The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
yegg: (noun) a burglar or safecracker. The yegg stole all our eggs, as well as the crackers we kept in the safe.
Everyday History
Those of us here at the Press unanimously agree that the most ridiculous patent ever granted was “The Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force,” also known as the Blonsky Device. It was invented by the married couple of George and Charlotte Blonsky and patented on November 9, 1965. Mind you, they were a couple who never had any children. How it was supposed to work was a pregnant woman who was about to deliver would be strapped down to a centrifuge that could reach up to 8 Gs, which was supposed to push the baby out to be caught in a net between the mother’s legs. A bell would ring announcing the birth. The device was never built or used, but it did win an Ig Nobel prize in 1999.
There have been a lot of really silly patents. A close runner up to the Blonsky Device was The Rodent Blaster, which was issued to a guy named James Alexander Williams on December 26, 1882. A loaded handgun (and, no, I’m not making this up) was fitted into a mechanism, and when a mouse or other unfortunate critter stepped onto a treadle plate, the gun went off. An alarm was supposed to sound to let you know the device had been triggered, as if the gun wouldn’t be enough. As far as we know here at the Press, Williams never actually made his Rodent Blaster, though, apparently, many folks since then have.
And an honorable mention goes to the “Fresh-air Breathing Device and Method,” better known as the Toilet Fire Snorkel, which was issued to William O. Holmes in March of 1982. The idea was inspired. If you’re ever trapped in your bathroom and it’s filled with smoke, then you can run a tube down the toilet, past the “P” trap, and then breathe the “fresh” air from the sewer. It featured a charcoal filter, though I’m not sure what it was filtering. Yeah. The thing would work. I suppose that’s why he was granted a patent.
See, here’s the thing. The Patent Office doesn’t care how silly your invention sounds, though the fees and the overall process are probably enough to weed out a lot of the silliness. They also don’t particularly care if an invention is dangerous, illegal, or hazardous. They leave all that to other government agencies. And they don’t care if you ever actually build your “device.” All they need are detailed written instructions and drawings... along with all the other forms and eventually money.
Any invention that you want to be patented must be physically possible to build, meaning it can’t violate the laws of physics or be pure fantasy. For instance, you can’t patent a Time Machine unless you can prove it really works. In that case you may be required to produce a working model before a patent will be granted. Beyond that, there are three main requirements for an invention to be considered for a patent. It must be new, completely different from anything else. It must be useful, doing a real job or solving a real problem. And it must be original, meaning it can’t be something an expert in the field would easily think of. The Blonsky Device, the Rodent Blaster, and the Toilet Snorkel check all the boxes.
To date, the United States Patent and Trade Office has issued over 12,700,000 patents since the first one on July 31, 1790. They issue upwards of 370,000 patents a year. Out of all those, only 5% to 10% are ever turned into a working product. Sure, some folks apply for patents with no intention of doing anything with them. But not many. The vast majority of people who apply for patents do so in hopes of selling or licensing their rights, but very few ever succeed. But don’t let that stop you!
Cartoon of the Week
Flies Under the Radar
Stuff
The History of the Future: The End of Sagging
It was in the summer of 2032 that the dress fashion known as "sagging" came to an abrupt end. As one fashion critic stated, sagging, which featured wearing one’s trousers no higher than somewhere well below the crotch, “was just taken too far.” A group of young men in Detroit began the short-lived fad of “dragging,” which was simply putting only one foot through one’s trousers and then dragging them as one walked. The fad lasted a little over two weeks before others, seemingly all at once, came to the sudden realization of just how fantastically stupid that was. What followed was the equally sudden realization of just how stupid sagging was, as well. And that was followed by what became known as “neo retro anti-sagging,” where the trousers were increasingly worn higher and higher in an effort to prove that the wearers definitely were not sagging, and that anybody whose trousers were worn lower than theirs was considered sagging, and that person was therefore what one fashion pundit described as “dweebified.” Wearing a belt around one’s neck was briefly popular, and surprisingly very few people were asphyxiated. The fad peaked with the adherents wearing their trousers so high that they had to unzip their flies to see. A few purists, who became known as “those assholes who keep running into everything,” refused to peek out of the fly, stating that it was demeaning. The height of one’s trousers suddenly became irrelevant by the spring of 2034, when the craze of church hats – a miniaturized, sanctified steeple that one could wear on one’s head, and thus be in church always – captured the public whim. See Eldridge’s concise history of fashion, How Dumb Can We Get? (Holy Grail Press, 2034)
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