Inventions and Patents

One of the documents I have inherited from my maternal grandfather is a George V Patent, No. 14544/12 dated 21 June 1912. My grandfather, Arthur, a Provisions Salesman, and his brother Wesley, a Grocer, invented "An improved machine for cutting cheese and like substances". Interestingly it is the only document I have which gives me my grandparents' address at that date.

Google 'scholar' searches for articles and patents found under a particular surname. 'McIlhagga' produces 'about 570' entries, mostly articles from five academics. 'McIlhagger' produces 'about 253' entries , all articles by three academics. There are however, three interesting 'inventions', for which patents were sought by McIlhaggas, and which we can say are part of our clan history.

They are as follows:

Net mass liquid filler, US Patent 5,996,650 of Dec 7, 1999, by Scott McIlhagga and five others.

'Liquid filling apparatus and method of producing a fill or dose of a defined quantity of liquid based upon the mass of the liquid. In one embodiment, a servo motor driven rotary positive displacement pump is used to produce flow through a Coriolis mass flow meter to feed a positive shut-off filling nozzle, wherein mass flow data from the meter is used to control the servo motor-pump-nozzle to produce a precise fill dose of liquid based upon its mass'.

This device appears to have had a predecessor, a High Speed beverage dispensing method and apparatus, US Patent dated Dec 30, 2003.

Design for a Razor Blade, US Patent 92,361 of Feb 28, 1934 (In Great Britain No. 50,869, of Nov. 10, 1933), by George Robinson McIlhagga: 'Be it known that I, [GRMcI], a subject of the King of Great Britain, and a resident of the city of Belfast, Ireland, have invented a new, original, and ornamental Design for a razor Blade... (as shown)'. I have referred to this invention in my blogs of 17 Sep last year and 22 April this year.

A Data Processing System, International Application PCT/IE2003/000105 of 23 Jul 2003, by Elaine McIlhagga and two others. 'A data processing system is programmed with objects according to the object-orientated architecture. Each object is for implementing an event, which for financial securities processing is often referred to as a corporate action. An object has a container containing a series of masks, all at the same level, in a flat structure. Each mask has four binary bit flags, each switching on or off a pre-stored unit of executable code for an asynchronous transaction. Initialisation or modifications of the system involves only processing through a series of decisions and setting mask flags accordingly'. The IE in the application number must indicate that this invention is from Ireland.