A freighter full of 5,000 sheep capsized and sank off of the coast of Kuwait in 1964. The sheep died and started decomposing. This was unacceptable, as the scene of their putrefaction was next to the source of Kuwait's drinking water and no one wanted to drink rotten sheep.
Danish inventor Karl Kroyer solved the problem by devising a way to run a hose to the sunken vessel and to pump into it 27 million small buoyant balls, which caused the sheep ship to become shipshape and rise to the surface.
Kroyer then attempted to patent his invention in Holland, but it was rejected by the Dutch patent officers because they claimed that the idea was not original. Although Kroyer did not intentionally poach another person's work, it turns out that the patent office was correct. Specifically, the May 1949 issue of Walt Disney Comics featured the story The Sunken Yacht where Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie had used the exact same technique to fill Uncle Scrooge's sunken yacht (hence the name of the episode) with ping pong balls to raise it from the depths of the sea.
It is still unclear why the Dutch authorities were using Donald Duck comic books to conduct a patent search, but hey, they obviously knew what they were doing. Some folks have asserted that the Dutch patent office did not have the comic book in mind when it denied the patent, but the patent office itself actually gainsays these skeptics.
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| Copyright 1949 "The Sunken Yacht" by Walt Disney Corporation |
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