Sweden’s Volvo made the three-point seatbelt design patent open and available to other car manufacturers for free, in the interest of safety. It saves one life every 6 minutes.
The man who invented the water bed was unable to patent it because it had already appeared in science-fiction novels.
In 2011, United States business entities incurred $29 billion in direct costs because of patent trolls.
It was to Western Union that Alexander Graham Bell and his co-inventors first took their patent for the telephone. But its chairman said it was “nothing but a toy”.
On July 31, 1790, the first U.S. patent is issued for a process to make potash and pearl ash (potassium carbonate).