Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, while many are preening over the outfits and the awards given to celebrities at the Oscars, we take a look at some patents granted to celebrities which may surprise you. Who knew some of these people were also inventors?
Good ideas can really come from anyone, and celebrities are no different. Let's look at a few granted U.S. patents and their well-known inventors famous for something entirely different.
Back in the 1980's when Jamie Lee Curtis was working on Halloween movies among other hits, she was also having children. One time when changing a diaper on her daughter, she discovered she left the wipes across the room, which made for a tough conundrum of leave the messy diaper open to go get the wipes, or try to deal with the mess without wipes. So she invented and patented the Dipe and Wipe, a diaper with a pouch to hold wipes on site at all times. This patent granted in 1988 and was never heavily marketed, but it is in the public domain now for all to use, if wanted.
Neil Young is better known for his music as a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, but his passion on the side is model trains. He has a barn filled with model trains on his property. He actually held an ownership stake in the model train company Lionel for a while in the 1990s, and developed and patented several things for the company during that time. One patent covers a controller that sends signals to model train locomotives using an electromagnetic field rather than requiring actual contact with the metal track materials, which was developed to helped his son with cerebral palsy control and enjoy the trains. He also patented a model train horn system that better allowed an operator to simulate many of the locomotive noises a real train makes.
Before Bill Nye became "The Science Guy" on children's TV, he was a mechanical engineer who worked at Boeing Corporation. Just because he stopped being a full-time engineer doesn't mean he stopped inventing, and it's no surprise many of his inventions stem from the shows he produced. But one particular patent on ballet toe shoes stands out as way outside Bill Nye's normal field. When he interviewed Seattle ballet dancers who were appearing on an episode about bones and muscles, he realized the toe shoes ballet dancers use to dance en pointe could be improved to help avoid many of the injuries young women were experiencing from this dance form. His patented shoe from 2005 adds a tubular support sleeve and a particular polymer material for additional shock absorption.
The Bottom Line is, the patent field is full of inventors from all walks of life, including these celebrities who we consider to have extraordinary skill in another art. Inspiration can come from everyday problems, and those same problems being solved is precisely the type of evidence patent offices in the U.S. and other countries find persuasive when deciding to grant patents. While many look forward to the next fashion statement on the red carpet from celebs, I look forward to being surprised by new inventions these same people can come up with.
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