In our recent post on the Alex Tremulis flying saucer hood ornament, we came across its design patent, which led us down the rabbit hole that is Google Patents, via which you can search through more than 7 million patents. Plug in a few keywords and you start to see that patents – especially design patents – were taken out on all sorts of sketchpad doodles that never had a hope of reaching production.

So we started, of course, with Brooks Stevens, not just because he is our favorite industrial designer, but because we'd imagine he would have most likely been familiar with the patent filing procedure. Indeed – he sketched everything from toasters to cabin boats, but we found several interesting automotive design patents from Mr. Stevens, including a teardrop-shaped streamliner, a moving van, the Excalibur J and the Scimitar.

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