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ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER
Abelman, Frayne, &Schwab
This Week In Intellectual Property History for February 20-26, 2011
On February 25, 1958, Broyhill Furniture Factories received a trademark registration for their brand of furniture:
Thomas H. (T.H.) Broyhill made his initial investment in furniture manufacturing in 1905 in Lenoir, North Carolina. In 1919, T.H. Broyhill became the majority owner of Lenoir Furniture Corporation, manufacturing bedroom and dining room furniture. As early as 1924, Broyhill began marketing its products at the new American Furniture Mart in Chicago.
Broyhill Furniture continued to grow through the early years of the 20th century. In 1926, James Edgar (J.E.) Broyhill, T.H. Broyhill's brother, established Lenoir Chair Company. This expanded the company's product line into upholstery. Through the Depression and World War II Broyhill Furniture grew. By the 1970s, Broyhill Furniture Industries, Inc. had pioneered the use of assembly line techniques and had become one of the largest and most respected state-of-the-art furniture manufacturing companies in the industry.
Interco Inc., a diversified holding company with a stable of consumer goods manufacturers, acquired Broyhill in 1980. Today, Broyhill is part of Furniture Brands International, the world's largest manufacturer of residential furniture and the parent company of Lane®, Thomasville®, Henredon®, Drexel Heritage® and Maitland-Smith®.
On February 24, 1839 William S. Otis was issued U.S. Patent No. 1,089 entitled, "Crane-Excavator for Excavating and Removing Earth." Today we more colloquially refer to this invention as the "steam shovel."
Otis, a civil engineer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, conceived of the steam shovel as a means for excavating and removing earth for building railroads and canals. The patent drawing (which was subsequently lost by the Patent Office after the issuance of the patent) showed the crane mounted on a carriage or railroad car. A load of earth could be taken up by the scraper, raised by the crane and turned to be dumped, such as in railcars, and released. The patent described how a steam engine of a kind already in ordinary use, was installed with a power control mechanism for the crane, and a system of pulleys to move its arms and bucket. It could move about 380 cubic meters of earth a day, with its 1.1 cubic meter capacity shovel and 180° slewing wooden jib. It was first used on the Western Railroad in Massachusetts.
