pm) in the presence of a great crowd. A globe of taffeta, covered by elastic gum, 36 feet in circumference, has risen from the Champs de Mars, and been lost to view in the clouds, being borne in a northeasterly direction; it is impossible to foresee where it will descend.
It is proposed to repeat these experiments on a larger scale. Anyone who sees such a globe (which resembles a darkened moon) in the sky should be aware that, far from being an alarming phenomenon, it is only a machine, made of taffeta, or light canvas covered in paper, which cannot possibly cause any harm and which will some day prove serviceable to the wants of society.
* hydrogen.
** the authorities get it wrong here. The Montgolfier balloon had been powered by hot air.
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Coca-cola may have been endorsed by some big names, but none was as dedicated as the actress Joan Crawford was to the company’s greatest rival. From 1955 to 1973 she worked as a publicity executive for Pepsi, and in 1959 she took her fourth husband’s place on the board following his death. He had been Alfred Steele, the president of the company.
Crawford’s crowning achievement at Pepsi was winning the Sixth Annual ‘Pally’ Award, for the employee contributing most to company sales. Thereafter, she displayed the bronze Pepsi bottle next to the Oscar she had won for her role in Mildred Pierce. -
May 1735: The Engravers’ Copyright Act receives royal assent. It extends the regulations of the Literary Act (‘Queen Anne’s Act’) of 1709 to prints, with a 14-year copyright. The publication of The Rake’s Progress prints was deliberately delayed until the Act took effect and appeared in August.
Hogarth had been the main promoter of the campaign in favour of the new Act, which came to be referred to as The Hogarth Act. The number of pirated prints diminished rapidly. The copyright period was extended from 14 to 28 years in 1767, but Hogarth himself allowed cheaper, ‘authorised’ copies to be made of his own prints. - Nike once ran a campaign to sell T-shirts and other merchandise bearing the slogan ‘You don’t know Diddley’ and featuring the image of Blues great Bo Diddley. In this instance, Nike’s lawyers didn’t appear too smart themselves. Diddley sued the company in April 2000 for using his name and image without permission.
- Staff at Stanford University were somewhat taken aback when they discovered that their teaching assistant’s handbook section on plagiarism cropped up in a similar handbook put out by the University of Oregon. Oregon officials conceded that the section, and indeed othe rparts of its handbook, were identical with the Stanford guidebook, promptly apologised and revised their text. Who said irony was dead?
- According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an average Westerner on an average day encounters 1,500 trademarks. The figure rises dramatically to up to 30,000 if he or she visits a supermarket.
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In the old days, gem cutters relied on trade secrets to prevent others copying their work. But with the pirates steadily improving their reverse-engineering skills, jewellers have increasingly been seeking intellectual property protection. Under US law, there are three main routes open to them:
Copyright: Technically, gem art is de facto protected from the instant of creation. In practice, it is difficult to prove the priority of a design in the absence of a formally registered copyright.
Patents: A gem cut may not be novel enough to qualify for copyright protection but still be patentable, so long as it is different in some way from previous designs. The difficult part is deciding which kind of patent protection to apply for – utility or design. This is because in the case of jewellery, the distinction on which such decisions traditionally rest (that between an item’s ornamental and functional qualities) no longer applies. Jewellery’s function is to be ornamental! As a rule of thumb, if you’ve come up with a simple, geometrical gem cut that happens not to have been used before, you’re better off applying for a design patent. If, on the other hand, you’ve devised a new cutting technique, go for the utility kind
Trade Dress: If a jeweller’s designs are distinctive enough (in other words, if the public come to associate a particular style with a certain designer), they may qualify for protection as Trade Dress. The necessary recognition takes time to develop, but once established, Trade Dress protection can be extended indefinitely. Anti-piracy Techniques in the Silent Film Era
Piracy was a serious issue in the early days of the silent movie. Unscrupulous film companies would regularly steal a movie, replace a scene or two with newly shot material and release it as a brand new production.
The Biograph Company devised a crafty solution to the problem. It started to ensure that its trademark, the initial’s ‘AB’, appeared somewhere in every shot. Doors, walls and windows were all fair game. Buffs can have a great time trying to spot the ‘ABs’ in old Biograph movies, an activity comparable to searching for the director’s inevitable cameo appearance in a Hitchcock film. The device was first used on a portable gipsy piano in Her First Adventure (1908).Genetic Patent Landmarks: the first transgenic primate
2000: ANDi, the first transgenic primate, is created in Oregon. The rhesus monkey had been engineered with green fluorescence-inducing jellyfish genes. The object of the exercise was to pave the way for the insertion of human genes associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, breast cancer and diabetes into primates to learn more about how they operated. But the general public was more interested in seeing whether he would glow in the dark. (This had already been shown to be the case in similarly engineered mice). Fortunately for ANDi (whose took his name from the initials of ‘inserted DNA’ written backwards), he didn’t. Some animals whose genes have been engineered in similar ways have not got off so lightly.- A few registered trademarks consist of not one, but a series of images, such as a clip of film or a computer animation. The Netscape ‘asteroid shower’ is one example, as is the sequence at the beginning of Tristar movies where a winged horse charges towards the audience and then soars into flight.
- When Ronald Reagan started to refer to the Pentagon’s Strategic Defence System (a scheme to equip satellites with missiles to take out any warheads that might be fired from the Soviet block) as ‘Star Wars’, the ever-litigious film director George Lucas filed suit against the administration for nicking his phrase. He lost.
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1790 Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont becomes the first person to be issued a federal patent in the United States. The invention in question was a method for the ‘making of Pot Ash by a new apparatus and process’.
1809 Mary Dixon Kies is the first woman to be granted a patent by the US Patent Office. She had devised a new technique of weaving straw with silk and thread.
1821 Thomas L Jennings is the first black man to be granted a patent, for the invention of dry cleaning. It is sometimes erroneously assumed that the first African American patent holder was the Henry Blair of Glenross, Maryland, who patented a corn planter in 1834. The confusion arises because, in the only instance of racial specification in the early records, the patent documentation refers to Blair as ‘a colored man’.
1836 The majority of the 10,000-odd patents issued by the US Patent office during the first 46 years of its existence are destroyed in a fire. About 2,800 are eventually salvaged, and given a number ending in an ‘x’. They are now known as X-Patents. The World's First Computer Programmer...
…was a mathematician named Ada Byron. She published her first programmes in 1843, for use with the mechanical digital computer recently developed by Charles Babbage. Her system was based on punch-cards.-
When would you imagine the world’s first fax was sent? The 1970s? The 1960s? The 1950s at a pinch? The answer turns out to be 1907*. In that year, Arthur Korn transmitted a photograph from Munich to Berlin using a wire technology he had begun working on five years earlier. History omits to tell us whether Herr Korn was ever tempted to honour the office tradition of faxing images of his buttocks to unsuspecting acquaintances.
* A primitive version of the fax had been patented by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain as early as 1843, but Korn’s device allowed the first inter-city transmissions. -
In a landmark case, the golfer Tiger Woods took Alabama-based artist Rick Rush to court for painting a picture of him in action at the Master’s tournament in Augusta in 1997. Eldrick Tiger Woods Corporation alleged copyright violation, arguing that it had exclusive rights to the Tiger’s name, likeness and signature.
In 2000, a district judge ruled in Rush’s favour, and street cartoonists everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. The decision was later upheld by the US Court of Appeals. Products with Dismal First Year US Sales
VW Beetle – 300 cars
(Sales peaked at over 200,000 in 1962. On 30 July 2003, the 21,529,464th and final original Beetle rolled off the production line in Puebla, Mexico.)
Scrabble – 532 sets
(Annual US sales now vary from one to two million.)
Liquid Paper – 1,200 bottles
(Liquid Paper was invented in 1951 by Bette Nesmith, mother of Michael Nesmith of Monkees fame. By the time she sold her company to Gilette in 1979, the product was generating US$38 million in annual sales.)
Remington Typewriter – eight units
(This was the first ‘commercial typewriter, introduced in 1874. By 1910, two million typewriters were being sold annually in the USA. By the late 1980s, global sales had reached 10 million units per annum.)
Coca Cola – 25 bottles
(In 2002, Coca Cola sold 5.6 billion cases of soft drinks in the USA, equivalent to 134.4 billion 8oz cans.)- When Penguin brought out a parody version of Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, in which a character named Dr Juice recounted the story of the OJ Simpson double murder case, Seuss Enterprises sued the publishers for copyright and trademark infringement and won on both counts.
The Great Inventors: Benjamin Franklin
Although he is perhaps best remembered as a statesman, having contributed to the drafting of the American Declaration of Independence and been instrumental in persuading the French to side with the colony against the British, Benjamin Franklin was most famous during his lifetime for his numerous inventions.
1717 Invents a pair of manually operated swim fins.
1751 Experiments and Observations on Electricity is published in London.
1752 Franklin conducts his seminal kite flying experiments in a series of thunderstorms. At considerable personal risk, he proves that lightning is a form of electricity. The first lightening conductors appear on the market shortly afterwards.
1752 While serving as Postmaster General, Franklin invents a simple odometer to calculate the distances of postal routes.
1752 To help his ailing brother Franklin invented a urinary catheter, which improved upon previous models.
c. 1761 Franklin invents a glass armonica. He later said of the instrument ‘Of all my inventions, the glass armonica has given me the greatest personal satisfaction.’
1783 Franklin observes the world’s first manned balloon flight in Paris. When a fellow spectator questions the utility of the new invention, he remarks ‘Of what use is a new born baby?’
c. 1784 Franklin invents bifocal spectacles.
c. 1785 The ageing Franklin unveils an instrument for taking down books from high shelves.Who you gonna call? – 'my lawyer!'
When Huey Lewis first heard Ray Parker Jr’s No.1 hit Ghostbusters in 1984 (from the movie of the same name), it struck him that the song sounded uncannily like his hit 'I Want a New Drug' from the previous year.
Lewis sued Parker for copyright infringement and settled in 1995 for an undisclosed sum. Unfortunately, despite agreeing not to discuss the case in public, he proceeded to insult Parker on VH1. Result: another lawsuit.-
What is a former Patent Office employee to do with all the free time suddenly on his hands when he retires? The late, great Arthur Pedrick of Sussex decided to put his extensive knowledge of patent application procedure to good practical use: he crossed over to the other side. Between 1962 and 1977, Pedrick patented 162 inventions, each one wackier than the last. He was undaunted by the fact that none of them were taken up commercially. It seemed almost beside the point.
The breadth of Mr Pedrick’s vision is well demonstrated by his radiation detector (UK Patent GB1426698, 1976). Depending on how the device was set up, it could either a) detect a nuclear explosion from an orbiting satellite and automatically dump a 1000 megaton atom bomb on the aggressor nation, or b) allow Arthur’s cat Ginger to pass through a cat flap while freezing out unwanted feline visitors. The machine worked by detecting the character of the light falling on it from a given source. When it registered the pre-selected wavelength, a release mechanism was triggered. History fails to reveal whether Ginger ever got his high-tec flap, but we do know that discussions he held with his master on the subject of nuclear physics made their way into the official patent documentation.
Other classic Pendrick inventions include an amphibious bicycle, a steerable golf ball and an apparatus allowing a car to be driven from the back seat. But his most ambitious project was a scheme to irrigate the world’s deserts. With admirable simplicity, he reasoned that some parts of the planet were much too dry while others had huge and redundant supplies of water. The solution was to fire a constant stream of snowballs from the polar icecaps into needy desert regions via a network of giant peashooters.
Eventually, running the ‘One-Man-Think-Tank Basic Research Laboratories of Sussex’ began to take its toll. Mrs Pendrick grew weary of the cost of her husband’s patent applications, not to mention the houseful of mechanical junk, and prevailed on him to curtail his inventive activities. -
Modern record companies find themselves spending a great deal of time and money clearing samples. But there is an elegant solution: they can simply buy the rights. And because the most sampled songs are obscure soul and funk numbers from the 1960s and 1970s, this can be surprisingly cheap.
A good example of the practice is provided by Tuff City Records of New York, which purchased the rights to The Honey Drippers’ 1973 track Impeach the President largely because so many of its artists had sampled the song. This turned out to be good business: the record has been sampled by more than 100 performers, and Tuff City finds itself in a no-lose position. If the sampler is signed up with the company, it has no royalties to pay. If an artist from another label wishes to sample Impeach the President, they have to pay Tuff City. - Valentine’s Day 1876 was not a happy one for Elisha Gray. On that day, he filed a ‘caveat’ (an announcement of an intention to patent an invention within three months) for a device that would later be known as the telephone. Incredibly, Gray later learned that Alexander Graham Bell had submitted a patent application for a similar device only hours beforehand. Bell was eventually awarded the relevant patent after a protracted legal dispute. With hindsight, perhaps Gray should have booked an alarm call.
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In 1986, US rappers The Beastie Boys started to appear on stage with Volkswagen badges around their necks. This unlikely fashion statement sparked a mini crime-wave. Fans throughout the world descended on parked Golfs and Polos and prised off the coveted ‘VW’ badges with screwdrivers. Then they strung them and wore them as pendants, thus aping their heroes and demonstrating their fearless street nous.
The manufacturers responded by ordering up enough replacement badges to fill a room four-feet wide by eight-feet deep.
Although the craze eventually died down, a spate of VW badge theft was reported in Yorkshire as late as 2000. -
Eric Corley, aka Emmanuel Goldstein (after the leader of the underground movement in Orwell’s 1984), has been a major thorn in the side of the intellectual property protection industry for decades. Corley is the publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, the bible of the hacking community. The ‘2600’ refers to a discovery made by proto-hackers during the 1960s: by transmitting tones of 2600 hertz across certain long distance phone lines, they found they could access ‘operator mode’. The number also features in the names of Corley’s company (2600 Enterprises, Inc) and website (2600.com, online since 1995). Corley has described it as a ‘mystical thing’.
A glance at some of the articles that have appeared in the magazine or on the website should explain why Mr Corley makes corporate America nervous. Past topics have included advice on accessing other people’s emails, installing Linux on your Xbox, stealing domain names, intercepting mobile phone calls and breaking into the computer systems of Federal Express and Costco.
In January 2000, the communications industry bit back. Eight Hollywood studios, all members of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), successfully sued Corley and two associates for posting a DVD decryption code on 2600.com. The arrival in court of a posse of teenage hackers wearing T-shirts adorned with the forbidden code failed to sway Judge Lewis A Kaplan.
Despite this setback, Corley and his magazine and website continue to thrive. Origin of the Name: Häagen Dazs
Reuben Mattus started working for his mother’s New York-based ice-cream business in the early 1920s. He sold her wares in the Bronx from a horse drawn wagon. Mattus was a bit of a visionary and dreamed of creating the world’s best ice-cream. As a result of his business acumen and insistence on the use of top quality ingredients, the company expanded considerably during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
In 1961, Reuben decided to go it alone. To give the new brand an air of old fashioned European know-how, he dreamed up the name Häagen-Dazs.Well it seemed like a good idea at the time
Peter Blake, who designed the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, sold the rights for £200. Had he kept them, he would of course have collected royalties every time the album was sold.
Hilda Brabban, the creator of the 1960s children’s television characters Bill and Ben, fared even worse. She simply gave her rights to the BBC, which has since earned more than two million pounds from videos and other Bill and Ben merchandise.Landmarks in the History of Genetic Patents
In 1998, developmental biologist Stuart Newman applied for a patent on a process to produce a ‘chimerical’ creature. Newman had no intention of actually making the part-human, part-animal monster – he just wanted to spark public debate.
But in 1999 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rejected his application. Newman announced his attention to appeal, if necessary all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 2005, he lost his seven-year battle when USPTO once more rejected the claim, saying the hybrid would be too closely related to a human to be patentable.- The invention of Silly Putty was a side effect of America’s attempts to cope with the rubber shortage brought about the Japanese capture of producer-nations during World War Two. In 1943, James Wright, a Scottish engineer, was working at General Electric’s laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut to find a viable method of producing synthetic rubber. One day he mixed some silicon oil and boric acid in a test tube. When he removed the gooey substance that formed inside, Wright threw a lump to the floor and found that it bounced back up again. After circulating among chemists for a few years, Silly Putty was launched as a children’s novelty item in 1949. Since then, over 200 million plastic eggs-full of the stuff have been sold worldwide.
The power of copyright-free song titles
To underline the point that song titles are, by and large, uncopyrightable, here are four melodically unrelated songs all called ‘The Power of Love”. Writing one seems to have been compulsory during the early 1980s:
Jennifer Rush
The Power of Love (1985)
(Celine Dion covered this version in 1993)
Huey Lewis and the News
The Power of Love (1985)
Frankie Goes to Hollywood
The Power of Love (1984)
Luther Vandross
The Power of Love (1981)How did the term 'plagiarism' originate?
The term ‘plagiarism’ derives from the Latin plagium, meaning ‘kidnapping’, and was first used in English in its modern context by the playwright Ben Jonson. Prior to Jonson’s coinage, a ‘plagiary’ was somebody who kidnapped a child or a slave.-
For more than a century, two companies have been fighting over the marketing rights to the brand name ‘Budweiser’. In the blue corner we have the world’s biggest brewery, Anheuser-Busch, which has been making a beer called ‘Budweiser’ since 1876. Depending on who you listen to, the founder of the company, Adolph Busch, either picked the name at random while looking at a map of southern Bohemia, or named his lager in a fit of nostalgia for a glass he had consumed their 11 years earlier. Anyhow, he registered the name ‘Budweiser’ as a US trademark.
In the red corner we have the tiny Budejovicky Budvar company, hailing from the Czech city of Ceske Budejovice, or Budweis as it is known in German. The brewery was established in 1895, 19 years after Anheuser-Busch began producing ‘Budweiser’. But the local beer had always been called ‘Budweiser’, and the company saw no reason to break with tradition.
1911:
Round 1
The rivals agree to divide the world into two spheres of influence. Budvar will refrain from selling its beer north of the Panama Canal, Anheuser- Busch will do likewise in Europe.
1976:
Round 2
The Czech company launches a bid to prevent Anheuser-Busch registering either ‘Budweiser’ or ‘Bud’ as a UK trademark. It takes 12 years, but they are eventually successful. Until the UK registrar does a Uturn and allows Anheuser-Busch to register the name ‘Bud’.
1979:
Round 3
The US brewery attempts to prevent the Czechs from using either name in the UK, on the grounds of passing off. The courts dismiss this claim, arguing (correctly) that British drinkers are aware of both products and are discerning enough to know which one they wanted.
Round 4
The Swiss courts block Anheuser-Busch from using either name in Switzerland, on the grounds that ‘Budweiser’ indicates the place of origin in a similar way to ‘champagne’.
Glasnost and beyond:
Round 5
The Iron Curtain dissolves. During the 1990s, Budvar expands into new territories. The Americans start to get nervous.
Round 6
A frenzy of punches and counter punches. Budvar claims victories in South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Latvia, Australia, and Denmark. Anheuser-Busch wins in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Nigeria, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Tajikistan. Some of those countries are in both lists. Everyone is confused.
Round 7
An ambiguous round. Budvar finally achieves a presence in the US market, after an absence of six decades, but at the price of changing its name. ‘Czechvar’ receives US Patent Office approval in 2002.
Round 8
At the time of writing, the rivals are still slugging it out in the courts of more than 40 countries. Neither shows any sign of flagging. The argument may rumble on for eternity. - Erroneously perceived by many as a sport involving ponies, chukkas and Prince Charles, this is in fact a proprietary brand of sports/leisure wear, according to lawyers representing Ralph Lauren, who in 2000 forced the US Polo association to change the name of their official magazine.
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If the shape of a building is distinctive enough, the United States Patent and Trademark Office is often prepared to register it as a trademark. Here are a few examples:
1. The Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco
2. The Guggenheim Museum
3. The Chrysler Building – both in New York City
4. The Citicorp Centre
5. The Wrigley Building – both in Chicago
6. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building in Cleveland, Ohio.
The shape (and colour) of McDonald’s’ golden arches is also a registered trademark. The great inventors: Erno Rubik
Cube mania was one of the defining features of the early 80s. It is estimated that an eighth of the world’s population has played with Erno Rubik’s infuriating but compelling toy.
Rubik was born in Budapest in 1944. His parents were ideal for a budding inventor: his mother was a poet and a ‘dreamer’ and his father an engineer-mechanic. Erno studied sculpture for his first degree, but then switched to architecture at the Academy of Applied Arts and Design. He was teaching interior design there when he came up with the invention that would change his life.
In the spring of 1974, Rubik was wrestling with the structural problem of designing a block of cubes in which each cube was able to move independently without the whole falling apart. At first he experimented with rubber bands, but the solution was to have the blocks hold themselves together by virtue of their shapes. Soon he had constructed a cube made up of 26 ‘cubies’ (not 27 as it appeared from the outside, as the one the middle was ‘missing’). He marked each side with a different colour and started twisting. It took him a month to get back the original pattern.
Rubik applied for a Hungarian patent in January 1975, receiving approval two years later. The first cubes appeared in the shops towards the end of 1977. Sales were slow until an entrepreneur named Tibor Laczi saw a waiter fiddling with one while having having a coffee. He immediately traced the device to Rubik and arranged a meeting. ‘I felt like giving him some money’, he later recalled. ‘He looked like a beggar. He was terribly dressed, and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But I knew I had a genius on my hands. I told him we could sell millions.’
The following day, Tibor went to the state trading company to seek permission to market the Cube in the West. Then he took it to the Nuremberg toy fair and wandered around playing with it. Here he bumped into British toy expert Tom Kremer, who was entranced, and subsequently ordered a million. Before long, Rubik had become the Eastern Bloc’s first self-made millionaire.
Since 1977, over 100 million Cubes have been sold worldwide. Rubik has since invented other mind-bending puzzles, including the Snake, the Triamid, the Soma Cube and Magic Rings, but none has captured the world’s imagination in the same way as the device that drove so many of us demented during the 80s.-
What do you give a country for its 100th birthday? When the US reached its centenary in 1876, France decided that the obvious gift was a 151-foot/46.5-metre copper statue. The young French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi was commissioned to design the 225-tonne figure. According to legend, he based the face on his mother’s and the body on that of a prostitute. It was left to the Americans to build a suitable pedestal.
As a result of fund shortages on both sides of the Atlantic, the project overran considerably. ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’ was finally unveiled, 10 years late, on Bedloe’s Island in New York harbour on 15 October 1886.
Bartholdi was shrewd enough to secure a US design patent for his iconic creation (D11023, registered 18 February 1879). -
The following sounds are registered as trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office:
1. The NBC Chimes – the world’s first registered soundmark, consisting of the notes G, E and C sounded in sequence in the key of C. The chimes pay tribute to the General Electric Company, one of the founders of NBC.
2. Sweet Georgia Brown – registered as a trademark of the Harlem Globetrotters
3. The MGM Lion Roar
4. Nine bars of primarily musical chords in the key of B Flat – Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
5. The spoken term ‘Cha-Ching’ – owned by Rally’s Hamburgers, Inc.
6. The words ‘the dreams we share, we’ll always remember, remember with the music of your life’, set to music – radio jingle owned by Al Ham Productions.
And here are a couple from Australia:
1. The sound of the word ‘sproing’ pronounced such that there is initially a rise in pitch at the ‘oi’ sound, which is then substantially elongated and pronounced with vibrato on the ‘oing’ portion of the word, so as to imitate the sound of a spring reverberating on metal – owned by Pacific Brands Clothing Pty Ltd, manufacturers of floor coverings and underlay.
2. ‘Yahoo’, sung in a yodelling style – owned by Yahoo, Inc. (Delaware). -
On 5 March 1960, Alberto Gutierrez took one of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century. The occasion was a memorial service in Havana for crew members of a Belgian arms cargo ship killed in an attack for which Cuba blamed counter-revolutionary forces aided by the US. The subject was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
Forty years later, Gutierrez, who goes by the professional name Alberta Korda, was surprised and furious to see his picture of Che in an advertisement for Smirnoff Vodka. ‘To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka is a slur on his name and memory,’ he declared. ‘He never drank himself, he was not a drunk and drink should not be associated with his immortal memory.’ An organisation describing itself as the Cuba Solidarity Campaign filed a claim on his behalf at the High Court in London. It accused UK advertising agency Lowe Lintas and picture agency Rex Features of trivialising the photo’s historical significance by combining it with a hammer and sickle motif with a chilli pepper substituted for the sickle. In 2000, Gutierrez/Korda accepted a substantial out of court settlement. - In 1976, Bright Tunes Music Corp sued ex-Beatle George Harrison, alleging that his song My Sweet Lord (1970) infringed the copyright of The Chiffons’ 1963 hit He’s So Fine. Although the two songs were very different in feel, Harrison’s being a hymn of praise to the Hindu god Krishna and The Chiffon’s to a hunky US schoolboy, the resemblance was difficult to deny. Harrison claimed that he had not knowingly appropriated the melody in question, but although the court accepted this, it was deemed irrelevant. ‘[My Sweet Lord] is, under the law, infringement of copyright and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished’, was the landmark ruling.
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Monopoly, the board game invented by Charles B Darrow in 1933 gave the inventor a licence to print money. Parker Brothers purchased the rights a couple of years later, and the toy manufacturer now prints about $50 billion in Monopoly money every year, compared to the £70 billion or so real cash printed by the US Bureau of Printing and Engraving.
Parker Brothers claims to have sold 200 million Monopoly sets during the game’s 70-year history. On the basis that each US version contains $15,140, this implies a total print run of more than three trillion dollars. -
The name may have a modern ring to it, but even if we ignore the fact that the Ancient Greeks were throwing spinning discs at the Olympics well over two thousand years ago, the Frisbee turns out to have been around for longer than you might think.
Back in the late nineteenth century, college students at Yale and other New England universities took to playing catch with pie tins made by the Frisbie Baking Company, based nearby in Bridgeport, Connecticut. To alert their fellows of the imminent risk of decapitation, the students would shout out the name of the product as it sailed through the air.
They were still doing this in 1948 when Walter Morrison and Warren Franscioni created a plastic version called the Pluto Platter and started selling it at country fairs. The toy fitted in perfectly with America’s growing fascination with UFOs. In 1955, Morrison and Franscioni sold their company to Arthur ‘Spud’ Melin and Richard Knerr, the inventors of the Hula Hoop. Three years later, the new owners renamed the product the Frisbee in homage to its roots. By the time they sold their Wham-O company to Mattel, sales had exceeded 100 million units. The Black and the White (and the Chutzpah)
Stendhal (born Marie Henri Beyle), the great French author of The Red and the Black, once wrote a book entitled The Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio under the pseudonym ‘Bombet’. It later emerged that he had ‘borrowed’ material from two biographies and a eulogy. Far from owning up, Stendhal mounted a vigorous defence of the integrity of the work, writing numerous letters to the press signed ‘Bombet Junior’.Celebrity Inventors: Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson is the co-inventor of a ‘method and means for creating an anti-gravity illusion’. The secret is a specially designed pair of shoes that attach to the stage, allowing the wearer to ‘lean forward beyond his center of gravity’. The patent was issued in 1993.-
The title of oldest trademark in the UK is held by Bass Breweries, whose distinctive red triangle motif is number one in the national trademark registry. It also features in Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergeres (1882).
Crosse and Blackwell’s logo has been in use since 1706, but the company didn’t register it as a trademark until 1925. Accidental inventions: modern fingerprinting
Although the science of fingerprinting began with the work of Francis Galton in the nineteenth century, detectives still had trouble locating the tell-tale marks. Then, in 1982, some researchers at the US Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory in Japan cracked a fish tank. When they patched it together with superglue (cyanoacrylate), they noticed the fingerprints on the glass standing out in proud relief. The fumes from the glue had condensed on oils in the prints, rendering them highly visible. Cyanoacrylate is now an important weapon in the forensic scientist’s armoury.- Half way into 2004, Agenda Inc, a San Francisco marketing firm, reported on the use of brand names in the lyrics of Billboard Top 20 songs over the previous six months. The company noted that there had been 645 instances in the year to date compared with 643 in the same period in 2003. Brands benefiting from the most references were Cadillac (41 mentions), with Hennessy in second place on 39 and Gucci and Rolls Royce tying for third with 26 each. There were also first appearances for Geico and the Bank of America.
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The Intellectual Property law of the old Soviet Union was based on the principle that the role of artists and authors was to enshrine the life and ideas of a socialist society. The publication and dissemination of works was exclusively controlled by the state, and no copyright fees were payable for works broadcast through the mass media. But
other public performances were subject to compulsory licences, and these gave authors the right to equitable remuneration. -
Often erroneously believed to have been developed as part of the American Space programme, Velcro was actually invented in 1948 by a Swiss engineer who had just been walking his dog. When George de Mestral got home, he noticed that both he and his pet were covered in burrs (the seed-sacs of plants that typically spread themselves by hitching rides on the fur of passing animals). Suddenly an idea struck him. Ignoring the dog, he plucked one of the offending items from his cloth jacket and raced to his microscope. Under magnification, the infuriating secret of the burr was revealed. It was covered with hooked strands, and these, he realised, would inevitably cling to the coat of a beast that rubbed up against it. In the case of his jacket, Mistral reasoned that the hooks formed an even firmer bond by slotting into tiny loops in the fabric.
Mistral knew at once that the burr principle could be used to develop a revolutionary fastening device, but it took him several years to perfect his invention. The main difficulty was getting the ‘loop’ side of the fastener right (the ‘hook’ side was more straightforward). The solution turned out to be to sew the loops from nylon under infra-red light.
In 1951, Mistral applied for a Swiss patent for an early version of his fastening system. He christened it ‘Velcro’ (the word is a combination of ‘crochet’ and ‘velour’) and opened his first factory the following year. In 1955, he obtained a US patent for his invention, and two years later Velcro went into production in Manchester, New Hampshire. Before long, the company was selling 60 million yards per annum. Looking at plants can pay. -
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Boffin Alec Guinness threatens the future of manufacturing by inventing an indestructible material.
The Water Engine (1992)
An inventor comes up with the solution to human energy needs but encounters ruthless opposition from vested business interests.
Men in Black (1997)
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are alien-chasers, working for a secretive and immensely wealthy NGO. The organisation gets its money from patents for microwave ovens, Velcro and liposuction machines, which Jones reveals were confiscated from extraterrestrial invaders. Brian Lara bats for the wrong jeans
In June 1994, the West Indian cricketer Brian Lara made a world record 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham. This caused consternation in the jeans world. Lara had a sponsorship deal with Joe Bloggs Jeans, but had inadvertently given a great boost to a rival company by publicising the number associated with its most famous product (Levi’s 501).
Neither manufacturer was exactly delighted. Bloggs couldn’t bring out a ‘501’ jean and Levi Strauss couldn’t sign up the player to exploit his achievement. Lara’s agents were left to rue the fact that their client hadn’t scored one run more or fewer – the marketing possibilities would have been endless. Fortunately, Lara had made a test record 375 for the West Indies against England two months earlier and would go onto break it with a score of 400 just 10 years later, so he still provided them with commercially valuable numbers.-
Ask nine out of 10 parents in the childcare aisle of a modern supermarket, who invented the disposable nappy (or diaper), and chances are, they will give the same answer: Pampers? But although it was Pampers-producer Procter & Gamble who patented the modern nappy – launching it to the world with great aplomb in 1961 – the original designer was, in fact, Marion Donovan, a mother from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
When Donovan first picked up the challenge in 1946, the cloth nappy, made of heavy fabric that needed to be secured with safety pins, had already been in mass production since the late 1800s. Its drawbacks were obvious to any mother of the time: it wasn’t waterproof and was burdensome to wash and dry between use.
Deciding to take action, Donovan set about designing a waterproof version that could not only reduce leakage but also be mass-produced. The result was a waterproof nappy known as the ‘boater’, which was launched to instant success in New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue store in 1949. Fashioned by Donovan out of a series of cut-up shower curtains, shaped into plastic ‘envelopes’, and stuffed with absorbent paper, the reusable leakproof diaper took its name from one exciting innovation: it helped babies to ‘stay afloat’ by reducing leakage.
However, it wasn’t all plain sailing. Her attempt at a completely ’disposable’ paper nappy (rather than a waterproof one which needed washing) was laughed out of offices throughout New York. Choosing to drop the design and concentrate on her original waterproof product instead, Donovan patented and mass-produced the ‘boater’ in 1951 – later selling both the company and the patent to the children’s clothing manufacturer Keko corporation for US$1 million.
It was another 10 years before Vic Mills of Procter & Gamble picked up Donovan’s (unpatented) disposable paper design and developed it into the first fully-disposable nappy. Once their improvements were patented, the company launched the affordable modern disposable nappy in 1961, later releasing it to an international audience in the early 1970s.
Today’s disposable nappies – tailored for age, shaped for boys or girls, easy to affix, superabsorbent, leakproof and comfortable thanks to elastic leg holes and waists – are a far cry from Procter & Gamble’s early designs: back then the nappies were thick and unwieldy, were only 90% leak-proof, and needed to be secured by strong sticky tape if they were to work (the lateral fastenings were added much later in the 1970s). Competition between Procter & Gamble and Kimberley-Clark (the producers of Huggies), however, ensured numerous innovations, as manufacturers sought to improve on their nappy designs and reduce their pricing almost as soon as they had hit the supermarket shelf.
But cloth nappies have also come a long way since the original squares with safety pins. Cost issues and environmental awareness have taken their toll on nappy sales with many new parents and environmental campaigning bodies currently promoting a switch back to cotton from disposable nappies, which cannot be recycled. Disposable producers, however, are already rising to meet the challenge, and with the first biodegradable versions already in our shops, it looks as if a new revolution for the disposable diaper is on its way. Who invented the 'black box' for use in airplanes?
When a number of the world’s first jetpowered airliners, the famous De Havilland DH-106 Comet, began inexplicably falling out of the sky in 1953, it looked like the age of commercial jet travel would stall before it even took off. Engineers and scientists pondered on what lay behind the crashes, but there were few clues and no witnesses or survivors.
In Australia, Dr David Warren, a chemist focusing on aircraft fuel, was asked to look into the mystery. Based at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne, Warren’s role was to consider whether fuel explosion could be responsible. However, his interest in plane crashes extended beyond chemistry, for he had lost his father in an unexplained plane crash when he was only nine.
During discussions, it became clear to Warren that they needed more evidence. He wondered if the flight crew could have known what was wrong, and whether it could have been revealed in their conversations prior to the crash. If their voices could have been recorded with a miniature recorder and protected to survive the crash, it might have yielded vital clues. Warren developed his idea into a report, which was distributed to aircraft authorities. Little interest was shown, so in 1958, he constructed a prototype.
Known as the ARL Flight Memory Unit, it was capable of recording four hours of cockpit conversation and instrument readings. Fully automatic, it was designed to operate the whole time the plane was in flight. Eight channels of flight data recorded airspeed, altitude, engine speed and temperature, every two seconds. To protect it from physical impact, the device was contained in a titanium box.
The recorder was offered to potential users, but the Australian air industry was less than impressed. The Department of Civil Aviation even stated: ‘Dr Warren’s invention has no immediate significance in Civil Aviation.’ The Royal Australian Air Force said: ‘We do not need your device…opinion is it would produce more expletives than explanations.’ The Pilot’s Association was indignant; they felt recording their conversations would be like ‘a spy flying alongside’.
In the UK, Warren’s invention was taken more seriously by the Air Registration Board, who decided that the fitting of recorders would become mandatory. The name ‘black box’ was coined by a journalist at a media briefing and has stuck, even though black boxes are actually bright orange. Warren and a team of four developed a pre-production prototype, with more sophisticated electronics and data storage for 24 readings per second. Warren’s prototype led to the first commercially manufactured flight-recorder, the ‘Red Egg’, which was produced by the British firm S Davall & Son.
In 1961, Australia suffered another major unexplained aircraft accident. The presiding judge at the accident’s inquiry ordered black boxes be compulsory fittings in civil aircraft. But recognition of the inventor’s contribution to air safety took a long time in coming. It wasn’t until 2002 that Dr David Warren’s contribution was officially acknowledged in the 2002 Australia Day Honors List, for ‘service to the aviation industry, particularly through the early conceptual work and prototype development of the black box flight data recorder’.Who invented the remote control?
The invention of the remote control all began when Eugene McDonald Jr, founder-president of US manufacturers Zenith, decided viewers would appreciate being able to ‘tune out annoying commercials’. We have a lot to thank Eugene for!
Zenith’s first remote, dubbed the ‘Lazy Bones’ was produced in 1950. Viewers could turn the television on and off, and switch channels, but unfortunately, it was connected to the television by a long cable; heading to the kitchen to replenish supplies was somewhat hazardous.
To rectify this problem in 1955, the company brought out the Flash-Matic a remote which flashed beams of light at photocells on each corner of the television cabinet. This remote could adjust the volume too. But unfortunately, the photocells reacted to sunlight, and if the sun shone on the TV, the tuner could start rotating. Clearly some advances were needed. Engineers experimented with radio signal remotes next, but found them so effective they could change the channel on a neighbour’s television.
A Zenith engineer, Robert Adler, came up with a solution that used ultra-sonic technology (which humans cannot hear) rather than light to communicate between the remote and the set. Pressing a button on the remote depressed one of four aluminium rods. Each rod emitted different sounds, and the television would interpret each of these as channel-up or down; sound up or down; and power on or off. A button could be squeezed to depress a rod towards a spring, which enabled it to rise again. Each rod was called a ‘vibrator element’ which varied in length so emitting different noises. A miniature hammer struck home to create a sound, rather like a tuning fork. The patent also explained the electrical circuits needed by the television to interpret the sounds correctly. Adler’s invention had two advantages over modern remotes: it needed no batteries and did not have to be pointed at the television.
Zenith patented Adler’s invention in 1956 and marketed it the same year as the Space Command 400, a futuristic name that brought the technology of James Bond into the living room. The cost of incorporating the technology added US$100 or about 30% to the cost of televisions, and of course the remote only worked with Zenith televisions.
Despite this, consumers warmed to the idea. For, as the patent stated: ‘It is highly desirable to provide a system to regulate the receiver operation without requiring the observer to leave the normal viewing position.’ But even this technology had its drawbacks. Sometimes ultrasonic sounds could trigger changes in the television, and the high frequencies it used to communicate with the television could cause dogs in the neighbourhood to howl.
The development of television knobs, from old style tuners that had to be turned manually to electronic controls, eased the way for future remote controls in the 1980s. There have been several advances in the remote’s technology, from transistor and infrared-light emitting diodes to digital technology.
These remotes are far more sophisticated than the Space Command and are fast penetrating our home life. A man can no longer confidently command the evening’s entertainment with a remote thanks to a bewildering variety of remotes now piling up in front of home entertainment systems. There are now remotes for almost every home activity. Meanwhile, doctors warn about the harmful effects of the ‘remote control’ lifestyle. Could rising obesity levels see the end to the remote control? Or will there be remotes for our walking machines? Only time will tell.