Collection
Real patents, examined and granted, for things nobody needed.
These circulate as screenshots with the number cropped off, which is what makes them funny and useless at the same time. Put the number back and something better happens: the claim language turns out to be stranger than the joke. A dot “small in area relative to a paw of the cat”. An escape tube retrieved for the next grave. A machine whose stated advance is that it does not stop between blows. Read together they make a narrow point about patents — that a grant records examination, not endorsement, and certainly not a product — and a broader one about how a document behaves once it loses its citation.
Franz Vester patented a coffin the prematurely buried could climb out of. The detail nobody repeats is in the specification: once death was confirmed, you withdrew the escape tube and used it on the next grave.
US 4,022,227 was granted in 1977. Claim 3 requires an object to be held over the hair partway through the fold, and claim 4 specifies that the object is a person's hand.
US 5,443,036 was granted in 1995. Its dependent claims are the reason to read it: the light pattern must be small relative to a cat's paw, and travel at five to twenty-five feet per second.
US 5,356,330 was granted in 1994 for a spring-loaded arm on a wall. Its background states the problem plainly: a high five "requires the mutual hand slapping of two participants", and a solitary fan does not have two.
US 6,293,874 was granted in 2001. Its cited prior art is a run of 1900–1916 patents for secret-society initiation paddles, and the improvement it claims is that this one does not stop between blows.
