JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 237
In the category of wrongly-inspired inventions comes this masterpiece from a G. Tilsen. whose idea for using a chord (as shown in figure 3) seemed to spawn for him an entire empire of possibilities. (Seems to me a little like patenting a stick and your hand for the use of making a hand sun dial AND for turning the stick around so as to be able to draw things in the dirt, and so on. Tilsen believed that if he had this chord and a place to attach it to the thing transformed into an apparatus to put on/taker off coats, hanging up a hat, “keeping a coat collar turned up”, for “suspending a muff on a person”, and other stuff. Sometimes in intellectual bait-and-switch you call something by another name and it becomes new/improved/different. For example, among the many supra-creative insights last night by Gov. Palin one referenced the use for “more clean coal” for the daily national energy intake. Arsenic was removed from coal some time ago, which made it “clean” in that there wasn’t any arsenic in the coal smoke anymore. Coal still releases CO2 which perhaps isn’t considered to be “dirty” anymore. (Well, its a clear gas, isn’t it? We won’t get into the Bush administration’s Dickensian allowances for coal-burners to escape new upfitting and scrubbing rules. ) It just goes to show the causal observer that it doesn’t take much for a stick to be a sundial, an elastic chord to be a apparatus for putting on a coat, and for coal to be “clean”.
From the British Patent Office, Abstract of Patent GB190200448, in all of its deep Edwardian splendor:
putting-on of garments; suspenders for articles of dress; overcoats.-Relates to
a portable appliance for facilitating the putting- on and taking-off of
overcoats, furs, coats, mantles, and like garments, but capable of being
utilized also for other purposes, such as for enabling an overcoat to be hung
up and taken down from a coat hook even when the coat hook is full, for
replacing a broken suspensory tab, for hanging-up a hat, for keeping a coat
collar turned up, for holding-up the skirt or train of a dress, and for
suspending a muff on the person. The appliance consists of a cord b, Fig. 3,
having a clip a at one end and a ring c at the other. Its general manner of use
is shown in Fig. 1, but to form a suspender for enabling an overcoat to be hung
up on a coat hook which is full of garments or to enable an overcoat to be
taken from a hook on which it is overlaid with other garments, the cord b is
passed through the tab of the coat and the ring c is gripped by the clip a, and
the overcoat is hung up by the suspensory loop thus formed. The collar of an
overcoat can also be retained in position when turned-up by winding the cord
round the collar and then gripping the cord with the clip.