* * * * *
                                        
                   “I'm sorry, but Donald Duck did it first.”
                                        
> There is a famous story (among patent attorneys, at least) about a Donald
> Duck story being used as prior art against a patent. This concerned an
> invention in which sunken ships can be raised by pumping buoyant bodies
> into them, which eventually will provide sufficient upward lift to bring
> the ship back to the surface. In a 1949 Donald Duck story, titled The
> Sunken Yacht a ship is raised by stuffing it full of ping-pong balls. But
> whether the story was actually used by a patent office to refuse the patent
> application remains unclear.
> 

Via news from me [1], “The “Donald Duck as prior art” case [2]”

I think that's really neat, and even better, the story itself was written and
drawn by my favorite Disney cartoonist Carl Barks [3].

I also remember him doing an Uncle Scrooge [4] comic where the Ducks use old
inner tubes to raise a riverboat (a charming story about Scrooge McDuck
raising a riverboat to finish a riverboat race with a rival).

Heck, I remember another Carl Barks story which had a credible explaination
for the Flying Dutchman myth [5]. Heck, all the Carl Barks stories were
great.

[1] http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2006_11_28.html#012493
[2] http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/donaldduck/
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/01/21.1
[4] http://stp.ling.uu.se/~starback/dcml/chars/scrooge.html
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Dutchman

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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