SF-0013Products Invented Because Someone Had Enough
The comb-over patent folds three sections of hair over a person's hand
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.
Illustration — not a photograph, and not evidence for anything on this page.
Figure 3 of the patent: the head from above, with the three sections of hair extended outward before they are folded over the bald area in sequence.
FIG. 3 is an illustration of a top view of the person's head in FIG. 1." The numerals are the specification's: 2 the person's hair line, 4 the bald area, 6 and 8 the two side sections, 10 the back section.
- Image
- Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith (inventors); drawing published by the USPTO
- Taken
- 1977-05-10
- Archive ref.
- US Patent 4,022,227 — drawing sheet 1, Figure 3
- Licence
- Text and drawings typically not subject to copyright restrictions under USPTO policy; no exception applies to this patent on inspection (licence record)
- The image itself
- Authentic, unaltered
Figure 3, US Patent 4,022,227 (Smith and Smith, "Method of concealing partial baldness", issued 10 May 1977). United States Patent and Trademark Office. Cropped from drawing sheet 1.
Verdict
"Someone actually patented the comb-over."
The claim is supported by primary or authoritative evidence, and nothing of comparable quality contradicts it.
Established by the patent itself, read in full from the USPTO's own three-page scan. US 4,022,227 was granted to Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith on 10 May 1977, on application 643,681 filed 23 December 1975, classified US Cl. 132/53 and Int. Cl.² A41G 3/00, with five claims and six drawing figures, examined by G.E. McNeill. The claim being tested is that such a patent exists and covers that method; the document answers it directly and nothing of comparable quality contradicts it.
Scoped tightly on purpose. "A patent was granted" is the whole of the verdict. It is not a finding that the method was novel in practice, that it conceals anything, that it was ever used by anyone, or that any government body judged it to work. The patent is evidence of examination, not of efficacy, and this file says so.
Verified requires 1 primary or authoritative source. This file cites 3.
In short
In December 1975 Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith of Orlando, Florida filed an application for a method of concealing partial baldness. It was granted on 10 May 1977 as US 4,022,227, with five claims and six drawing figures on a single sheet. The method divides the hair into three sections and folds them over the bald area in sequence, using a hand as a shield and hair spray between layers. The patent is real and its claim language is precise. What it does not establish is that the method worked, was ever used, or was endorsed by anyone.
What was actually granted
On 10 May 1977 the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted patent 4,022,227 to Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith, both of Orlando, Florida. The title is Method of concealing partial baldness. It has five claims and six drawing figures on a single sheet, and it was examined by G.E. McNeill.
The abstract is the whole invention in three lines: “A method of styling hair to cover partial baldness using only the hair on a person’s head. The hair styling requires dividing a person’s hair into three sections and carefully folding one section over another.”
The hand is in the claims
The popular version of this patent is a single sweep of hair. The document is considerably more involved than that.
Claim 1 separates the hair into “several substantially equal sections”, then places one over the bald area, a second over the first, and the remainder over those.
Claim 2 fixes the order: back first, then one side, then the other.
Claim 3 adds a piece of equipment. After the back section is down, “an object is placed over the hair and hair from a first of the sides is brushed over the object” — and the object is moved again before the second side goes over it.
Claim 4 says what the object is: “wherein said object is a person’s hand”. The specification explains why it is there, and the reason is entirely practical: “Care should be taken to brush the hair only as it lies over the hand to avoid messing up the hair under the hand.” The hand is a shield, protecting the layer already in place while the next one is brushed across it. Hair spray goes on between layers.
The background is an argument about money
The section that reads most like a person rather than a legal instrument is the opening one, and it is not a joke. Transplants, weaving and hairpieces, it says, “can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars” and need periodic care. “Obviously a partially bald person without the financial means can not afford the luxury of such hair coverings.”
That person, the patent continues, has few options: he can try to use his own hair, “but generally most people do not have the ability to properly plan a hair style that will look good, and most attempts result in brushing the hair in one direction over the bald area, or he can allow his baldness to show.”
The invention is pitched as the free alternative to a hairpiece, and as a better comb-over than the one people were already doing badly. Which is the detail the popular version loses.
It is not called the comb-over patent
Not by itself, anyway. The word never appears in the document. It arrives in 2004, when Improbable Research gave this patent the Ig Nobel Prize for Engineering — “Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227)” — and Donald Smith’s son and daughter came to Harvard’s Sanders Theatre to accept it.
That prize is why the patent is famous, and it is worth being clear about what it is: a satirical award from a private magazine. It is not a government assessment and it is not evidence about whether the method works.
What this file does not claim
That the method conceals anything. That anyone ever performed it. That it was licensed, sold, or made into a product. That any part of the United States government judged it useful, effective, or a good idea — a patent grant is a finding on novelty, utility and non-obviousness as those terms are used in patent law, and it is emphatically not an endorsement.
A patent is evidence that an examiner found a claimed combination allowable. That is a narrower and more procedural fact than “someone invented this”, and it is the fact this file reports.
The evidence
US Patent 4,022,227, "Method of concealing partial baldness", was granted to Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith, both of Orlando, Florida, on 10 May 1977, on application 643,681 filed 23 December 1975. Five claims, six drawing figures on one sheet. Primary examiner G.E. McNeill; attorney John B. Dickman, III.
Cited sources:S1
The abstract states the whole method in three lines: "A method of styling hair to cover partial baldness using only the hair on a person's head. The hair styling requires dividing a person's hair into three sections and carefully folding one section over another."
Cited sources:S1
Claim 1 covers "A method for styling hair to cover bald areas using only the individual's own hair, comprising separating the hair on the head into several substantially equal sections, taking the hair on one section and placing it over the bald area, then taking the hair on another section and placing it over the first section, and finally taking the hair on the remaining sections and placing it over the other sections whereby the bald area will be completely covered."
Cited sources:S1
Claim 2 fixes the order of operations: the hair is folded over the bald area "beginning with the hair from the back of the head, and then from first one side and then the other."
Cited sources:S1
Claim 3 introduces a shield. After the back section is folded over the bald area, "an object is placed over the hair and hair from a first of the sides is brushed over the object", and the object is then repositioned before the second side is folded over it.
Cited sources:S1
Claim 4 identifies the object: "A method as in claim 3, wherein said object is a person's hand the hair spray is applied after the hair from said first side is folded into place and again after said second side being folded into place." The missing conjunction is in the granted text.
Cited sources:S1
The specification explains what the hand is for. "Care should be taken to brush the hair only as it lies over the hand to avoid messing up the hair under the hand." The hand protects the layer already in place while the next one is brushed across it.
Cited sources:S1
The method has a stated prerequisite: the hair "must be allowed to grow long enough to cover the bald area, generally about 3 to 4 inches", and the length required varies with the size of the bald area.
Cited sources:S1
The specification is written in the first person singular despite naming two inventors — "using my hair styling method", "my method is directed to a person who is partially bald" — and the claims are introduced with "I claim:".
Cited sources:S1
The background gives the motive as cost. Transplants, weaving and hairpieces "can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars", require periodic care, and "a partially bald person without the financial means can not afford the luxury of such hair coverings." The invention is offered as the free alternative.
Cited sources:S1
A variant is claimed for a different pattern of baldness: "A person who has a bald spot in the back of the head could use four equal sections, using my hair styling method, for best results."
Cited sources:S1
Three prior US patents are cited: 3,317,921 (Zarzour, 1967), 3,464,424 (Buzzelli, 1969) and 3,811,453 (Bretton, 1974). The field of search covers US classes 132/53, 54, 9, 7, 5 and 2/9.
Cited sources:S1
In 2004 the patent received the Ig Nobel Prize for Engineering, awarded to "Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227)" at the ceremony held on 30 September 2004 at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. Donald Smith's son and daughter attended to accept it.
Cited sources:S3
Evidence that cuts the other way
Findings that complicate or argue against the verdict above. They are listed because leaving them out would make the file look stronger than it is.
The patent never uses the word "comb-over". Its title is "Method of concealing partial baldness" and the popular name is applied from outside — including by the Ig Nobel citation, which is where most readers meet it. Calling this "the comb-over patent" is a convenient label, not the document's own description of itself.
A granted patent is not evidence that nobody had combed hair over a bald patch before. The background says so directly: "most attempts result in brushing the hair in one direction over the bald area" — that is, the ordinary comb-over is the existing practice the invention is pitched against. What the grant establishes is that an examiner found this particular three-section folding sequence allowable, which is narrower and more procedural than "someone invented the comb-over".
Cited sources:S1
An Ig Nobel Prize is awarded by Improbable Research, a private magazine, and is satirical by design. It is not a government finding, a scientific assessment, or an endorsement of any kind, and it says nothing about whether the method works. It is cited here as the reason the patent is famous, not as evidence about the invention.
Cited sources:S3
What we still don’t know
- Whether the method conceals anything. The patent asserts that following it gives "an appearance of a full head of hair", and that is an applicant's assertion in a patent application. Nothing was consulted that tests it, and this file takes no position on whether the result looks like hair.
- Whether anyone ever used it. A method patent is granted on the claims, not on a demonstration, and no evidence was sought or found that the sequence was ever practised by a barber, a salon, or the inventors themselves. The ubiquity of comb-overs is not evidence that anyone followed these five claims.
- Whether it was ever licensed, sold, or enforced. Not established, and not investigated. No attempt was made to trace assignments, litigation, or any commercial product.
- Whether Donald J. Smith is living. He was alive in 2004, when the prize was awarded and his children attended the ceremony. Nothing more recent was sought, and the file makes no claim either way. Frank J. Smith was described as "the late" in the 2004 citation.
- Exactly when the patent term lapsed. A 1975 filing granted in 1977 ran seventeen years from issue under the term then in force, which would put expiry in 1994, but maintenance and term records were not checked and no date is asserted. Nothing in this file depends on it.
Sources
Every source below was read in full before it was cited. Archive snapshots are recorded at research time, because a file whose sources have evaporated is indistinguishable from one that never had any.
S1Tier 1Read in full
US Patent 4,022,227 — Method of concealing partial baldness
Frank J. Smith and Donald J. Smith · United States Patent and Trademark Office · 1977-05-10
The patent itself, retrieved as the USPTO's own three-page scan and read in full — front page, drawing sheet and the complete specification including all five claims. It is the document the claim is about, and it establishes every finding attributed to it here: the parties, the dates, the application number, the classification, the examiner and attorney, the abstract, the claim language including the object and the hand, the stated hair length, the cost argument in the background, and the cited prior patents. Also the source of the image, and the subject of the rights inspection. The archive snapshot was checked rather than assumed: it returns the same three-page PDF, and all three pages render byte-identically to the copy retrieved here. The two files differ by two bytes of PDF container metadata, because the USPTO generates the document per request.
S2Tier 1Read in full
Terms of Use for USPTO Websites
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The agency's stated rights position: that subject to the limited exceptions at 37 CFR 1.71(d) and (e) and 1.84(s), patent text and drawings are "typically not subject to copyright restrictions"; that not all material on USPTO sites is US government work; that the seal and logo are excluded; and that publication without copyright restrictions "does not give you permission to manufacture or use the invention". It also points to MPEP 608.01(v) on the right to include a copyright or mask work notice in a patent, which is the provision that makes individual inspection necessary rather than optional. Cited for the licence reasoning only.
S3Tier 1Read in full
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners — Engineering
Improbable Research · 2004-09-30
The awarding body's own record of the prize it gave, which is what makes it primary for this one fact and for nothing else. Establishes the year, the category, the exact citation wording "for patenting the combover", the patent number, the ceremony date and venue, that Frank J. Smith was already deceased in 2004, and that Donald Smith's son and daughter attended to accept. Read from an archived January 2006 snapshot because the live page has since been reorganised and no longer lists 2004; the snapshot is of Improbable Research's own site, not a third-party retelling. A Wikipedia list entry pointed the way here and was not cited, per the tier-3 finding-aid rule.
Checked for circularity: S1 and S2; S1 and S3; S2 and S3 were confirmed not to derive from one another. Two sources that trace back to the same origin are one source, and counting them twice is the most common way a false claim looks well-evidenced.
How we checked this
What we went looking for, and what we found
Four searches against this file's own framing, three of which changed it.
First, against the label. The file was going to be called the comb-over patent throughout, and the document never uses the word. The title is "Method of concealing partial baldness"; "combover" enters through the 2004 Ig Nobel citation. The label is kept where it describes how the patent circulates and dropped where it would put a word in the document's mouth. Recorded as contradicting evidence.
Second, against "nobody had thought of this". The background describes the ordinary one-direction comb-over as what people already do and do badly, so the grant cannot mean the practice was unknown — only that this three-section folding sequence was found allowable. This became the Quick File correction, because it is the actual thing the popular version gets wrong.
Third, against the Ig Nobel. A prize is an easy thing to cite and an easy thing to overstate. It is a satirical award from a private magazine and is not evidence about the invention, so it is carried as context and as the origin trace, with a contradicting-evidence entry saying plainly what it is not. The Wikipedia list that pointed at it was not cited; the awarding body's own page was retrieved instead, from an archived snapshot after the live page turned out no longer to list 2004.
Fourth, against the rights position. Text extraction reported nothing; the extraction had produced three bytes from a scanned document, so the clean result was a false negative rather than a clearance. All three pages were re-inspected visually. The conclusion survived on evidence rather than on a null. The tempting shortcut here — "it is from 1977, so it must be public domain by now" — was also rejected: 1977 is nowhere near copyright expiry, and the file says so in the rights note rather than leaving the reader to assume otherwise.
- We searched for evidence against our own conclusion
- We traced where the claim started
- The claim is stated in its strongest form, not a weak version
- The photograph was verified independently of the story
- We checked whether this was settled after the popular version froze
- Image rights were traced to a stated licence
- We checked what we were leaving out
- The verdict sat before publication, and was re-read cold
- Confidence in the verdict
- high
- Verdict assigned
- Most recent authoritative source
- Researched by
- The Strange File
NOT YET CLEARED. Three separate controls stand between this file and READY, and none of them may stand in for another: the cooling-off wait, independent review, and the owner's approval.
Cooling-off is a wait, and the wait has elapsed. The verdict was assigned 2026-07-30; the fresh-eyes pass was made on 2026-07-31 by a session that neither researched nor wrote this file, reading the dossier, the evidence, the sources, the verdict reasoning and the rights record cold. The pass changed one thing. The headline read "the wearer's own hand", while claim 4 says only "said object is a person's hand" and nothing read for this file establishes whose hand it is. Corrected to "a person's hand", which is the patent's own phrase.
That pass is cooling-off and nothing else. A cooling-off reader is not an independent reviewer, and this file names no second reviewer — it carries no sensitivity flag, so none is required. The owner has not approved publication, and READY is not permission to publish. Naming any of these as satisfied because the work feels finished is the move this publication exists to catch other people making.
On the named individuals. Both inventors are named, which is unavoidable in a file about their patent, and the naming is confined to public acts recorded in public documents: they filed and were granted this patent, and the patent was later given a prize their family publicly accepted. No adverse claim is made about either man, and nothing is asserted about their own hair. Frank J. Smith was already deceased in 2004. Donald J. Smith may be living and no sensitivity flag is set on that basis, consistent with SF-0012 and for the same reason — but it was considered rather than skipped, and the consideration is recorded here so that a reviewer can disagree with it.
One thing was deliberately withheld. The patent's front page prints both inventors' full home street addresses, as patents of that era did. They are in the public document and they are not reproduced here, in the dossier, in the captions or on the card. The city is enough to identify the filing; the street address only identifies a house.
Part of a collection
What The Stamp Actually CertifiesA grant, a listing, a prize. Each certifies something narrower than everyone reads it to mean.
Patently AbsurdReal patents, examined and granted, for things nobody needed.
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