26Vader Respirator Patent
The sound of Darth Vader mask’s respirator function is trademarked in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under Trademark #77419252 and is officially described in the documentation as “The sound of rhythmic mechanical human breathing created by breathing through a scuba tank regulator.”
27. In 1915, Independent filmmakers fled from New Jersey to California, both for the advantageous climate and to get away from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Company, whose heavy-handed demands included the use of Mob thugs to demand payments on cameras, projectors, and the films themselves. Edison’s thugs often destroyed movie sets because he felt that he owned the rights to any and all film made since he filed the first patent for the motion picture camera.
28. Ajay V. Bhatt, an Indian-born American computer architect who led the Intel team that invented the USB (Universal Serial Bus), regrets not making it reversible. It would have doubled the cost, which was a hard sell at the time, “[b]ut in hindsight, we blew it.” He holds 132 patents and counting.
29. Even though Benjamin Franklin is credited with many popular inventions, he never patented or copyrighted any of them. He believed that they should be given freely and that claiming ownership would only cause trouble and “sour one’s Temper and disturb one’s Quiet.”
30. When the leading emergency asthma medication Albuterol’s patent expired, the patent-holding pharmaceutical companies lobbied to have their own inhalers banned based on environmental issues, allowing them to file a new patent, and continue to monopolize the market.
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31Laminated Safety Glass
Laminated safety glass was invented by chemist Édouard Bénédictus after a lab accident in 1903. A glass flask coated with the plastic cellulose nitrate was dropped, shattering but not breaking into pieces. In 1909, he filed a patent after he heard of a car accident causing injury by glass debris.
32. Abraham Lincoln, prior to becoming President, was an avid boater and traveled on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers where his boat often got stuck on sandbars. In 1849 Lincoln invented a method for buoying vessels over shoals, making him the first and only U.S. president to receive a patent.
33. In 1945, a school dropout and self-taught electrical engineer named Percy Spencer was working at Ratheon. He stepped in front of a magnetron, a device that powers radars. He noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Later that year, he filed a patent for the first microwave oven.
34. The patent for toilet paper (filed in 1891) features an illustration that would imply that the correct way a roll should be placed would be so that the paper hangs over, and not under.
35. Aircraft inventor Alberto Santos-Dumont believed air travel would bring peace to the world so he filed no patents and offered his designs free yet burned all his designs when he was accused of being a German spy during World War 2 and committed suicide after seeing aircrafts being used in warfare in the 1930s.
