A few months ago my friends and I got into a debate about China's plan to bring a torch up to Mt. Everest. Climbing the mountain is hard enough, but bringing a torch as well? And how would the torch even continue to burn in the oxygen poor, windy, snowy conditions of the mountain? So, in some down time, I drew a schematic for how I would design an Olympic Torch Backpack. My friend Shelley blogged about it, to some moderate success. Now, I usually take jokes way beyond the point they need to be, so late one night after a couple beers I submitted the olympic torch backpack to the tech-transfer office here at the University of Michigan.
My e-mail:
Hello Tech Transfer Office,
I am a graduate student in Daryl Kipke's Neural Engineering Lab at UM, and my friends and I got in a recent discussion about the 2008 Winter Olympics. It turns out the Chinese Government plans to carry the Olympic Torch up to the peak of Mt. Everest. This, of course, got the engineering head of mine thinking about how you would actually get a torch up to the oxygen thin windy snowing conditions of the mountain. I drew up a schematic, and my colleagues suggested I submit it to your office. Imagine a UM logo on an olympic torch on Mt. Everest!
My question is: is it worth patenting? I know you have a disclosure form on your website, but for this kind of thing I thought it would be best to contact you directly in this fashion.
Sincerely,
Tim Marzullo
I am a graduate student in Daryl Kipke's Neural Engineering Lab at UM, and my friends and I got in a recent discussion about the 2008 Winter Olympics. It turns out the Chinese Government plans to carry the Olympic Torch up to the peak of Mt. Everest. This, of course, got the engineering head of mine thinking about how you would actually get a torch up to the oxygen thin windy snowing conditions of the mountain. I drew up a schematic, and my colleagues suggested I submit it to your office. Imagine a UM logo on an olympic torch on Mt. Everest!
My question is: is it worth patenting? I know you have a disclosure form on your website, but for this kind of thing I thought it would be best to contact you directly in this fashion.
Sincerely,
Tim Marzullo
And a month later the response:
Subject: olympic torch design
Hi Tim,
Your email was forwarded to me! Very ingenious design :-) However, since the design has been published online on www.seedmagazine.com, it has been publicly disclosed. Based on patent laws, once an invention has been publicly disclosed, it is no longer patentable in any countries except for the US. As a result we feel that we will not be able to get enough patent protection even if we decided to pursue this.
Please feel free to give me a call if you have any additional questions, I'd be happy to discuss this with you.
Nadine
Hi Tim,
Your email was forwarded to me! Very ingenious design :-) However, since the design has been published online on www.seedmagazine.com, it has been publicly disclosed. Based on patent laws, once an invention has been publicly disclosed, it is no longer patentable in any countries except for the US. As a result we feel that we will not be able to get enough patent protection even if we decided to pursue this.
Please feel free to give me a call if you have any additional questions, I'd be happy to discuss this with you.
Nadine
Tech Transfer Office
University of Michigan
Oh well. It was a fun exercise. But, yesterday the Chinese actually did bring the torch up Mt. Everest. Unfortunately, they cheated a bit. They simply lit the torch on the peak, rather than carrying it up the whole way. If I had known of that less stringent technical requirement, I would have just made the torch out of gunpowder, since gunpowder has its own oxidizer built in and will even burn in outerspace. China went about it a different way and made their torch to burn on propane, which evidently will still burn at the lower oxygen density of 28,000 ft.
You can see the whole shenanigans via youtube.
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