Word: patently
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...crusty Avrea, who frets that inventors are treated as "second-class citizens," holds a 1970 patent for a "coolant recovery system" that includes a small plastic bottle attached to the radiator by tubing. Before Avrea's invention, hot radiators sometimes spilled frothy fluid onto the road through a pressure-relief valve, lowering efficiency and forcing drivers to check the coolant level. Now, that fluid flows into Avrea's container; when the engine cools, the liquid runs back through the tubing into the radiator...
During the three years it took Avrea to get a patent, his invention was pirated by auto companies and suppliers. Fighting back in the courts, he has won more than $5 million in settlements and awards from General Motors, Ford and three auto-parts manufacturers. Then, last March, he was hit with a suit by Toyota, Japan's largest carmaker, that sought to invalidate his troublesome patent. Says he: "It was like a second Pearl Harbor...
Avrea countered by suing 25 companies, including Japan's major automakers, for a total of $62.9 million in damages for patent infringement. If the Japanese do not settle the matter within the next six weeks, Avrea plans to ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to halt imports of Japanese cars. Under the Trade Act of 1974, the I.T.C. would at least have to investigate Avrea's complaint. Neither Ford nor GM will comment on Avrea's campaign, but nothing would bolster Detroit's spirits more than watching the plucky inventor devise a way to block those...
...spent his days emendating the Latin poet Propertius instead of reading the syllabus. When he failed his final exams, the undergraduate's pride was crushed. At home, his father had run through the modest family fortune, and for a drab and agonizing decade Housman clerked in the London Patent Office...
...which are left in the sand when melted." It took him almost 30 years of experimentation before he found methods that produced what he wanted, including an iridescent glass that he called Favrile (from the old English word fabrile, of a craftsman) and for which he applied for a patent. Others, including John La Farge in the U.S. and Thomas Webb in England, were working along the same lines, but apparently Tiffany got there first...