Verdict
The claim is supported by primary or authoritative evidence, and nothing of comparable quality contradicts it.
Strands of volcanic glass over a metre long and under a millimetre thick, spun from lava the way sticky dough pulls into threads. The USGS advice for finding some is to leave it alone.
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.
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.
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.
