Jean Reinecke. Charles Harrison. John Tjaarda. Chances are you’ve never heard of these people. But if you’ve ever used a piece of tape, or vacuumed or used a stove, you have these designers to thank.
I learned about them and their inventions in a new book by Thomas Rinaldi called Patented. The book covers 1,000 design patents, which Rinaldi narrowed down from the 750,000 patents issued to date. Rinaldi aimed to include the most recognizable design patents, and some under-recognized ones, too, including the first generation Nintendo console, the iconic Fender guitar, the Delorean made famous in Back to the Future, a 1952 bear-shaped honey bottle, the Motorola Razr flip phone, and even a 1920 ouija board. Together, the patents in this book tell a bigger story: that there’s beauty (and a lot of fun) in the objects we encounter every day but don’t necessarily think of as “designed.”
The book makes the case that the some of the dullest designs are the most worth celebrating, because they are so important to our everyday lives. Though few of the designers became household names, many were prolific in the quantity of designs they patented, sometimes over decades, and the scale of their reach.
Henry Dreyfuss, one of the most famous industrial designers of the 20th century, has 18 patents featured in the book for companies like Hoover, Whirlpool, Singer, and Bell Telephone. Raymond Loewy, another prominent industrial designer, patented a car, a train, a faucet, a globe, a fridge for Sears Roebuck, and a beverage dispenser for Coca-Cola.
Designer Jack Morgan had a similar body of work but is less well-known. “Jack Morgan was a designer in the ’30s who worked for Sears, and was someone who was as prolific as a Henry Dreyfuss or Raymond Loewy but whose name probably no one is familiar with now,” says Rinaldi. Morgan patented a range of products for Sears, including a washing machine, two portable radios, a car trailer, weighing scale, and vacuum. Jean Reinecke, or as Rinaldi calls him, the “king of the tape dispenser,” patented the classic rounded plastic tape dispenser now in desk drawers everywhere. John Tjaarda patented both a stove and toilet for Briggs manufacturing.
What you discover is that completely different types of products for completely different companies come from the mind of the same inventor. “Totally seemingly disparate types of objects have this relationship by way of the creative process,” Rinaldi says.
