Patently Absurd? National Archives Houses Strange Ideas
Homes are aglow with Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb. Billions have flown since Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the flying machine. But whatever happened to Charles Hess and his piano that unfolds into a bed?
Maybe Hess should have hired a good salesman.
Come to think of it, Christian Henry Eisenbrandt of Baltimore never struck it rich with his “Life-Preserving Coffin in Doubtful Cases of Actual Death.” His casket came equipped with an air vent and pop-open lid, just in case.
These and other strange fruits of Americans’ inventive genius are among hundreds of thousands of historic patent drawings and applications dating to 1790 that are stored in the National Archives.
“These drawings are graphic evidence of the American inventive spirit at the dawning of the Industrial Revolution in the farm, the factory and the home,” National Archives spokeswoman Jill Brett said. “They ranged from the sophisticated to the practical to the absurd.”
The shelves of two large warehouses in the Washington suburbs contain original patent applications for inventions that changed the world, from Cyrus McCormick’s reaper and Edison’s “electric lamp” to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.
Abraham Lincoln, while serving as an Illinois congressman in 1849, obtained Patent No. 6,467 for his own invention, “A Device for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals.” The system of inflatable bellows attached to ship hulls was inspired by Lincoln’s experiences as a young mate aboard cargo vessels that ran aground in the shallows of the Mississippi River.
Among other unusual patents were Hezekiah Thistle’s saddle for invalids, which looks like a horse-borne rocket launcher, and Richard Sealy’s steam machine for destroying bedbugs. And, of course, Charles Hess’ bedroom piano.
Hess, a Cincinnati inventor, won a patent in 1866 for the piano that unfolded into a trundle bed. It also contained a bureau and chest of drawers. The piano stool opened into a writing desk. Underneath the seat was a mirror and “lady’s work box” with pin cushion and needles.
“It has been found by actual use that this addition to a pianoforte does not in the least impair its qualities as a musical instrument but, on the contrary, adds considerably to its reverberatory power,” Hess boasted.
Eisenbrandt’s invention, patented in 1843, offered an easy solution to the undertaker’s worst mistake. It featured an air vent that would fit over the mouth of the coffin’s still-breathing inhabitant.
“Whereas there have been instances of human beings having been buried alive, the inventor of this coffin has contrived an arrangement whereby anyone who may not really have departed this life may, by the slightest motion of either the head or hand acting upon a system of springs and levers, cause the instantaneous opening of the coffin lid,” he wrote.
