On November 9, 1842, George Bruce, an American printer, industrialist and inventor, received the first design patent, D1, issued on a typeface:
Since then, more than a million designs for products, or portions of a product, have been protected with a design patent. Most recently U.S. Patent No. 1050666 issued on a cross:
On November 2, 1982, Laul Galley received U.S. Patent No. 4,356,753 on a Musical Electro Magnetic Analog Synthesizer Controlled Rocket Engine. Mr. Galley explained that the effect achieved by the rocket engine output “is similar to that of a pipe organ” and that the pitch can be similarly controlled by “the barrel length and diameter of the rocket engine chamber exhaust structure.”
On November 1, 1881, Edwin Thatcher a computing engineer for the Keystone Bridge Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received U.S. Patent No. 249,117 on an improved slide rule. Thacher was a graduate of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and spent much of his career designing railway bridges, inventing his slide rule to assist with his calculations.
The slide rule was invented sometime between 1620 and 1630, shortly after John Napier’s publication of the concept of the logarithm. In 1620 Edmund Gunter of Oxford developed a calculating device with a single logarithmic scale. Two years later in 1622 William Oughtred of Cambridge combined two handheld Gunter rules to make a device that is recognizably the modern slide rule.
Edwin Thatcher’s slide rule is notable for its cylindrical form, although his was not the first slide rule of a cylindrical form factor. Thacher’s rule, though it fit on a desk, was equivalent to a conventional slide rule over 59 feet long. It had scales for multiplication and division and another scale, with divisions twice as large, for use in finding squares and square roots.
On October 30, 1888, John J. Loud a patent attorney and occasional inventor received U.S. Patent No. 392,046 on one of the first ball point pens.
This pen was not a commercial success, but others soon followed. None were very successful until Laszlo Biro’s ball point pen design, which received U.S. Patent No. 2,390,636 in 1945:
Ss influential was Biro’s design, that 79 years later ball point pens are called “Biros” in many parts of the world. In 1945 Milton Reynolds, an American businessman from Chicago, visited Argentina where Biros were being manufactured and bought some of Bíró’s pens. Reynolds returned to the U.S., and changing the design slightly to avoid Biro’s patent, and the “Reynold’s Rocket” went on sale at Gimbels on October 29, 1945. Initial sales were brisque, but ink leaks soon quelled the popularity of the pen.
The next big entrant on the ball point pen market was the Frawley Corporation, whose pen received U.S. Patent No. 2,734,484 on February 14, 1956:
The king of ball point pens, at least in the U.S., was Marcel Louis Michel Antoine Bich, who Bic pens were synonymous with ball point pens in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Bich received two design patents on ball point pen designs U.S. Patent Nos. D2024527 and D218492:
Bich also saw Biro’s pens in Argentina during World War II, and in 1944, licensed Biro’s design. Between 1949 and 1950, Bich’s design team at Société PPA designed the familiar Bic Crystal, which he launched in Europe in in December 1950,and in 1959 brought the pen to the American Market.
IIn September 2006, the Bic Cristal was named the best selling pen in the world after the 100 billionth was sold.
On October 29, 1872, James A. Risdon received U.S. Patent 132,602 on an improved windmill entitled Wind-wheel:
Until the 1870’s windmills were made of wood, the only metal being bolts and other small parts. Risdon’s “Iron Turbine” was the first all metal windwill, and appeared on the market in 1876. A few years later,
Henry H. Beville, patented (U.S. Patent No. 226265) another all-metal design in 1880:
Beville was a traveling salesman for a farm implement company in Indiana. He licensed the “Iron Duke” for manufacture and sale, making a substantial profit on his invention.
On October 28, 2003, Mason McMullin, Robert Bell, and Mark See obtained U,S, Patent No. 6,637,447 on the BEERBRELLA:
This was not the first attempt to shade a beverage. U.S. Patent No. 5,058,757 is on a Beverage Insulator with Retractable Shader:
U.S. Patent No. 5,115,939 protects a Insulated Beverage Container that features an umbrella:
U.S. Patent No. 5,186,196 protects a Beverage Shader with a pivoting umbrella:
Oon October 27, 1936, Gustav Bucky and Albert Einstein (yes, THAT Albert Einstein) received U.S. Patent No. 2,058,562 on a Light Intensity Self Adjusting Camera:
This was not Albert’s first experience with patents. In addition to being a patent examiner in the Swiss Patent Office (imagine trying to convince him that some invention was not obvious), he earlier patented a refrigeration system (U.S. Patent No. 1,781,541, with Leo Szilard:
On October 26, 1909, Frank G. Daggett and Edward G. Slinghart received U.S. Patent No. 938125 on a Hair Growing Device:
The patent explains “[a]s is well known, a fruitful source of loss of hair is the lack of ventilation or circulation of air within hats. The warmth of the head soon heats
the air within the hat and the presence of this warm air in contact with the scalp
causes the hair to lose its vitality and to fall out.”
The device comprises comprises “a receptacle having perforations therein and provided with means for attaching the receptacle to the body or crown of the hat, together with a sack or container for material in a dry or powdered form capable, when heated or moistened of evolving oxygen.” “In operation, the warmth and moisture of the head heats and moistens the air confined within the hat and gradually evolves oxygen from the ingredients contained within the sack.”
On October 25, 1966, U.S. Patent No. 3,280,710 issued to James O. Kuhn on a Corn Popper.
This corn popper was specially adapted for use with the Easy-Bake Oven that Kuhn also invented:
U.S. Patent No. 3,368,063 issued to Kuhn on February 6, 1968, on the Easy Bake Oven itself.
Kenner introduced the Easy Bake Oven on November 4, 1963. Originally available in yellow or turquoise, and powered by two 100 watt lightbulbs. The toy has morphed considerably over the years, with chaging designs and colors. The lightbulb heat source was eliminated in 2011, on fears that incadescent bulbs would become unavailable. The current version of the Easy Bake Oven, sold by Hasbro, resembles a microwave.
The Easy Bake Oven was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2006
In Nextstep, Inc., v. Comcast Cable Communications, LLC, [2022-1815, 2022-2005, 2022-2113](October 24, 2024), the Federal Circuit affirmed the construction of the claim term VoIP, and the district’s court’s grant of judgment as a matter of law that there was no infringement under the doctrine of equivalents.
The appeal involved U.S. Patent No. 8,280,009 directed to a “digital butler” that controls consumer electronics based on audio data, which the jury found was not literally infringed, but was infringed under the doctrine of equivalents. However, the district court set aside the jury verdict and granted judgment of non-infringement as a matter of law, finding the evidentiary record inadequate to support infringement under the doctrine of equivalents. The district court primarily reasoned that the testimony of NexStep’s expert, Dr. Ted Selker, was too conclusory to sustain the verdict. Describing portions of Dr. Selker’s testimony as “word salad,” the district court concluded that Dr. Selker’s testimony lacked the specificity and analysis required by Federal Circuit precedent. Among other things, the district court concluded that Dr. Selker failed to identify specific components in the accused products and failed to offer a reasoned basis for concluding that those specific components were equivalent to the relevant claim limitations.
At trial, the parties’ dispute focused heavily on the “single action” limitation in the claims. Comcast argued that the multiple actions—the several user button presses— required as a predicate to using any of the three troubleshooting tools meant that the My Account App did not infringe. NexStep focused its infringement theory on the view that a series of steps, when taken together, can be appropriately described as a single action. The jury returned a verdict of no literal infringement, rejecting NexStep’s view that the series of user steps needed for each of the accused tools amounted to “a single action”) but found infringement under the doctrine of equivalents.
The Federal Circuit noted that patentees typically seek to prove infringement under the doctrine of equivalents in one of two ways. One way, often referred to as the function-way-result test, asks “whether the accused product performs ‘substantially the same function in substantially the same way to obtain the same result.’” The other way asks whether “differences between the claimed invention and the accused device or process are ‘insubstantial.’” However the test is phrased, courts must employ “special vigilance” to avoid overbroad applications of the doctrine of equivalents, because when applied to broadly, the
doctrine of equivalents conflicts with the definitional and public-notice functions of the statutory claiming requirement. Thus, the Federal Circuit has imposed specific evidentiary requirements necessary to prove infringement under the doctrine of equivalents: First, proof under the doctrine of equivalents must be on a limitation-by-limitation basis. Second, the evidence of equivalents must be from the perspective of someone skilled in the art, for example through testimony of experts or others versed in the technology; by documents, including texts and treatises; and, of course, by the disclosures of the prior art. Third, specificity and completeness of proof is crucial, there must be particularized testimony and linking argument as to the insubstantiality of the differences between the claimed invention and the accused device.
After quoting a little more than a page of testimony, which it said was the only testimony it was aware of in which NexStep asserted infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, the Federal Circuit said that NexStep had to prove—with particularized testimony and linking argument—that the elements of the accused arrangement were substantially the same as the elements of the claimed arrangement. The Federal Circuit noted that Dr. Selker’s testimony never identified a particular element or elements in the My Account App as being equivalent to the “single action” limitation. The Federal Circuit concluded that Dr. Selker’s testimony simply does
not include a particularized identification of what elements in the accused device are equivalent to the claimed limitation. The Federal Circuit said that the failure to explicitly identify the alleged equivalent is fatal to NexStep’s doctrine of equivalents theory.