Navaho Gunleg

I don’t know where exactly that I read it, but some time the previous year I read this bit about a boat that sunk, in the 1960’s or 70’s, and that it was recovered by transferring ping-pong balls into it. Yeah, it made me think of the Discovery programma MythBusters as well, but it seems this way of recovering a boat was actually once used. The guy that did it, wanted to patent it. This was impossible because, there was some prior art, literally, because the concept had once appeared in a cartoon by Disney, I believe starring Donald Duck.

I remember it well because I thought, hey, so basically all you gotta do to prevent an idea from being stolen by a big bad company, you ought to publish it on the internet, because that can be defined as published ‘prior art’. (I’m not a lawyer, but I definitely see a difference between a printed magazine and the internet so I could be all wrong there.)

The Incredible Hulk — Prometheus
Enter, the incredible Hulk. A couple of days ago I was watching an old 80’s programme, The Hulk (hey, call it nostalgia) when I noticed that the idea of ‘force feedback’ was already used in the episode ‘Prometheus‘ (it’s in 2 parts I don’t exactly remember what part it was in… could be in both).

Spoiler warning, yada yada, but it’s about this meteorite crashing to Earth, influencing Banner’s capability to fully turn back into a human…. The government sends their spooks in the form of a special tactical team, working in this facility inside a mountain dubbed ‘Prometheus’.

One of the ’specialists’ the government hires is a guy that works with robots… In part 1 of the episodes, you see him drinking something with a girl behind a glass panel — why is she behind a glass panel? I guess she’s radio-active or something. He’s pouring her glass with robotic arms which he controls which some mechanism. (I believe the director already slightly hints there that the controller of the robot feels the touch of the women touching the robotic arm on the other side of the panel.)

Later, and as I said, I’m not sure if this happens in part 1 or part 2, but this guy controls the same type of robotic arms again, from a distance.

At a certain moment, and this is the moment I’m focussing on, the Hulk pulls the robotic arms. The next thing you see is the controller being pulled from his position and falling down because of that force. Which surely implies feedback of force, now doesn’t it?

Note these episodes have been aired in 1980.

The Force Feedback Patent
Now — knowing that it was the company Immersion that went after a couple of console producers that used the force-feedback concept in their controllers, I looked around a bit and came to discover this patent describing an `Electromechanical human-computer interface with force feedback‘.

Hmm, OK, now that is interesting because it’s from 1996 (well, filed in 1995, so we’ll give them that year).

But — the episodes in The Incredible Hulk surely show an electromechanical human-computer interface too with, indeed, force feedback.

Seeing the year that this specific episodes are from, then a rough 15 years later the same concept is not at all ‘original’ and ‘innovative’ as a patent ought to be. Thinking of that ping-pong ball story, it makes me conclude the force-feedback patent is invalid because I don’t see this being any different.

Searching around a bit more, I found the story on the Donald Duck and the ping-pong balls here, it seems this prevented the patent from being approved in the Netherlands and Germany — not in the US…

But as I said, I am not a lawyer at all and I could be completely on the wrong track here… but it’s just something that I noticed.

The Incredible Hulk, Force-feedback, Prior-art