Weird Earl’s today is pointing to Alex Chiu’s website. Alex Chiu is a major quack, as has been pointed out on these boards in the past.
At any rate, Alex Chiu has a legitimate patent (legitimate in that it’s registered with the US Patent Office; I checked - it’s number 5,989,178 and you can read it here.) on a “Magnetic Ring”.
The first part of the claim within the patent states:
Well, it goes on from there. I was under the impression that to get a patent approved, you needed to demonstrate that it works. How do you demonstrate that something bogus like this works (i.e. does what it purports to do; mainly, inrease health of the human body)?
To my knowledge, you don’t have to prove an invention works to patent it. I recall in some compendium of strange facts a list of the weird patents that had been granted. One was for a “baby pacifier” that was designed to hook onto a crib and periodically pat the baby on the butt while the baby blissfully snoozed. It came complete with illustrations. Rube Goldberg would’ve been proud.
So your challenge, Mr. Chiu, in order to prove the validity of your claim, is to hop up on this operating table, put on these magnetic rings, and then we’ll stop your heart and see how well the magnetic flux thingy really works.
I don’t think the devices have to “work” to be patented, they just have to be operable as described in the application. What I mean is that a device would have to be buildable and operable (wearable in this case), but not actually have to produce the supposed benefits that the inventor claims. Health claims are probably much more difficult to verify than the engineering claims I deal with.
I know this because I meet with people asking advice on all sorts of devices for improving energy efficiency of various systems, and at least 90% of them won’t do anything like what the salespeople tell them they will do (which is good because most often they violate well understood physical laws.) The 10% that actually do something usually have a secondary feature that makes it unlikely to ever be cost effective.
Most have patents listed on them, but checks of the patents usually show they are for a manufacturing process related to the device, an artistic case design, or in some cases something totally unrelated to the devices. The ones with the patents on the devices seem to accomplish what the designer was attempting to accomplish, but that doesn’t have to produce the benefits that they claim it will produce at all. In other words a refrigerant additive that claims to improve heat transfer across the coils might actually do that, but it will not increase the system’s capacity or decrease the required horsepower to produce the same ammount of cooling, which are the benefits claimed in the patent application.
I hope this makes sense. It seems kind of odd to me because the benefits aren’t always seperated from the design and intended operation, but it is how I think of it.
A perpetual motion or free energy machine has to run continuously for one year at the patent office before a patent is granted, right? How come other machines are not made to prove themselves? Like this ring of Alex Chius for instance.
In the last years of the 19th century, a patent lawyer named George B. Selden patented a gasoline-engine propelled horseless carriage. He kept renewing his patent, and when Henry Ford came out with his first commercial automobile, Selden sued him for infringement.
The important thing is that this was a case where patent law actually held back innovation, ans Selden had NEVER actually build a working model!
He just used his patent rights to extort money from people who actually built cars!
So it needs to have a useful purpose. One would assume that this purpose would be stated in the claim. Nowhere in the claim is adornment mentioned (although it is mentioned in reference to an earlier patent for a similar device). Don, what you said makes sense, but it appears to contradict what the Patent Office says…
BTW, it appears that my original link to the patent is broken, and I’ve been unable to paste it in. If you want to see it, go here and search for patent 5,989,178.
The Patent Office doesn’t have the staff (or expertise) to evaluate everything sent to them to be patented. So they don’t usually require a working model.
In the case of a perpetual motion machine, the model requirement is a way to discourage a flood of applications. It’s a rather elegant solution to the problem.
This is a learning experience for me. My response was based on my experiences dealing with cranks and charlatans. RC’s response seems to make sense in that it would be impossible to have a staff of cutting edge researchers just to do reality checks.
I think the key factor here is a lot more simple, though. It appears that a device need only have one acceptable use for it to be considered “useful”. It is probably why the magnets were put in ring form rather than something less common that would be more difficult to claim as art. Lots of people wear rings, right? So they must have some use. The things he is selling certainly operate like rings, so I think they meet the minimum requirements.
From the patent:
ACCORDINGLY, AN OBJECT of the present invention is to provide a magnetic ring that avoids the disadvantages of the prior art.
ANOTHER OBJECT of the present invention is to provide a magnetic ring that is simple and inexpensive to manufacture.
STILL ANOTHER OBJECT of the present invention is to provide a magnetic ring that is simple to use.
This ring clearly isn’t like those prior artistic rings that have all those disadvantages. It is simple and inexpensive to manufacture, and easy to use on top of all that. Now, I don’t personally know of anyone who has difficulty using rings, but it is good to hear of people making strides in ring usability for the less-gifted ring users out there.
It is crap, but it fits with the other patented devices I have seen. It does something useful as specified in the patent, just not neccesarily everything useful claimed in the patent. If a device has no real useful value then they seem to patent a design on the case so they have a patent number to put in the advertising.
Certain the ‘useful’ argument must fall apart for some items like new drugs for example. Maybe it cures my infection but since your infection doesn’t respond to it, or worse yet, you have an allergic reaction, it does nothing for you and thus, is not useful.
In fact, in drug research, we generally patent the drug after only a minimal number of rat studies. Certainly you want it well in the books before human testing begins. Yet the drug may crap out, or only be ‘useful’ in a certain sub-population. Using this argument, no one would ever be able to patent any but the most benign drugs like aspirin.
I thought you had to provide a working/running model and the pattent office would check to see if it ever stops. If it stopped you don’t get it, if is was still running they would wait some more.
