8 of the silliest tech patents ever

Here is a look at some of the most ridiculous technology patents ever to be filed.

While some great technologies have been patented over the years, so too have some very lame ducks. Below are some of the best – or should that be worst? – of them.

The page turn

No, it’s not April 1^st. The page turn really has been patented – by Apple. Approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) earlier this month, patent D670,713 gives the company exclusive rights over the electronic page turn. That’s right, the electronic version of something we’ve been doing with paper books for hundreds of years is now Apple’s intellectual property. It’s not the idea that makes the patent worthy of inclusion on this list, it’s the fact that something so basic could ever be patented in the first place.

Tech neck brace and belt

If you’d like to be productive while on the go, the device described in patent 6,929,164 could be exactly what you need. It’s a combination neck brace and belt that clamps a telephone next to your ear and has holders for a notepad, water bottle, cigarette pack and more. The only problem with the device is … well, you’d look like a complete goof wearing it.

Mechanical high-five simulator

You’ve just completed HALO 4′s campaign – or some other solitary activity – and feel the need to slap some skin in celebration. The problem is, you’re all alone and have nobody to share your excitement with. Awww. Enter the High-Five Simulator: a wall-mounted mechanical arm that will enable you to celebrate even when nobody else is around. The device even includes a sound system able to emit a predetermined or user-selected celebratory noise whenever the hand is struck. Yeah, baby, yeah!

Life expectancy watch

Answer a few questions about your age, state of health and whether or not you smoke, and this handy timepiece will tell you how much time you have remaining. It relies on the actuarial data used by insurance companies to calculate the date of your demise and then displays how long you have left in years, days, hours and seconds. It can even sound an alarm when the end is near. Nice.

Hip hop exercise doll

Forget about exercise DVDs! Simply pop a DVD or VHS into this device and copy hip hop moves of the exercise doll. The inventor claims the doll will “help promote significantly more exercise by children and adults.” Hmmm.

Google Doodle

Yup, Google has patented the Doodle – the versions of the Google logo that are customized to mark special events. The abstract describes the invention as a system that provides “a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page.” Is this really patent-worthy? You tell me.

Nokia’s vibrating tattoos

A tattoo that vibrates when your phone rings. Why, Nokia, why?

A time machine

How does it work? According to the patent’s abstract, the machine is:

A method for employing sinusoidal oscillations of electrical bombardment on the surface of one Kerr type singularity in close proximity to a second Kerr type singularity in such a method to take advantage of the Lense-Thirring effect, to simulate the effect of two point masses on nearly radial orbits in a 2+1 dimensional anti-de Sitter space resulting in creation of circular timelike geodesics conforming to the van Stockum under the Van Den Broeck modification of the Alcubierre geometry (Van Den Broeck 1999) permitting topology change from one spacelike boundary to the other in accordance with Geroch’s theorem (Geroch 1967) which results in a method for the formation of G{umlaut over ( )}odel-type geodesically complete spacetime envelopes complete with closed timelike curves.

Of course, it doesn’t really work, so why the heck did USPTO ever allow it to be patented?

Do you know of any weird or outrageous tech patents? If so, share them in the comments!