An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an idea is unique enough either as a stand alone invention or as a significant improvement over the work of others, it can be patented. A patent, if granted, gives the inventor a proprietary interest in the patent over a specific period of time, which can be licensed for financial gain.
A vacuum cleaner, also known simply as a vacuum or a hoover, is a device that causes suction in order to remove dirt from floors, upholstery, draperies, and other surfaces. It is generally electrically driven.
JT Storage, Inc. was a maker of inexpensive IDE hard drives for personal computers based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1994 by "Jugi" Tandon—the inventor of the double-sided floppy disk drive and founder of Tandon Corporation—and Tom Mitchell, a co-founder of Seagate and former president and Chief Operating Officer of both Seagate and Conner Peripherals.
John Boyd Dunlop was a Scottish inventor and veterinary surgeon who spent most of his career in Ireland. Familiar with making rubber devices, he invented the first practical pneumatic tyres for his child's tricycle and developed them for use in cycle racing. He sold his rights to the pneumatic tyres to a company he formed with the president of the Irish Cyclists' Association, Harvey Du Cros, for a small cash sum and a small shareholding in their pneumatic tyre business. Dunlop withdrew in 1896. The company that bore his name, Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company, was not incorporated until later using the name well known to the public, but it was Du Cros's creation.
A photo booth is a vending machine or modern kiosk that contains an automated, usually coin-operated, camera and film processor. Today, the vast majority of photo booths are digital.
Noel's House Party is a BBC light entertainment series that was hosted by Noel Edmonds. Set in a large house in the fictional village of Crinkley Bottom, leading to much innuendo, it ran from 23 November 1991 to 20 March 1999 on BBC One, and for 8 series was broadcast live on Saturday evenings. The show, once described by a senior corporation executive as "the most important show on the BBC", was cancelled in February 1999 due to declining ratings, although two further compilation specials were shown in March 2000. In 2010, Noel's House Party was voted the best Saturday night TV show of all time. In August 2022, an episode of the show, the tenth episode of the first series, was repeated on BBC Four. This marks the first time since 2000 that the show has been broadcast on the BBC.
The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as U.S. Patent 748,626. It is a realty and taxation game intended to educate users about Georgism. It is the inspiration for the 1935 board game Monopoly.
Luther George Simjian was an Armenian-American inventor and entrepreneur. A prolific and professional inventor, he held over 200 patents, mostly related to optics and electronics. His most significant inventions were a pioneering flight simulator, arguably the first ATM and improvement to the teleprompter.
Bill Booth is an American engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur in the skydiving equipment manufacturing industry. His invention of the 3-ring release safety device has enhanced skydiving safety. He founded the companies United Parachute Technologies and Complete Parachute Solutions, which had 150 employees as of 2015.
American Inventor was a reality television series based on a competition to be named America's best inventor. It was conceived by Simon Cowell and the producers of American Idol, and premiered on ABC in March, 2006. It was organized as a competition between inventors nationally, resulting in one overall winner.
Thermo King is an American manufacturer of transport temperature control systems for refrigerator trucks and trailers, refrigerated containers and refrigerated railway cars along with heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems for bus and passenger rail applications. Headquartered in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Thermo King is a subsidiary of Trane Technologies.
Scams in intellectual property include scams in which inventors and other rights holders are lured to pay money for an apparently official registration of their intellectual property, or for professional development and promotion of their ideas, but do not receive the expected services.
Ticket-in, ticket-out (TITO) is a technology used in more modern slot machines. It was originally developed circa 1992 by MGM Corporation who purchased technology from a Las Vegas firm Five Star Solutions as well as barcode ticket printing technology from Jon Yarbrough before his VGT success. They also worked with Pat Greene, an inventor in Boston of Triad Company who held a patent on a Bill Validator which could read bar coded tickets as well as accept cash. MGM created a consortium of game manufacturers and developed a protocol for its custom Universal Interface Board "UIB" based on a derivative of Bally Gaming's SDS System. They contracted local firm Applied Computer Technology, Inc. to develop the UIB, its firmware, and also facilitate the organization of the consortium. Later IGT acquired the rights to the TITO patents from MGM and began to modify their own protocol called SAS to implement TITO. It is incorrectly maintained that IGT developed TITO and Bally's Easy Pay which came out many years later.
Theodore George "Ted" Paraskevakos is a Greek-American inventor and businessman. Paraskevakos graduated from the Superior College of Electronics in Greece and served for 28 months as communications and electronics instructor in the Hellenic Air Force. He attended a variety of courses for digital engineering in Alabama and in Florida.
Cashmaster International is a manufacturer of money counting machines based in Dalgety Bay, Scotland. The company makes machines that count cash by weight, an alternative to counting cash manually or using a traditional friction based banknote counter.
The United States provided many inventions in the time from the Colonial Period to the Gilded Age, which were achieved by inventors who were either native-born or naturalized citizens of the United States. Copyright protection secures a person's right to his or her first-to-invent claim of the original invention in question, highlighted in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, which gives the following enumerated power to the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Stanford University v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., 563 U.S. 776 (2011), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that title in a patented invention vests first in the inventor, even if the inventor is a researcher at a federally funded lab subject to the 1980 Bayh–Dole Act. The judges affirmed the common understanding of U.S. constitutional law that inventors originally own inventions they make, and contractual obligations to assign those rights to third parties are secondary.
Diamond Reef System, including each individual Hover Station and the new Multi-Portal System, are trademarked, skill evaluation and safety-based diving curriculums that utilize the world's first portable, collapsible underwater obstacle course to simulate fragile reef or dive wreck structure for diver buoyancy skill and underwater photography training. A form of scuba Gymkhana, the program was designed by Pete Wallingford in 1988 to educate scuba instructors and scuba divers on how to safely teach and promote situational awareness, proper body positioning and safe interaction with coral reefs, fragile marine ecosystems and shipwrecks. The program was adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, dive store operators and dive resort/charter operators worldwide.
