Unusual Patents Nintendo’s D-Pad Patent: How a Plastic Cross Controlled the Game Industry for 20 Years
Nintendo invented the directional pad. That small plastic cross first appeared on the Game & Watch Donkey Kong in 1982, ...
Unusual Patents
Unusual Patents 
Unusual Patents Why Tesla Gave Away Its Patents — and What It Actually Kept
In 2014, Elon Musk announced Tesla would not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone using its technology in good faith....
Unusual Patents How Google’s PageRank Patent Decided the Search Engine Wars
In 1998, Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed PageRank — an algorithm ranking web pages by the num...
Unusual Patents How Dyson’s Cyclone Patent Disrupted the Vacuum Industry for 15 Years
In 1983, after 5,127 prototypes, James Dyson completed the first bagless cyclone vacuum cleaner. For the next 15-plus ye...