Every war provokes patriotic inventions. World War I was certainly no exception.

When I researched my last book, Inventing the American Dream, I spent many happy hours scanning the Design Patents in the American official gazette during the American involvement in both world wars.

This is really the only way to research them, as patriotic playing cards, for example, are indexed simply as playing cards by the classification.

The image shown on the right has been captured from the valuable Google Patents website. The only way of finding it was to insert as search terms its Design number, 51574, together with the word design. It shows Uncle Sam as the King in a pack of cards,

I didn't note the numbers at the time, but noticed similarly patriotic designs for combs, finger rings, pins (a big favourite), car radiators, easels, lampshades and photograph holders, another popular topic.

Uncle Sam turns up again as a proud eagle statue (left), by Mary Harris of San Francisco. This is Design Patent 51415.

Then there was Design 52871, which shows a child wrapped in the flag while stamping on the Kaiser (bottom right), with "Kaiser's Finish" at the bottom of the statue.

There were also the usual board games, such as the Game Apparatus which was called "Kop the Kaiser", which involved a race to Berlin.

There is also a toy, called Target, which is unfortunately missing from the Espacenet database. It is patent 1305653 and shows an American corporal striking a bemused Kaiser on the head.

All these can be searched for on the Google database...as the numbers are known.

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By Steve Van Dulken  on   Jun 26,2008

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Keywords

war    cards    patents   

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