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New Quiz
The e-cigarette: smoke without the fire
This
article describes a new type of electronic cigarette
that pretends to be legal even if used indoor:
"They are already a familiar nocturnal sight on the streets of
London - huddles of windswept smokers lighting up outside pubs, clubs and bars.
Now one nightclub claims it has solved the problem, allowing smokers to get
their fix without having to sneak outside in mid-conversation. Celebrity
hangout Chinawhite in Soho is trying out Britain's first "e-cig", a
Chinese-made device that mimics the ritual of smoking but is claimed to be
entirely legal indoors.
The six-inch white plastic stick uses a battery-powered atomiser to
create realistic puffs of "smoke," while the tip glows red with each suck."
Using esp@cenet try finding
patent documents covering this type of cigarette and check how innovative this
product is.
Courtesy wikipedia
Solution to the previous Quiz
A Patent Search Challenge: the most advanced search quiz
ever published
This quiz is the most difficult ever proposed in the IPR-Helpdesk
Bulletin. It is aimed at passionate patent searchers and information freaks.
The following picture is a book excerpt that recently landed in the
hands of the quiz author.
Based on this text only, retrieve the patent antedated by the French
patent. Genuine search aficionados can try finding the French patent.
A small hint: the search for the first patent should not take more
than 2 minutes if you use the right strategy.
- As the quiz was referring to a book page, the best approach was
to identify the book. A quick Google Book Search e.g. on a passage like
"our
perfidious lawyer" would have quickly retrieved the book and its
author(s)/title: Flying Dutchman: The Life of Anthony Fokker by Anthony Herman
Gerard Fokker & Bruce Gould. See the
original cover of this book.
- The next step in finding the published patent application was a
combination of keyword-search (eg: "string wheel" or "resilient wheel")
together with the inventors name "Fokker". As there are not so many, you
quickly would have found a British patent in our databases:
GB190912193 (An Improved Resilient Wheel for Road
Vehicles.), filing date 24.05.1909, EC-class B60B9/04. Looking for French
patents before/around that date would have also revealed a French patent
application
FR403263 for the same invention but does have only
basic bibliographic data and is not yet linked to the GB document.
- Once you had the publication in question, the more difficult
part was the mentioned basic French patent (closest Prior Art). As it was not
the aim to challenge you with a full examination in a field maybe not familiar
to you, we decided to not be too restrictive in this answer.
- One approach would have been to browse through all
FR-applications published before FR403263 (or GB190912193) and classified eg
in the same EC-class B60B9/04. This would have left you with about 70 documents
that could then be verified in esp@cenet.
- From this list of documents, possible candidates from our users
replies and own results are: FR329638,
FR352199,
FR364323,
FR359659,
FR385020,
FR352199, FR383042,
FR375172, FR350634,
FR406804,
FR400925
- And finally you can see
here, how a prototype of the invention must have looked
like.
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