The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-11-14
ISOME FREAK
INVENTORS
Various Tomfool Papers
In Patent Office
Records.


have to look over SO many tomfool ap-
| pIications for patents nowadays as IN
former years, but the funny practitioners
of patent law still favor us with oc-
casional farcical applications" said
principal examiner in the Patent Once
esThese applications are always IN reg
ulation official form, and the speciflca-
tons describe all sorts of nonsensical
| contrivances and contraptions.
"The chaps who send them in are not
insane. They are usually briehess young
patent attorneys, with nothing much on
| hand except time.
"Not long ago one of these applica-
tions drifted in covering claims for an
attachable tail for stump tailed dogs.
The application was drawn up with
great elaboration and accompanied by
numerous drawings that must have cost
the expenditure of considerable time
and effort 1t was plainly the work of
very idle young attorney.
sThe specifications recited the diff
Guilty which short tailed dogs are al
legged to experience in turning sharp
corners, and also dwelt feelingly upon
the obvious humiliation with which
short tailed dogs regard their abbreviat-
ed caudal appendages, especially when
they come into social contact with other
dogs better fixed out in that respect.
Then the specifications described the at
tachable tail at great length, and the
application wound UP with numerous
serious and technically worded claims
for the priority of the invention.
This, of course, is all fun, or at any
rate it means to be fun. But many of
the bona hde applications for patents are
more genuinely funny than the farcical
applications Some of the inventions
upon which patents have actually been
issued are little less amusing
"a man need not be sane to get a
United States patent If he submits to
the Patent Office an invention that is
patentable, he gets his patent, and quite |
a few patents have been issued to men
confined in insane asylums.
There is a never ending stream of |
applications for freak patents. Not long
ago CHICAGO man applied for patent |
on an electric hog killing apparatus |
The centraption was SO devised that |
the unsuspectIng hog stuck his head |
through an aperture in an electrically |
wired compartment, closed circuit by I
butting his snout against metal sheet,
and with his head firmly held within
the aperture by a drop clutch apparatus
committed involuntary sui
eide.
Another man from the West applied,
not long ago, for a. patent on an cleo
trical horse. The horse is fashioned
of aluminium, the body completely COW
cred with the hide of a deceased horse,
and in every respect the animal is made
to look as natural as life, even being
provided with movable eyeballs,
The electrical horse is intended to
run with the natural movements of
4 sure enough live horse, and, according |
to the applicant, is capable of doing a
mile minute. Just cantering," as he
states. The applicant doesn't state what
he's going to do with his electrical
horse after he gets his patent-suppos-
ing he gets it-but it is presumed that
ne rneditates entering his imitation
runner as ringer in races with honest
live thoroughbreds.
A few years ago a queer genius in
New England applied for a patent on
an improved tombstone, a metal affair
involving a lot of odd kinks and de-
signed to resist wind and weather for
many thousands of years. The appli-
cant has died since filing his application
and one of his tonbstones adorns his
own resting place in a small Massachu-
sets village, with the following inscrip-
ton wrought on the face of it:
Here lies Wendell, an inventor by
trade,
And this, you will see, is an invention
he made