Patents can be an interesting window into the past.  For example on December 14, 1937, U.S. Patent No. D107425 issued to Wallace K. Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux on a model of an architectural unit.

The design is of the Trylon, Perisphere, and Helicline that became the central symbol of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, reproduced by the millions on a wide range of promotional materials.   and serving as the fairground’s focal point.  The structures were razed and scrapped after the closing of the fair, and their materials repurposed into World War II armaments, but the image and the optimism for the future they were intended to convey, persist in the records of the USPTO.