In 1994, the company that had a patent on GIFs tried to charge a fee for using GIFS. The PNG was invented as an alternative, and the company backed down.
100 Mind-Blowing Patent Facts
Originally, bumper cars were not supposed to hit each other. Drivers were supposed to avoid crashing despite chaotic driving. The first company to patent a bumper car was in 1920 named Dodgem.
The inventor of the microwave appliance received only $2 for his discovery. Percy Spencer was working as a researcher for American Appliance Company (now Raytheon) when he noticed that a radar set using electromagnetic waves melted the candy bar in his pocket. He had the idea to make a metal box using microwaves to heat food, but the company was the one to file the patent. That was in 1945, and he received a $2 bonus but never any royalties.
May 20, 1873, is the “birthday” of blue jeans. According to the Levi Strauss company, this was the day that Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, the innovators behind the sturdy blue jeans we all love, got a patent on the process of adding metal rivets to men’s denim work pants. The pants were called waist overalls until 1960 when baby boomers began calling them jeans.
The MGM lion roar is trademarked. At the start of any movie made by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, the iconic lion roars at the audience. While MGM has gone through several iterations of lion mascots, the sound of the roar is always the same. The company trademarked the “sound mark” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the 1980s.
The design for the seatbelts we use now was given away by Volvo. Before 1966, seatbelts were not mandated. During this period, seatbelts just secured the lap but offered no upper-body protection. When Nils Bohlin of Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt design, he gave away the patent for free to keep drivers safe.
The fire hydrant patent was lost in a fire. Oh, the irony. Frederick Graff Sr. patented the fire hydrant in the early 1800s. However, the patent was destroyed when the Washington, D.C. patent office burned down in 1836.
The first alarm clock could only ring at 4 a.m. The first American alarm clock was invented by Levi Hutchins in 1787. It took 60 years for French inventor Antoine Redier to patent an adjustable one!
Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. While it’s true he got a patent for the invention back in 1880, the real credit goes to Warren de la Rue, a British astronomer, and chemist who created the first bulb forty years earlier.
The First Computer Mouse. Colleagues at SRI Built The First Computer Mouse. Douglas Engelbart began the development of the computer mouse in the early 1960s. Bill English, a colleague of Engelbart at SRI, built the original prototype in 1964. By 1967, Engelbart filed a patent for the mouse, which was issued in 1970. SRI licensed the technology to other companies, but the computer mouse didn’t reach widespread commercial production until 1984. The original mouse relied on one or two wheels to record motion and a single button for clicking.
The first product scanned was a packet of chewing gum in 1974. Norman Joseph Woodland invented the barcode and received a patent in October 1952. It wasn’t until 22 years later when he was employed by IBM, that the barcode was developed to be used for product labeling. Known as the Universal Product Code (UPC), a system that is still used today.
Abraham Lincoln was the only US president who owned a patent and a salon.