Patent Earth Blog

It is widely accepted that crude blades made from stone were among the first tools to be developed & used by mankind. So it comes as no surprise that the first surgical instrument would be a variation of the blade, that fundamental tool which found ubiquitous use in so many of man's earliest activities such as hunting, preparing food, making art, crafting other tools and of course our earliest attempts at medicine & surgery.

There was a brief period in the not too distant past when it seemed that mankind had explored all there was to explore. There was no body of water we had not sailed, no mass of land we had not set foot on. The entire world was mapped, from pole to pole, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and everything in between. We had explored it all. That is until the 1950's, when we set our sights on the grandest frontier of them all: Space.

Imagine an invention that could change the world for the better. An invention that could bring mankind together in harmony, solve world hunger, end pollution, and save the whales. This invention does none of those things.

The barber chair has been a fixture in barbershops for more than a century and a half, with engravings from as far back as the Civil War era showing designs not entirely unlike those still in use today.

However, the barber chair truly came to prominence around the turn of the century, when a number of patented inventions by an enterprising young man named Ernest Koken led to the basic chair design that is still in use today. Koken barber chairs dominated the first half of the century, and they remain popular today both as collectible antiques and as modern, contemporary chairs.