On June 7, 2005, David P. Coughlin received U.S. Patent No. 6,901,925 on a Fireplace with Waterfall:
While it is not clear whether Mr. Coughlin had any success before his patent expired, the idea of mixing fire and water is a popular one with inventors:
On June 6, 1995, Peter and John Kockelman et al., received U.S. Patent No. 5,421,783 on a Human Slingshot Machine.
While a human slingshot is not for everyone, it is considerably safer than the human cross bow from U.S. Patent No. 562448:
I suppose that that is the march of progress (or perhaps OSHA).
On June 5, 1945, Frank W. Schwinn received U.S. Patent No. D141505 on a Tandem Bicycle:
Frank W. Schwinn was the son of Ignaz Schwinn, who founded the Schwinn bicycle company in 1895, Frank joined the company around 1918, taking over leadership of the company during the Great Depression, and running the company until his death in 1963.
Frank’s design was not the first tandem bicycles — which became popular in the 1880’s, and boomed in the 1890’s after Harry Dacre’s 1892 song “Daisy Bell” (The Bicycle Built for Two song). Nor was Frank’s design the first Schwin tandem bicycle — his father Ignaz had been manufacturing Tandem bicycles since the 1890’s. In fact, Frank’s design may never have been produced. in the 1940’s, Schwinn Tandem’s had a very different chain guard, as shown in this advertisement in the 1948 catalog featuring comedian Bob Hope:
Even if this design was never commercialized, Frank W. Scwhinn made numerous contributions to the design and manufacture of bicycles in a career spanning 5 decades, ending in his death in 1963, when the third generation of Schwinn, Frank V. Schwinn took over the company.
In Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, 608 U.S. ____ (2026), the Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit, holding that Amarin failed to state a claim for active inducement of its patents on Vascepa.
The Court began by identifying the three requirements of an inducement claim: (1) direct infringement by a third party; (2) the inducer’s knowledge that the induced acts constitute infringement; and (3) the inducer must take active steps to encourage direct infringement.
Hikma submitted an ANDA to market Vascepa for severe hypertriglyceridemia (the SH indication), and succeeded in invalidating Hikma’s patent on the treatment of severe hypertriglyceridemia. In the meantime, the FDA approved Vascepa for treating hypertriglyceridemia in patients already on statins (the CV indication) and Amarin obtained two new method of use patents for the CV indication. Hikma went forward preparing to mark Vascepa adopting a skinny label only referencing the now-unpatented SH indication, preparing a leaflet that its drug was for “people who have heart (cardiovascular) disease”; and describing its product as “therapeuticallly equivalent to Cascepa, and listing its therapeutic category broadly as “hyperglyceridemia”; and issuing a series of press releases describing its product as “generic Vascepa.”
The Supreme Court said that inducement must involve the taking of affirmative, as opposed to passive, steps to bring about the desired result of patent infringement. To avoid interfering with “regular commerce” ordinary acts incident to product distribution are insufficient to support liability. The Supreme Court found that Hikma’s statements came up short.
Of all of Hikma’s statements, the press releases calling their product generic Vascepa see the most culpable, since the product was not a replacement for all indications., However the Supreme Court dismissed this, explaining that it was to truthfully describe a generic drug as an “equivalent” to the brand-name comparator. The court declined to “put generic manufacturers between a rock and a hard place by turning adherence to the law and industry standards into building blocks for illegal conduct.”
The Supreme Court explained the law requires active not passive inducement, so the question is not merely whether the statement could be plausibly understood to induce infringement, but whether they plausibly understood to induce infringement. Viewed in that light, the Supreme Court found Hikma’s statements to be implausibly roundabout ways to induce medical providers to infringe.
It would seem that if Amarin gave different names to the formulation for different indications — even something as simple as Vascepa-SH and Vascepa-CV would have prevented Hikma from referring to its product as generic Vascepa, instead having to use “generic Vascepa-SH” more clearly indicated that it is not approved for the Vascepa-CV indication.
On April 22, 1924, U.S. Patent No. 1,490,987 issued to Harry E. Soref on a lock casing:
Soref’s innovation was making the lock body from a plurality of steel laminations secured together with rivets — a construction still widely used 102 years later.
Soref was born in 1887 Bilozirka, Ukraine, and emigrated to the U.S. where he worked as a lock smith. When he was unable to find a taker for his lock design, he co-founded the Master Lock company with two friends — Samuel Stahl and Phillip E. Yolles, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to build his locks. Mr. Soref held more than eighty patents for locks and lock-making machinery.
He died in 1957 in Phoenix, Arizona, aged 70.
On April 21, 1857, U.S. Patent No. 17082 issued to Alexander Douglas on a Bustle:
While necessity may be the mother of invention, the ‘082 patent is proof that necessity is not always, the mother of invention.
The earliest U.S. patent reference to a bustle was U.S. Patent No. 4897, issued December 17, 1846, predating Douglas’ invention by nearly 11 years. Douglas’ patent was the start of a frenzy as inventors hustled to the Patent Office invention with their bustles, and 15 more bustle patents issued in the next two years: U.S. Patent Nos. 17,602, 20,263, 20,681, 20,801, 20,865, 21479, 21,806, 22,124, 22,133, 22,197, 22,242, 22,426, 22,532, 22,875 and 23,681. While inventors’ interest in bustles died down before the end of the 19th century, it has never completely gone away, with U.S. Patent No. 12582183 issuing on March 24, 2026, on a Bustle Device to Be Received Under Garments.
On March 14, 1899, U.S. Patent No. 621195 issued to Ferdinand Graf Zeppelin on a navigable balloon:
Ferdinand Graf Zeppeli was born July 8, 1838, he was a Count and general. He served as an official observer with the Union Army during the U.S Civil War, visiting the balloon camp of Thaddeus Lowe, and then made his first ascent in a balloon in St. Paul with former Army balloonist John Steiner, which was the inspiration of his later interest in aeronautics. Zeppelin’s ideas for large airships were first recorded in a March 25, 1874, diary entry.
After resigning from the Army in 1891, at the age of 52, Zeppelin devoted himself to designing an air ship. He patented the design in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899. After initial succes, the name Zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all forms of rigid airships. Zeppelin also created the world’s first commercial airline, using his air ships.
On March 7, 1865, U.S. Patent No. 10609 issued to Charles Miller
Miller’s sewing machine which, was able to automatically make buttonholes, whip stitches, and herringbone stitches, was an improvement of his earlier patented machine (U.S. Patent No. 9139), the model of which survives in the National Museum of American History:
On March 2, 1926, U.S. Patent No. No. 1,575,263 issued to Winifred Guglielmi aka Natasha Rambova (born Winifred Shaughnessy in Salt Lake City):
Natasha was a dancer, costume designer, actress, and the second wife of silent screen movie actor RUDOLPH VALENTINO (born Rodolfo Guglielmi).
Valentino first met Rambova while filming Uncharted Seas in 1921. They become friends, and eventually a romantic relationship developed. They married on May 13, 1922, in Mexico, which resulted in Valentino’s arrest for bigamy, since he had not been divorced for a full year, as required by California law at the time. Rambova and Valentino lived separately until they were legally remarried at the Lake County Court House in Crown Point, Indiana on March 14, 1923.
On March 1, 1988, U.S. Patent No. 4,728,061 issue to Caldwell Johnson, Maxime Faget, and David Bergeron on a Spacecraft Operable in Two Alternative Flight Modes.
The patent was owned by Space Industries, Inc., which was formed by one of the co-inventors, Maxime Faget, for the purpose of building a privately owned space station called the Industrial Space Facility (ISF). Faget was a retired chief of engineering and operations at NASA. The company lobbied the United States government to be an anchor tenant in the proposed space station, and the Reagan Administration requested funding from Congress, which was never approved. The company merged with Calspan Corporation, which in turn merged with General Dynamics Corporation,