Anyone can conjure up a patent for the Next Best Thing, including these four absurd gizmos

If you’ve read the news lately, or perused the weekly Law & Apple column, you’re probably familiar with Apple’s latest patent clashes in the courtroom. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are embroiled in disputes that are focused more on keeping each other from getting the upper hand rather than encouraging progress and innovation in the technology world.
 
The problem with the patent system is that it allows anyone with a vague idea to file a piece of paper denoting that “idea” as his or her property--no actual product is required to lay claim to it. As soon as you begin to delve into the patents that have been awarded, you begin to realize just how flawed the system is. No one has to actually create these devices or technologies, they just have to think them up and hire a batch of lawyers.

To help illustrate the insanity, we thought we’d look beyond the technology world and search through some of the weirder patents currently filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Seriously, you won’t believe that some of this stuff actually exists.

Time Travel

Publication Number: US 2006/0073976 A1

While the possibility of time travel is technically still up for debate--although if it could ever exist, you’d think someone would’ve come back to tell us about it by now--that didn’t stop Marlin B. Pohlman from filing a patent for a “method of gravity distortion and time displacement.” By modifying gravitational fields, Pohlman’s device hoped to change the curvature of space-time and allow travel across time. It’s not as cool, or as stylish, as the DeLorean, but it makes sense. Kind of. Then again, if this had worked he would have filed a patent for the working version of the device and Back to the Future would have been based on a true story.

Teleportation

Publication Number: US 2006/0071122 A1

Whether you’re traveling by plane, train, or automobile, trying to get anywhere can be stressful, especially when you factor in the cost of airfare and fuel. That’s why teleportation is the real future of travel--no fuss, no fuel, and instant gratification. Luckily, John Quincy St. Clair has filed a patent for a “full body teleportation system.” Thank goodness he stipulated that it’s for a “full body.” No one wants to arrive in New York missing a leg or an ear--it’d put a damper on the trip. The device uses pulsed gravitational waves to create a magnetic vortex--basically, a wormhole. Like a Stargate without all the weird hieroglyphics and space aliens.

Force Field

Publication Number: US 7482154

Of all these pie-in-the-sky patents, this one seems the closest to actually becoming a reality. Well, we’d like to think so, anyway. There are lots of people who’d really like a force field to protect them from the meanies out there. The device uses magnets to create a “diamagnetic force field at all points in space at which a magnetic field-field gradient product of the magnet has a value greater than or equal to a threshold value.” Uh, what? It gets more confusing as the patent progresses further into science speak. At no point in the patent does the inventor discuss protecting against bullets. If a force field doesn’t stop bullets, then what’s the point?

Perpetual Motion Machine

Publication Number: US 6960975

While the other patents are at least plausible in the loosest sense of the term, this one goes against the laws of the universe. It’s a spaceship, but that’s not the crazy part. Boris Volfson filed a patent for a “space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state” with a superconductor shield that changes the space-time continuum to defy gravity. Everyone seems to think that changing the space-time continuum is totally easy when drawing up patents. But this ship is basically a perpetual motion machine, which means that once it gets going, it’s never gonna stop. Kind of like the lawsuits that have sprung up around patents in the past few years.