9 Strangest Patents Ever Actually Granted

A patent examiner has a narrow job. They ask whether an invention is new, whether it is useful, and whether it would have been obvious to somebody already working in the field. Nowhere on that list sits the question the rest of us would ask first, which is whether the thing was worth several years and a great deal of money.

That gap is where the following nine live. Every one is a real granted United States patent with a real number, a real inventor and a filing written in the flat procedural register of a document that expects to be taken seriously. We have kept the inventors’ own words throughout. Without further ado.

1. The Anti-Eating Face Mask

US 4,344,424. Granted 17 August 1982.

Lucy L. Barmby described a “cup-shaped member conforming to the shape of the mouth and chin area of the user,” worn so that “ingestion of food by the user is prevented.” The reasoning is blunt. “The major contributing factor to overweight is the excessive consumption of food.” The hardware is the strange part. It fastens with a leather strap and “a conventional lock,” the sort you would put on a locker, so the wearer cannot remove it at the moment the temptation wins. Wire mesh lets you talk and breathe. Barmby did consider emergencies, noting that the strap “may be cut and the face mask removed.”

2. Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force

US 3,216,423. Granted 9 November 1965.

George and Charlotte Blonsky built a horizontal centrifuge for childbirth. The mother is strapped to a stretcher on a rotating deck plate, head at the axis, feet three feet out. The motor spins. Their filing promised “a gentle, evenly distributed, properly directed, precision-controlled force.” The engineering is careful, which somehow makes it worse. There is a variable-speed drive, a table of g-forces, and a ball governor that halts the machine if it passes a safe speed set for the individual patient. In 1999 the couple received the Ig Nobel Prize in Managed Health Care.

3. Method of Exercising a Cat

US 5,443,036. Granted 22 August 1995.

Kevin T. Amiss and Martin H. Abbott patented pointing a laser at the floor. That is the whole invention. Claim 1 covers “directing an intense coherent beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus” onto an opaque surface, then “selectively redirecting said beam out of the cat’s immediate reach to induce said cat to run and chase said beam around an exercise area.” The abstract widens this to “any other animal with a chase instinct,” which covers most of the mammal kingdom. The filing also keeps calling the beam invisible, which would make the dot rather hard for a cat to chase.

4. Apparatus for Simulating a “High Five”

US 5,356,330. Granted 18 October 1994.

Albert Cohen identified a problem with real emotional weight behind it. “A solitary fan is unable to perform a ‘high five’ to express excitement during a televised sporting event,” the filing observes, since the gesture takes two. His answer is a spring-loaded mechanical arm with a removable hand, hinged at a simulated elbow, that absorbs your slap and springs back into alignment. It bolts to “a table, wall, floor or the like.” Options include a sound generator and a light, both fired by the strike. Cohen was early to the notion of a device congratulating you on your behalf, which has since gotten completely out of hand.

5. The Santa Claus Detector

US 5,523,741. Granted 4 June 1996.

Thomas Cane built a Christmas stocking with a battery, an LED and a pull cord, filed as a device “useful for visually signalling the arrival of Santa Claus by illuminating an externally visible light source.” The detection technology is the parent. “While the child is asleep (on Christmas Eve), one merely needs to pull on the pull cord 40 to activate the switch 30.” Then comes the payoff. “Thus, when the child awakens on Christmas day he/she will assume that the pull cord 40 was pulled inadvertently by Santa Claus when he entered.” Reference numeral 40 is doing an enormous amount of parenting.

6. The Kissing Shield

US 5,727,565. Granted 17 March 1998.

Deloris Gray Wood’s invention is a frame holding “a thin, resilient flexible, impervious membrane” that two people kiss through, to “lessen one’s chances of becoming infected by disease from casual contact.” Canker sores, fever blisters and AIDS all appear in the filing. Her tone throughout is earnest. She wrote about people using the shield to practice “preventive medicine” and to make sure “that disease is not passed from one person to another.” Filed in 1995, it reads a good deal less ridiculous in 2026 than the title alone suggests.

7. The Motorized Ice Cream Cone

US 5,971,829. Granted 26 October 1999.

Richard B. Hartman’s device is a battery-powered, hand-held cup spinner “for supporting, containing, rotating and sculpting an individual portion of ice cream or similarly malleable food while it is being consumed.” You load the cone. You press the switch. The ice cream turns and your tongue does not. By “holding one’s tongue stationary against food portion 40 to carve horizontal channels,” the patent explains, the eater cuts patterns into the spinning surface, turning dessert into a very small lathe. Watching engineering get aimed at problems nobody had is also the whole appeal of the 3D printing world.

8. The Beerbrella

US 6,637,447. Granted 28 October 2003.

Robert Platt Bell, Mason Schott McMullin and Mark Andrew See patented a tiny umbrella that clips to your drink. The stated problem is thermodynamic. “A beverage left out in the sun, even if insulated or cooled with ice, quickly warms due to the effect of the intense infrared radiation.” Specifications are exact. The canopy runs “approximately five to seven inches in diameter” and the clip grips “by means of spring action and friction.” The patent adds that “suitable advertising and/or logos may be applied to the umbrella surface,” which is the sound of an inventor already picturing the trade-show booth.

9. Method of Swinging on a Swing

US 6,368,227. Granted 9 April 2002.

Steven Olson patented swinging sideways. Claim 1 sets it out as a numbered procedure: suspend a seat between two chains hung from a tree branch, position the user facing perpendicular to the branch, then have the user “pull alternately on one chain to induce movement of the user and the swing toward one side, and then on the other chain,” repeating until side-to-side motion is achieved. The inventor arrived at this “through experimentation on a standard swing.” He and his sister call it “Tarzan” swinging, the document says, because it “more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest.” And then, with total composure, the patent offers commercial terms. “Licenses are available from the inventor upon request.”

The office reconsidered. A reexamination decision cancelled every claim on 1 July 2003, fifteen months after the grant, and the patent lapsed for unpaid maintenance fees in 2006. Sideways swinging is back in the public domain, which is where most of the good ideas were sitting all along.