Thanksgiving Post: turkey patents
Some patents to lighten up your holiday
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. We know you are likely taking Thanksgiving off. So this week’s edition of Nonobvious is keeping it light: instead of our normal deep-dive and weekly novelties, we’re going to cover something fun you can bring to the Thanksgiving table: some patents relating to turkeys! Gobble gobble, everyone.
Our first turkey patent is for a product you can buy: the Presto ProFry turkey cooker. It is a combined turkey fryer-rotisserie, and its patent was granted in 2020. Because it constantly rotates the turkey, it cooks the turkey in just an hour with very little oil, thus also making the process healthier and safer. Truly, if there was ever a protection worth inventing, it was this. And if you want to show your family the usefulness of patents, I learned about the existence of this product by way of seeing this patent, and I found the actual product by looking up the assignee, Presto.
Given that the prosecution history cited insufficient drawings in the initial non-final rejection, the issued drawings look very good, and quite similar to the final product!
There are other cooking related turkey patents, of course. This turkey flipper patent, for example, is delightful. And this turkey fryer patent, which is more traditional but has splatter protection for safety, is also a fun to read.
There are also quite a few biotech related patents relating to turkeys, specifically recombinant turkey herpesvirus. Some of the early patented uses of turkey herpesvirus is vaccines from the 1990s.
But that is on the serious side. The most fun, and seemingly voluminous, category of pure turkey patents seems to be patents relating to hunting. Many inventors, for example, think they have discovered a better turkey call, and want to patent it.
But by far, my favorite is the turkey decoy patents.
There are so, so many fun turkey decoy patents. This one, which is one of my favorites, puts two turkeys on a rotatable spool to try and imitate two turkeys undergoing a mating dance. Many patents, like this one, this one, and finally this one, focus primarily on the tail. (Evidently, turkeys notice each other in the distance by looking for the distinctive turkey tail.) One particularly unique patent discloses a decoy that is a full turkey, but uses elastic straps to create realistic tail movements.
There are many more turkey patents to share—over 100,000 of them—but for that, we leave it to you. Go find a fun turkey patent and share it with us!
From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving. We’ll see you next week with more patent news and IP views. You might see some AI in light of all the related news this week.
