Patents reveal from voting machine to water skates – 01/13/2024 – Science

An illuminated safe that floats in the event of a boating accident may make little sense today, but it would probably have been useful in the early 20th century, when the sea was feared and long voyages were undertaken exclusively by ships. Or even a toilet seat that was sterilized at 250ºC, as one of the concerns at the time was bacteria and hygiene.

These are some of the 3,200 historical patents digitized by Inpi (National Institute of Industrial Property), revealed by Sheet in the Invenções do Brasil series, which reaches its second chapter.

Dating from 1895 to 1929, the finds also include a variety of curiosities. A hydro-skate to walk on the sea; a Batman-style propaganda projector; and a building humidifier that sprays water are some examples.

Records of more everyday things, similar to those of today, were also found, such as a washing machine or dishwasher, a dentist’s chair, a shaving brush and a wall-mounted liquid soap dish.

For civil servant Flávia Romano Villa Verde, head of the Patent Documentation Division at INPI, these records reveal the desires of that society and what the daily needs of the time were.

She cited as an example the washing machine, called Eureka, which had a patent granted in Brazil to the Spanish industrialist Luís Soria y Hernandez in 1923.

“It is curious because it had two drums and a stove underneath, very different from the current ones. But it had similarities, such as a circulating water system and washing temperature regulation. Other records are also peculiar due to the surprising similarities with modern products.”

The researcher also highlighted inventions that reflected fears of the time, such as the floating safe with a light that lit automatically in case of emergency, with a patent granted to the Italian engineer Nicola Santo in 1919, seven years after the tragedy of the transatlantic Titanic.

Another invention was the so-called hydro-skates, a type of boot with wheels that allowed you to glide through the water. This is the 10,000th Brazilian patent, granted in 1918 to Brazilian businessman Franklin Barroco.

In 1906, the concern with more practical voting already existed, to the point that the Italian industrialist Eugenio Boggiano patented a voting machine, which promised to guarantee the secrecy of the choice with a mechanism that involved a metal token placed in slots and which were then mixed with others to guarantee confidentiality.

According to Ricardo Nunes, a patent lawyer at Daniel Advogados, “some inventions seem strange. But even if they are not commercially viable, they show how surprising innovation can be.”

The specialist’s attention was drawn to one of the ideas, patented in 1914 by Brazilian student Horácio Marinho da Silva, which, for him, would be a model reminiscent of today’s Spam. This is a method of making announcements and complaints printed using folded paper tickets, like telegrams.

This required reading by the recipient, as the author of the invention wrote in the patent, as a receipt detached from the ticket itself would be required to be sure of delivery.

“When the advertisement or claim is ‘forcibly read’, as the inventor says in the registration, I consider this system to be the precursor of Spam”, says the lawyer.

A Brazilian electrician also had a curious idea, an electric alarm clock, patented in 1919 by Manoel Fernandes de Souza. He added small metal protrusions to an ordinary clock to mark the hours, half hours, and quarter hours.

When adjusting a hand on an extra dial to the desired time, the clock closed the circuit, activating a bell. This allowed using a single device to set alarms at different times and places.

Another Brazilian inventor, the dental surgeon Gorasil Brandão, was granted a patent in 1922 for a device to extract the root of teeth in a more practical way, especially in more complex cases, using a type of lever, a method that fell into disuse and was substituted.

Curious inventions are important, but they often go unnoticed in our daily lives, according to Julio César Castelo Branco Reis Moreira, president of Inpi.

“Intellectual property plays a significant role in our daily lives, impacting everything from simple objects to technological and economic advances.”

Moreira cites the wall-mounted liquid soap dish as an interesting everyday example, an invention that had a patent granted to Portuguese industrialist JR Pires in 1918 and is still used in public bathrooms in Brazil.

This innovation, which, in his opinion, may seem trivial, is actually protected by intellectual property rights. “When we use it, we are helping inventors receive their due royalties.”

Between 1895 and 1929, Brazil was going through significant changes, such as the beginning of industrialization, incentives for science by Emperor Dom Pedro II (1825-1891), world leadership in coffee production and roads were being opened in some states, such as São Paulo .

This and the fact that Brazil is the fourth country in the world, according to Inpi, to create a law to protect intellectual property (a practice inherited when the country was still a colony of Portugal), could have attracted the attention of scientists to protect their inventions in the country.

Brazil was seen as a commercial power, when capitalism was taking shape in the world, and this attracted foreign investors, according to Leandro Malavota, professor at the Intellectual Property Academy at INPI.