Did Donald Duck foil a patent application?
Back in the old days, when patent examiners actually did their job and only granted patents to genuinely novel and useful inventions, a Donald Duck comic may have undone a patent application:
There is a famous story (among patent attorneys, at least) about a Donald Duck story being used as prior art against a patent on a method of raising a sunken ship. A 1949 Donald Duck story used the same technique.Link (Thanks, Javier!)How do you quickly raise a sunken ship full of sheep? The Danish inventor Karl Krøyer came up with a very creative solution: pump buoyant bodies into the ship to achieve sufficient upward lift to bring the ship back to the surface. The solution was so creative he got a patent on it. In a 1949 Donald Duck story, titled The Sunken Yacht a ship is raised by stuffing it full of ping-pong balls. That kind of prior art could kill the patent. But whether the story was actually used by a patent office to refuse the patent (application) remains unclear.
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wasn't there a mythbusters episode about using ping pong balls to raise a sunken ship?
indeed there was, and it was based on the very same Donald Duck strip. They did actually raise the ship.
There was a good article on this at the Comics Should Be Good site: Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #73 with the illustrations from the comic in question.
Wow... I knew I voted for the right guy. WTG DONALD!
I seem to remember Dortmunder attempting to raise a coffin from the bottom of a reservoir using the same idea in Donald Westlake's Drowned Hopes. Hilarity ensued.
Leonardo da Vinci seems to have been the first to think of the idea. See page 13 of Mark Roshiem's book ' Leonardo's Lost Robots':
http://www.scribd.com/doc/323708/Leonardos-Lost-Robots