Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, and I’m the host of the Bold Today show for you, the adventurous entrepreneur, or business owner, to get your daily dose of inspiration to help you make the world a better place. And we’re in part 4 of our aerospace set on the Bold Today show. 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.
If you’ve ever looked at an airplane from inside the airport, outside the window, you’ve probably noticed these massive engines 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. It’s caused them to compete and try to outdo each other each year, resulting in an enormous set of new inventions that get published.
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. 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.
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 in 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. 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 lines long, 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 higher value because it covers such a broad scope. You don’t need that many words to define all the narrow details about it.
This patent, the way it works and what I was able to read through, is that the exhaust is what comes on the output side of the engine. As the airplane is traveling through the air, you know, fresh clean air comes through the jet engine, it turns the turbines, goes through the heat exchanger, expels 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. 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 gonna look at a patent later, hopefully, in the show tomorrow. We’re gonna 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 show, and if you have a chance, please share it with any friends and relatives. Have a good day, go big, go bold.