Patents for the windproof umbrella

Many like me have been infuriated by umbrellas that were ruined by being turned inside out. How do you invent an umbrella that shields the user from rain while not inviting the rain to destroy it ? This is a fascinating technical problem.

I am indebted to William Davis for an interesting post on the British Library innovation and enterprise blog on the Senz XL storm-proof umbrella, an idea which was new to me.

Gerrit Hoogendoorn was a Dutch engineering student, later an industrial designer, who had had three umbrellas broken in a week. There had to be a better way, he thought (often the origin of inventions), and he set out to invent a solution.

Normal umbrellas are round, or close to that shape, but Hoogendoorn came up with an asymmetrical shape, more like a wing. This apparently is windproof.

In 2006 his Canopy device was published as an international patent application, as illustrated below.

Like all good inventors he thought of improvements, and in 2013 another international patent application, Parasol with asymetrical canopy, was published. Below is its main drawing.

What is interesting, for those who want to know about forerunners, is the list of patents cited as relevant for them. For the 2006 invention, here are the citations, while for the 2013 improvement, here is another list. The oldest is from 1910.

The 2013 document has no fewer than 11 CPC classes assigned to it to describe its technical features. One of these is A45B25/22, Devices for increasing the resistance of umbrellas to wind. This is a list of the international (PCT) applications published on the subject, which numbered 52 at the time of writing.

Hoogendoorn did not neglect the look. While it could be argued that the look and the function were closely linked, he managed to register (at the time of writing) three US Design patents, This is a list of the designs by his company, Senz Technologies, in the EU.

The third main aspect of intellectual property, after function and look, is the name or logo. Senz is the trademarked name, as recorded by OHIM, and applied for in 2006. I would have chosen a name that hinted at its properties, but then the problem is always, which language.

The rather bland Senz website lists stormproof umbrellas and does not tell the story behind them -- I suspect buyers would enjoy a bit of razmatazz. It has won awards -- why isn't this mentioned ? Davis' post says it was launched in 2006, selling the initial 10,000 umbrellas in nine days, and his umbrella is still intact after six years. It looks like this particular technical problem has been solved !

I finish with a charming three minute video showing umbrellas being wind tested, and even tried out in a skydive.

Country shares in PCT patent publications, 2014 versus 2013

Using data for PCT patent publications (the so-called World Patent) in the free Espacenet database, I have made some calculations comparing countries for 2014 over 2013. I carried out a similar exercise in January 2014. In this post, I have adjusted the 2013 figures as given in Espacenet as apparently the final figures were later revised on the database.

For those new to patents, it is customary to file abroad within 12 months of the domestic filing to gain foreign protection and all applications are published as 18 months from the first "priority" filing. The PCT (the Patent Cooperation Treaty, based in Geneva and run by WIPO) enables a single document to be published rather than each office publishing its own version. Individual countries or regional systems later individually decide whether or not to grant a patent and hence the data merely reflects wanting to patent.

Because of the way the system works, the data reflects filing activity between 18 and 30 months ago.

One advantage of using this international system rather than comparing national figures is that it is a "level playing field", as different countries charge different fees and may permit different kinds of inventions or have different attitudes to novelty.

A second advantage is that regional patent systems, of which the European Patent Convention is the largest, confuse the issue. A European county can apply directly to Europe, or directly to the PCT designating Europe among other patent systems, or could apply to their home country as well. This causes much confusion.

In 2013 there were 192619 published patent specifications in the PCT system, while in 2014 there were 201456. This is a 4.5% increase.

This means that when comparing the numbers each country was responsible for, any gain under 4.5% is in fact a decline in "market share", as total numbers grew by that amount.

The national shares were worked out by asking the database for the number of Paris priority applications from that country (in the form of country codes such as GB for the UK) This is not quite the same as the nationality of the first named applicant (a common measure requiring the use of priced databases), and there will be some oddities, such as a Finnish applicant using a German priority, or a Hong Kong applicant using a UK priority. I expect, however, that most countries' shares will not be substantially different.

However, two problems reduce the actual numbers (and possibly % shares) shares for each country.

It is possible to quote an EP priority to show that the first filing was not national but rather regional: the European Patent Office. In 2014 10358 applications gave that office as the priority and hence could not be allocated to a country. I expect that these were mostly EU nationals. There were 10239 in 2013.

Another is that the Geneva office that handles the PCT filings can itself be quoted as a priority, using the WO code. These numbered 22717 in 2014, and 21243 in 2013.

I am unclear about the impact of these EP and WO priorities, which if added together would reach 33075, third place in the list of countries applying for rights in the PCT (and only just behind Japan).

The table below gives the top ten countries in 2014, and the percentage gain or loss in actual numbers (not in % of market share) over 2013.

Country	2014 publications	2013 publications	% gain or loss
United States	72148	65424	+ 10.2
Japan	34440	35765	- 3.8
China	15616	14399	+ 8.4
Germany	13055	13767	- 5.4
Korea	9720	9612	+ 1.1
France	5745	5830	- 1.4
United Kingdom	5299	5181	+ 2.2
Italy	2388	2388	no change
India	1608	1586	+ 1.3
Spain	1040	1079	- 3.7

Only the USA and China increased their "market share" of all published PCTs. Germany again suffered a drop in numbers, and Japan did only a little better.

Another way to look at the numbers is to examine the three major blocs and see how their percentage of all published PCTs changed from 2013 to 2014. These blocs are the USA, the Far East (Japan, China and Korea) and the EU (Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain). Yes, I know that Taiwan (not a member state of the PCT, hence in theory no priorities) is also in the Far East, and that there are other EU member states. While my choice of five does diminish the EU share, we can at least see how the named countries as a bloc changed.

The US went from 33.9% to 35.8%, plus 1.9%.

The Far East went from 31.0% to 29.6%, minus 1.4%.

The EU went from 14.6% to 13.6%, minus 1.0%.

Of course another way to look at the data is to see how many applications were published per million population. Italy is only a little smaller than France or the UK yet has half the number of applications, for example. China has a population much larger than Korea or the UK yet its numbers do not (yet) reflect that disparity. That suggests that China's numbers have a long way to go in their increase.

It could be argued that the PCT data reflects a country's interest in exporting its innovation, either as actual exports or in licensing agreements. Countries that traditionally manufactured other countries' technology but that are shifting to innovating themselves will do well.

In addition, if the principle that the claimed national priority is mostly the same as the actual country is not correct then the data itself is suspect and hence any conclusions. It is best to treat this data as indicative rather than definitive.

I have posted a follow-up on EU countries, National patent shares in major EU countries.

Do you know English : The challenge of English for patent searchers

An article by me, Do you know English ? The challenge of the English language for patent searchers has been published in World patent information, December 2014, vol. 39, pages 35-40. It is a light-hearted look at the problems that the English language present to patent searchers when using databases. These include Patentese, Americanisms and Anglicisms, nouns used as verbs, compound nouns, and the problems for those using English as a second language. I wrote it from the viewpoint of a searcher as I am not a linguist.

It is a revised version of a talk I gave in May 2014 at The Hague at the annual conference Search Matters, by the European Patent Office [the 2015 conference is in Munich in March 2015, see the webpage]. Probably, in my career as a patent searcher at the British Library, the biggest problem I had was dealing with the problem of the word "light" -- many clients persisted in asking that I search for the idea of portability, but that would include the word "light". Hence patents covering, say, illuminated walking sticks would be retrieved when all the client wanted was a small one...

...nor did I really trust the man who, convinced that I was trying to cheat his mother, say that patent searching wasn't rocket science. He was right -- it's usually a lot more difficult. Presumably he would have been happy to have an appendectomy carried out by someone who'd read up on the subject the night before rather than by an expert.

"Eight great technologies": analysis of patenting in key areas

The UK Intellectual Property Office has recently finished publishing a series of reports analysing the patent landscape in eight high technology areas which the government feels are important areas for the UK to carry out research in in the future.

A concluding report is titled Eight great technologies: a summary of the series of patent landscape reports, and it links on page 22 to PDFs of separate reports on each of the eight areas, or, with related papers, they can be found on this page.

These eight areas are the big-data revolution and energy-efficient computing; satellites and commercial applications of space; robotics and autonomous systems; life-sciences, genomics and synthetic biology; regenerative medicine; agri-science; advanced materials and nano-technology; energy and its storage; quantum technologies; and the Internet of things (IoT). That last topic is intriguing: it is about Bluetooth technologies,where objects talk to other objects, but also the ability of objects to automatically identify themselves to other objects.

The reports discuss the world patent scene in each technology, such as the major players (by entities and by country) and growth by year, followed by a look at the UK scene. For example, in IoT, the top UK player is Neul, a company based in Cambridge which I had not heard of. This is a list of World patent applications by Neul.

A command paper, Innovation and research strategy for growth, by Vince Cable MP (Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills), published as Cm 8239 in 2011, is of interest as it discusses in detail the subject. The measures it advocates include the annual publication of an innovation report on the UK, the latest being Innovation Report 2014, published in March. It also talked of helping the Technology Strategy Board, now called Innovate UK. All this sounds excellent so long as well-trained scientists and technicians can be funded (whether by public money or by industry) to create useful products to benefit the UK economy. For too long there has been lip-service rather than real action.

Eight great technologies is also the title of a discussion paper by David Willetts MP (until July 2014 the Minister for Universities and Science), published in 2013 by the Policy Exchange think tank.

Graphene in patents

John Colapinto has written an interesting article, "Material question", about the nature of graphene and research on its uses, in the current New Yorker (22 and 29 December 2014, 50-63).

Graphene is a an atom-thick layer of graphite which has special properties. These include the ability to transmit electrical charges 250 times more rapidly than silicon. It may be the successor material to silicon for use in electrical devices, a silicon is reaching its apparent limits as miniaturization continues. Graphene is also 150 times stronger than the equivalent amount of steel, and is the only material which is totally impermeable to gases.

It was discovered by two scientists at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Adhesive tape was used to isolate the first ever two-dimensional material. Their paper describing it was apparently twice rejected by Nature, as being "impossible" and not a "sufficient scientific advance", according to the journal's reviewers. It was published instead in Science in October 2004 as "Electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films" [it can be read at this link] and caused much excitement among scientists. They were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.

A report, Graphene: the worldwide patent landscape in 2013, was published by the UK Intellectual Property Office in 2013, Over 8,000 patents on the subject are covered in it, which shows that the UK is far behind in the race to develop the material -- the leading entity, the University of Manchester, has 6 patent families, which puts it at joint 163rd place, with Samsung first with 210 patent families.

Colapinto discusses in detail the work of James Tour and his colleagues at Rice University in Texas. The World patent applications by Tour for Rice in the field of carbon are listed here.

All in all, a very interesting article written for non-specialists in a fascinating field.

The "patent" for Oreo® cookies

We bought a packet of Oreo® cookies today at the local supermarket, and it made me wonder about the history of the product, a kind of "sandwich cookie."

I had a look on Google (for Oreo + cookies + either history or patented) and found several sites which mentioned the 6 March 1912 as the date of origin, and some which said that it was patented on "March 6, 1912, U.S. Patent No. 0093009." For example, the New York Daily News obituary of Sam Porcello.

The TimeToast timeline for Oreo® cookies also attributes that date to the patenting of the cookie.

According to the Wikipedia article on Oreo cookies,Sam Porcello held five patents relating to the cookie. A 2012 obituary for him in Time magazine was cited for this.

Well, I was surprised. There are a few patents for food products -- Toblerone® and Tabasco® sauce come to mind, as respectively Swiss patent 46708, filed for in 1909 and US patent 107701, filed in 1870. Yet I did wonder what was novel, even then, for the concept of two sweet layers with a creamy layer between them.

As I collect the patent numbers for the first patent for well-known products or processes I began some research. "Patented", in theory, meant the date the rights were granted, and would be the same day as publication.

The 6 March 1912 was a Tuesday, and American patents were at the time only published or "issued" on Wednesdays. So the date couldn't be the issue date.

Could it be the date a patent was applied for ? No apparent patent fitted -- and Sam or Samuel Porcello did indeed have five American patents between 1976 and 1989, mainly for Nabisco, for e.g. filler cream containing soybean oil, but this was obviously far too late for my purposes.

What about the number 0093009 ? It was wrong as a published utility patent number or as a design patent number as the dates would have been published in 1869 or 1934 respectively.

What about it being a filing number ? I wondered if it was a trade mark filing number. I went to my old standby, the free TMQuest database by Minesoft and asked for Oreo as an exact mark and the year 1912. I did not specify filing, registration or publication.

I got the one result, and said to myself "Bingo." US trade mark Registration number 0093009 was applied for on the 14 March 1912 and was registered on the 12 August 1913. The number matched perfectly if not the date.

I can't account for the 6 March 1912 -- perhaps that was the day the name Oreo was chosen to be a trade mark -- but this little saga does show how careful one has to be in carrying out research. Far from being patented (for the cookie itself or how to make it), the product was simply, and quite rightly, given a brand name.

I suspect that people have been innocently repeating the wording without checking further.

Inventors' groups in London

A few days ago I gave a talk about my life in patents, with anecdotes, and the problems of subject searching the patents. This was at the Croydon Round Table of Inventors' premises near Norwood Junction. Here are a couple of pictures from the evening: me smiling at the camera...

...and a clearly rapt audience taking it all in.

This is me again talking about the free Espacenet patent database, as displayed on the screen.

As with the same talk given recently at the Kingston Round Table of Inventors and at the East London Inventors Club there were plenty of questions and lots of interest. I get a real buzz passing on my knowledge of 25 years, and never tire of going over the same problems. Such as how do you protect an idea, what patents can you legally use, who should you trust, how do you negotiate, etc., etc.

I always suggest that inventors join clubs such as these if they can. Besides the talks given, they can comment on other people's inventions, and learn from others, who are very often with their advice and comments. It always helps when someone had years ago the same problem you are encountering now, and it is easy for a private inventor to feel very alone.

I also took the opportunity to sell some copies of my most recently published book, Inventing the 21st century.

I'm happy to repeat the same talk to other groups in the London/ Surrey area.

Green power: pressurising air underwater

I'm all for green power but the problem is with fluctuating supply, as with wind or solar. Supply rarely marches demand, so being able to cheaply and simply store power is vital. Batteries has been the usual approach when studying the problem, though pumping water uphill when there is little demand (and running it out through turbines) has its fans as well. The UK has been using this concept for decades.

Seamus Garvey, Professor of Dynamics at the University of Nottingham, has come up with a solution to the problem: when wind power isn't needed, it's stored in canvas bags under pressure in the sea.

I came across the idea in the article "Bottling the wind" by Abigail Beall in the 1 November New Scientist issue. She explains that the mechanical engineer was driving on a motorway when he thought of the idea of storing unwanted power underwater. When the power was needed, it would become available again, as simply venting it would drive a generator.

He tried to prove it was a bad idea and then realised it was a very good idea. If you want to store compressed air you need a lot of pressure, and there is no lack of that deep in the sea. Garvey was quoted as saying "It's important to take advantage of the stuff around you".

What about the patents ? As long ago as 2007 a World patent application in his name was published, with the University of Nottingham as the applicant, titled Power generation. Here are two patent drawings from the (American) patent specification.

The corresponding European patent application is still, all these years on, undergoing examination and has not therefore been granted protection. The European Register entry EP1971773 lists the various actions and by clicking on All Documents, at top left of that page, the correspondence with the European Patent Office can be read. Maybe the 10 patent documents cited against the World application were causing a problem. Meanwhile, in 2011 US8030793 was published.

At the time of writing, 16 patents since 2007 have had the Garvey specification cited against them, and are listed here. Clearly, there is interest in the topic.

There are a lot of videos about the concept or Garvey available. Garvey is now working on a commercial system with Canadian wind power company Hydro-Star Energy, LLC.

Giving talks in London

Last night I gave a talk to the East London Inventors Club, and on the 11th I will be giving the same talk at the Croydon Round Table of Inventors.

"My life in patents" told about my 25 years as a librarian working in inventions, with some anecdotes, and then about the main problems involved with devising a patent search strategy, ending with two case studies showing how relevant patents might be identified by using keywords and classifications.

I am glad to say that the East London members are a lively bunch, and I was frequently asked questions or "interrupted" -- no shrinking violets they. I spoke for about an hour and then spent a further hour talking to individual members about their inventions, and making suggestions. Those suggestions often came down to using a patent attorney to drafting the specification, asking the British Library's Business and Intellectual Property Centre (BIPC) to carry out a priced search, or visiting the BIPC to understand how to use databases and to get other help. It's a lonely furrow to plough if you don't get expert help.

I had a great time and I think the members appreciated it. I enjoy giving ad hoc advice in such situations, as it is so important that no inventor feels isolated. That's why it's so important that private inventors join clubs as the more experienced members, in my experience, are generous with their time.

Hoverboards a reality in future ?

The dream of working hoverboards seems to have been achieved, and Back to the Future fans may soon be able to emulate Marty McFly's antics.

On the 18 September 2014 D. Gregory Henderson, for Arx Pax LLC, both of San Jose, California (same state as McFly, almost inevitably) had published a US patent application, Magnetic levitation of a stationary or moving object. A week later a World patent application with the same title, WO2014/149626, was published. It is 73 pages long, of which 20 pages are drawings. The final pages cite relevant prior art, and they only found "A" citations -- background, unlikely to invalidate the application. Taken from the US document, there is for example this spectacular drawing:

Here are three others.

The World patent summary states "In one embodiment, the moving magnetic field can be generated by a rotor with arrangement of permanent magnets which is driven by a motor. In operation, the rotor can be spun up from rest to above a threshold velocity, which causes the magnetic lifting device to rise up from the conductive substrate, hover in place in free flight and move from location to location. In free flight, the magnetic lifting device can be configured to carry a payload, such as a person."

Wired has a piece by Rhett Allain called The physics of the Hendo Hoverboard.

Arx Pax themselves seem to be a bit of a mystery. Their emblem is a dove between olive branches, and their mission statement is to be "a revolutionary technology company with the sole purpose of innovating solutions to some of the most pressing global problems of our age." I'm not sure I'd regard the problem of levitating a pressing problem, to be honest. How expensive would it be, I wonder ?

Hendo Hover is the name of the website with a rather cool and fun video showing the device in action. Below is the same video, from Youtube.



The same inventor and company had, in July 2014, a US patent granted for Methods and apparatus of building construction resisting earthquake and flood damage. The basic idea is to put buildings on a concrete structure which can float on a "buffer medium". A drawing from it is given below.

I recently wrote on the related Frankie Zapata's Hoverboard by ZR.