On September 28, 1999, U.S Patent No. 5,960,411, issued to Amazon.com, Inc., on a Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network — the patent on the one-click to purchase:

Amazon sued Barnes & Noble the next month, and was granted a preliminary injunction against Barnes & Noble’s Express Lane service. Barnes & Noble designed around the patent by requiring shoppers to make a second click to confirm their purchase. The lawsuit was settled confidentially in 2002.

In 2000 Amazon.com reportedly licensed the one-click ordering patent to Apple for $1 million.

On May 12, 2006, the USPTO ordered a reexamination of the one-click patent, based on a request filed by Peter Calveley. Nearly 17 months later, on October 9, 2007, the USPTO issued an office action in the reexamination which confirmed the patentability of five of the claims, but rejecting 21 others. In November 2007, Amazon amended the claims and the reexamined and amended patent was allowed. The patent expired on September 11, 2017.

On September 27, 1933, Igor Sikorsky received U.S. Patent No. 1,879,716 on an amphibian aircraft:

Seaplanes generally are powered fixed-wing aircraft capable of taking off from and landing on water. They are usually divided into floatplanes and flying boats. A float plane is, as the name implies, a plane with float. A flying boat is an aircraft where the body of the craft floats. What makes Sikorsky’s aircraft “amphibian” is that it is capable of taking off from and landing on both land and water.

Glenn Curtiss patented a float plane in 1922:

and a flying boat in 1915:

On September 26, 1933, U.S. Patent No. D90793½ issued to C.T. Coxner:

The patent is notable because of its number “90793 ½.” This is one of the rare fractional patents. The USPTO would ocassionally lose track and in order to keep the patents in the correct order would have to give a patent a fractional number. We have written about fractional patents before here: https://patents.harnessip.com/?p=2261, but today’s fractional patent is even more special because it is a fractional design patent.

Other fractional patents include 126½, RE1,217½, RE1,242½, 2,712,152½, 3,262,124½, 1400½, and one other fractional design patent: D1093½

On September 25, 1962, U.S. Patent No. 3,055,113, on a Tracing Device — what was commercialized as the Etch-A-Sketch:

In an odd coincidence, exactly eleven years later, on September 25, 1973, U.S. Patent No. 3,760,505 issued on a Tracing Device — covering an improved case:

How much simpler things would be if we could just shake our tablets and start over, like the good old Etch-A-Sketch.

Dr. Alexander Dey received U.S. Patent No. 411586 on a Workman’s Time-Recorder — a time clock on September 24, 1889.

In Dr. Dey’s own words, the invention “consists in a novel construction and combination, with a clock, of mechanisms by means of which employés of shops, factories, and other establishments may be enabled to record the time of their entering and leaving their place of business, and thus save the extra expense of watchmen or time keeper’s usually employed for the aforesaid purpose.”

Dr Alexander Dey was educated at Aberdeen and Cambridge Universities. He worked as an inspectors of schools in Scotland from 1873 to 1903. As a side hustle he invented the time recorder, He and his brother John Dey formed the Dey Patents Company in Syracuse New York in 1893, which eventually became the Dey Time Register Company around 1900. Dr Alexander Dey moved to Syracuse in 1903 to work full time on his inventions. The brothers’ company was acquired by the International Time Recording Company four years later in 1907. In 1911, International Time Recording Company merged with two other firms and became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later renamed International Business Machines, or IBM.

On behalf of everyone who has ever had to punch a time clock, thank you?

On September 23, 1934, U.S. Patent No, 1,776,637 issued to Johannes Ostermeier on a Flash Lamp.

A fixture in photography, for decades, flash bulbs have been replaced by electronic flashes, and supplanted first by faster films and more recently by digital photography. Important in its time, other inventors and the march of time, obsoleted this technology, as they do to most technologies.

On this date in 1859, George B. Simpson received U.S. Patent No. 25532 for his “electroheater”.

This was the first patent on an electric range, The range was powered by battery, and as the patent explained, could be used to “warm rooms, boil water, [and] cook victuals.”

The electric range was important invention because it gives house hunters something to complain about when touring houses on TV.

On September 19, 1838, Ephraim Morris received a patent on a train brake, presumably to the great relief of train passengers everywhere.

Ephraim apparently was fascinated by inclined planes. because he is credited with designing the inclined planes for the Morris Canal which opened in 1831, which brought further commerce to the area and provided recreational diversion in the form of swimming in the summer and ice skating in the winter. His patent explained that brake could be used on an inclined plane of a canal or railroad.

On September 17, 1901, electrical engineer and inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt of New York City received a serios of eight patents (Nos. 682,692-99). Also these lights had a peculiar blue-green color, these were commercially successful because of their improved efficiency over incandescent lamps, and were a precursor to fluorescent lighting. The mercury vapor lamp was often used in tandem with an incandescent lamp, providing a more acceptable color.

In 1902 Hewitt developed the mercury arc rectifier, the first rectifier that could convert alternating current power to direct current without mechanical action. He also worked on an early hydoifoil, and on a automatic airplane.

When Cooper Hewitt died in 1921 at the age of 60, he left 1/3 of his $4 million estate to his wife Maryon and 2/3 to his daughter Ann, with the proviso that should Ann die childless, her share would revert to her mother, inadvertently pitting mother against daughter. Shortly before her 21st birthday Ann came down with appendicitis, and Maryon had the doctor sterilize her daughter while removing her appendix, guaranteeing the reversion upon Maryon’s death. After discovering what Maryon had done, she filed the civil suit against her mother for $500,000 in January 1936, alleging that Maryon Cooper Hewitt paid the doctors to remove her fallopian tubes without her knowledge or consent. Soon after, the San Francisco district attorney charged Maryon and both doctors with “mayhem,” a rare charge that was “reserved for cases involving the act of disabling or disfiguring an individual . . . punishable by up to 14 years in prison.”

A lengthy, scandalous trial resulted in the charges being dropped against the doctors and Maryon, and Ann accepting a settlement of $150,000. Maryon died at 55 following a stroke a few years later in April 1939. Ann wound up marrying five times, before dying of cancer in February 1956 at age 40.