SKIRMISHER

Danish inventor Karl Krøyer came up with a method of raising sunken ships by filling them with buoyant bodies fed through a tube. It was simple and brilliant, but when Karl tried to patent it, the Dutch Patent Office rejected it because they found a Donald Duck magazine (1949, The Sunken Yacht) in which Donald and his nephews raised a ship by filling it with pingpong balls shoved through a tube. Quite simply, as “an invention has to be new to be patentable, the application was refused.”

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