Hello! Today, I am releasing a new major feature for Admiral Shark's Keyboards, a place to store patents relating to IBM's keyboard history! I technically had a page like this before, but it never got developed well and I basically never promoted it. But I have been wanting something like this for a while to serve as a new sources database and a reference for the inventors and designers behind certain things. There are now 150 recorded patents, so I picked this nice round number to launch with!
https://sharktastica.co.uk/topics/patents
Besides the practical use for my research and future articles, it is also doubles as a lovely gallery. Whatever you may think of a patent system/the concept of patents (etc.), I think it is hard to deny some of these illustrations are wonderful and are (near if not) public domain. Throughout the last two months whilst I was searching and making a list of potential patents to include, I have spent many hours just admiring the things I'm seeing and looking out for who is doing what since I saw a lot of names coming up again and again as inventors. In particular, I've enjoyed the work of
Eliot Noyes, who was known for designing the IBM Selectric. A lot of the Selectric design patents are amazing. I think the original IBM Selectric I is amongst the most beautiful devices ever conceived.
I also recommend checking out
Peter J. Mendel, and
Kazuhiko Yamazaki if you're a ThinkPad fan.
Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!
FYI: Just to make things clear, most of the database is
design patents instead of
utility patents. It will likely always be like this, but there are certainly more utility patents I want to add in the future.
