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By J.D. Houvener
Patent Attorney and Founder

Hi, everyone! I’m J.D. Houvener, and I’m the host of The Bold Today’s Show, where you, the adventurer, entrepreneur, or business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to help you make the world a better place. We’re in part 4 of our aerospace set on The Bold Today’s Show, and today we’re going to talk about airplanes, of course, but I want you to think about not just airplanes but what’s attached to them—those gigantic monstrosity engines, right?

If you’ve ever looked at an airplane from inside the airport, outside the window, you’ve probably noticed these massive engines. They are quite a piece of work, and if only you could see under the hood to see how those jet engines are actually made, you’d really appreciate the innovation that goes into them. There are four big air engine manufacturers in the world today. That’s it: Rolls-Royce, General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Safran. Now, having four big competitors is actually a good thing for innovation, and it’s caused them to compete and try to outdo each other, resulting in an enormous set of new inventions that get published every year from each of them.

So, we’re going to talk about just one, and it’s hilarious because this invention is actually owned by Boeing, probably to sort of tease these engine companies into doing even better. So before we get to that, I do have a challenge for you. Next time you’re at the airport, I want you to look out the window and try to see if you can tell which of those four manufacturers actually made the airplane engine. It’s labeled right there on the side.

Now, the invention topic of the day is about this invention. What you see here is, and I’m not making this up, this is a jet exhaust laser system. Okay, this technology is a new species; they call it. This is the first of its kind and is incredibly novel. I stumbled on it just when I was looking to prepare for this and was able to see that there was actually zero references cited and only one patent document that was relevant enough to even put on the application. What that says to me as a practitioner is that there’s really no other prior art out there on this subject.

To go beyond that, I took a look at the claims set, and that’s what you should do as well as if you were to open up this patent. We can look at it if we get a chance. Look at claim one; it’s just five or six lines long. That’s it. That’s a huge indicator when you’re looking at a patent claim—the fewer the words, the smaller the claim means that it’s more powerful, it has some higher value because it covers such a broad scope. You don’t need that many words to define all the narrow details about it.

So, this patent, the way it works and what I was able to read through is that the exhaust comes on the output side of the engine. As the airplane is traveling through the air, fresh, clean air comes through the jet engine, turns the turbines, goes through the heat exchanger, exports that as thrust right through velocity forward. The output, after it burns up the energy, is exhaust, much like you have in your automobile exhaust. Well, in an airplane moving at that speed, exhaust moves extremely quickly, and what scientists have found, and obviously through this patent, is that it moves so quickly that it can be convertible into a laser beam.

Now, in the patent talked about this morning, I didn’t get a chance to read into all the details, but what they said is that through a series of mirrors, this laser can be focused and for military applications could be focused on a target either on the ground or in the air. Pretty wild, huh? So, have a look at this one. We’re going to look at a patent later, hopefully in the show tomorrow. We’re going to look at a huge claim set. You’ll better see the difference between a broad, which is this one, or a narrow claim. So, I hope you enjoyed this version of The Bold Today’s Show, and if you have a chance, please share it with any friends and relatives. Have a good day! Go big, go bold.

About the Author
J.D. Houvener is a Registered USPTO Patent Attorney who has a strong interest in helping entrepreneurs and businesses thrive. J.D. leverages his technical background in engineering and experience in the aerospace industry to provide businesses with a unique perspective on their patent needs. He works with clients who are serious about investing in their intellectual assets and provides counsel on how to capitalize their patents in the market. If you have any questions regarding this article or patents in general, consider contacting J.D. Houvener at https://boldip.com/contact/