Word: patent
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PAPER CLIP The design is perfect. There's been little improvement since Norwegian Johan Vaaler got his American patent in 1901. Only about 20% are actually used to clip papers...
...picnic in 1959, Ermal Cleon Fraze found himself with a can of beer and no can, opener-one of life's major annoyances at the time. The solution came to him "just like that" one sleepless night. In 1963, Fraze, the founder of Dayton Reliable Tool Co., obtained the patent for a removable pull-tab opener for the tops of cans. Continental Can Co. created a nonremovable tab 16 years later...
...Brassiere 1914, popularized by Mary Phelps Jacob, a New York City debutante who later sold the patent...
...suggest the Times has been duped. "They haven't done the science," says TIME science editor Phillip Elmer-DeWitt. "They haven't reproduced it. It isn't science until you do it a second time." Indeed, the biotech firm Advanced Cell Technologies has offered little more than a patent application and a photograph of embryonic cells under a microscope...
...Back patent leather bustiers reign at the Masquerade, but not all tricksters aim to emulate women of the night. Children--shockingly, they still exist outside of our hallowed Ivory Tower--don darling guises that garner enough candied corn to put any stained Gap dress to shame. The cute crowd's preferred costumes this Halloween were, as perhaps expected, a smattering of superheros, monsters and children's movie characters...