The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-03-20

q number of women who have become

a number of women who have become
wealthy through their patents.
On the whole, however, the vast proper
ton of patents are useless. We have
thousands of ideas offered at the patent
office every year which are of the craziest
possible character. There ere numbers OF
applications for patents on perpetual mo-
ton. We get rid of these by asking the
applicant to give us working model Of
his invention. This, so far, no one has
been able to give US, and the probability
is that no one will ever do it.
Among. our curiosities are many
medical inventions. One is q tape
worm trap. 1t is a little gold capsule
about big enough to contain two grains
of quinine. 1t has little ring in the end
of it, and to this ring is fastened silk
string. 1t is made SO it can be pulled
apart and baited, and it works with
spring like a saw-tooth rat-trap. The man
who has a tapeworm starves himself for
several days in order to make his tape
worm hungry, then bats his trap and
swallows it, holding tightly to the string.
When the tapeworm makes for the bait
the trap goes off and the man hauls him
out hand over hand. The doctor who
patented this trap said the machine was
practicable, and that he had caught
numerous tapeworms with it. One
OF the Oldest curiosities is can
non pillow for use of pioneer when
attacked by Indians. The cannon is at the
end of the pillow and is ready for use at all
times. Another funny thing is sheet
iron cat, which is painted with phos-
phorus, shines like fire. and scares all the
other cats off the roof. There are hun
dreds of queer patent gravestoEes and
patent collins, and there are lots of patents
to prevent grave robberies. There are
canes which you can use as spittoons, UNI
brellas which you can turn into chairs,
,oh II l.
rooster right off the field if he attempts to
scratch the crops when he has them on.
There are, in short, as many impracticable
inventions proportionately among those
of the patent office as you will find i'm
practical men in our practical everyday
life.
The patent Office is good school for the
study of human nature and human char
acter. In it you find represented every
description of the human mind, and in its
models and in its drawings are stored up
the mental lives of hundreds of thou
sands of souls. Every patent granted rep
resents a dozen which have been rejected,
and the half-million, in round numbers,
inventions recorded in the patent office
represents thousands of stories stranger
than the widest visions of fiction.
Could they speak, they would tell
stories full of pathos. They would
give dreams wilder than the
stories OF the ARABIAN Nights, ana you
would find the facts connected with them
more pathetic than the saddest incidents
of the novels of Dickens or of the crimes
and injustice recorded in the works of
Charles Reade. The patents represent a
few millionaires and tens of thousands of
paupers. They represent some happiness
and much misery. Over some of them
men have worried themselves into the in
sane asylums of the country, and over
others thew have studied and worked I'M
til hope deferred has made their heart
sick, and they have died without seeing
the success which afterward came out of
their great IDEAS