The INOV8 blog tracks the latest news and trends in technology and innovation throughout the world
August was a busy month for Arkansas patents. The U.S. Patent Office issued 21 patents to Arkansas inventors and entrepreneurs in August. A normal month sees two or three per week come out of Arkansas, which is comparable to other states that share our size and demographics.
But Arkansas expanded its chest a little in August. Among the 21 patents issued this past month were these doozies, each of them impressive in their own right, from the serious:
To the interesting if not quirky:
Oh, and there were also a couple of “bags.” (Eventually, one would think, humanity will run out of innovations for bags/totes/purses, etc.)
Occasionally, INOV8 selects an Arkansas Patent of the Month, and August is an all-you-eat buffet. With all due respect and gratitude to the awesome work being performed by Arkansas university scientists in the areas of cancer research, our patents of the month lean to the quirky side. That said, the Patent of the Month for August is Edward Horn’s “high rise evacuation system.”
Horn, from Hot Springs Village and presumably a retiree, came up with this system:
A system for the evacuation of persons from high rise structures in an emergency, said system being secured to a vertical wall of said structure comprising:
a pair of upstanding vertically oriented discrete tubular posts each attached to said vertical wall; said posts being in close proximity to one another;at least one evacuator, said evacuator affixed by means of upper and lower sleeves circumscribing said one of said posts for controlled vertical movement along substantially the length thereof; said evacuator adapted to receive an evacuee securely thereon;a brake mounted to said evacuator and selectively engageable with said post to control the rate of movement of said evacuator relative thereof;controls on said evacuator, actuatable by an evacuee thereon to control the pressure applied by said brake to said post and, thus, controlling the rate of movement of said evacuator;said system being segmented such that said posts are extensible over a predetermined distance, such post segments being laterally offset from one another and each said post segment vertically overlapping with a successive post along said vertical wall to or toward ground level;a cable attached to said evacuator, said cable extending to said other post; a weight at the other end of said cable, said weight acting as a counter balance to said evacuator to return said evacuator to its start position once evacuees have left said evacuator.
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