In one of his short stories (“Let There Be Light”), Robert Heinlein has his characters invent the “Douglas-Martin sunscreen” which works almost identical to the panels RSi has invented. The characters wind up making the technology open source because of vested interests trying to suppress it.
I don’t think Heinlein described Douglas-Martin sunscreens well enough for anyone to build one. (I should check this at some point, in my copious free time - he might have!) However, he did describe the waterbed in enough detail that the person who built the first one, and who is generally given credit as the inventor, could not get a patent on it.