In our recent post on the Alex Tremulis flying saucer hood ornament, we came across its design patent, which led us down the rabbit hole that is Google Patents, via which you can search through more than 7 million patents. Plug in a few keywords and you start to see that patents – especially design patents – were taken out on all sorts of sketchpad doodles that never had a hope of reaching production.
So we started, of course, with Brooks Stevens, not just because he is our favorite industrial designer, but because we’d imagine he would have most likely been familiar with the patent filing procedure. Indeed – he sketched everything from toasters to cabin boats, but we found several interesting automotive design patents from Mr. Stevens, including a teardrop-shaped streamliner (D107268), a moving van (D118221), the Excalibur J (D170171) and the Scimitar (D190475).
Next up, Norman Bel Geddes, who we profiled in an SIA Flashback a few months ago. Though not as prolific as Stevens, he also designed a wide array of gadgets, including a couple unique streamlined eight-wheelers (D90577 and D93863). John Tjaarda had a design patent as well, for a teardrop-shaped car we saw in another SIA Flashback (D94396), but he also had a few non-design patents that stretched the bounds of conventional car construction (2164096, 2208709, and 3022105).
Searching for the term Fageol brings up a whole slew of design and non-design patents from the whole clan, including a couple ideas on adding a fifth-wheel hitch to cars (D49959 and 1226958), a unit-body automobile from 1938 (2128930) and many truck and bus designs (D87875, D91556 and D169365).
Of course, many more well-known designs appear here as well, including one by a certain Bruce F. Meyers (D203745) and one by a certain P.T. Tucker (D154192).
But some of the real gems are from people unfamiliar to the collector car world. Ever hear of James R. Selzer? He was apparently a designer in the employ of International Harvester and spent most of his time thinking up innovations for pickup beds, but also sketched an odd little COE pickup (D163544). Or take Donald G. Weddell’s three wheeler (D171628) or Walter Wiggins Jr.’s jet age styled cars (D168005 and D169645).
What’s missing, of course, is the context for these designs. Some we know by sight, but some we don’t. Some became tangible constructs, some didn’t. Many were perhaps the fancy of a suburban father, lost in his subscriptions to Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated.
So what interesting designs can you discover in the reams of scanned design patents? Let us know in the comments.