Pimp my arm 

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The patent system, like the copyright system, was designed to protect, reward and thereby foster innovation. Patents grant inventors the exclusive right to produce and sell their inventions -- but only for a limited time, and only if the inventors share with the public a written description of their invention, in sufficient detail that another skilled person could recreate it.

In theory, the patent system encourages people "to stand on each other's shoulders in some sense to further innovation," Webb says. "Innovation is really a communal process, and you have to have something that gets people talking to each other, understanding what they're doing in a way that allows them to build on their ideas and advance things societally."

While that concept isn't popular among most pharmaceutical, aerospace and technology companies, Webb believes using patents in that way can give a boost to industries, like prosthetics, where innovation is lagging behind.

A related Tackle endeavor is the All Patents Initiative, which is in the process of digitizing a vast archive of patents -- nearly 4 million in all -- filed with the U.S. Patent Office between 1790 and 1976. While the U.S. Patent Office has kept digital records of patents after 1976, those before that date have languished, virtually inaccessible, scanned in and made into TIFF image files, the text unsearchable. Thanks to a partnership with the Internet Archive, HP Labs and Duke University, those documents are being made searchable through optical character recognition and will eventually include metadata (general information about the documents) that will help inventors and scholars learn about the history of innovation by allowing them to peruse the vault of American ideas. A beta version of the search, encompassing all patents between 1836 and 1925, is up at search.allpatents.org. (Plug in "artificial limb," and you'll find that not much has changed since 1919.)

When Ken Heide, a prosthetist in Fargo, N.D., heard about the Open Prosthetics Project, he saw his chance to get the Trautman hook back on the market. The Trautman hook is a terminal invented in the early 20th century, manufactured in Minneapolis by the Paul Trautman company. It was especially popular with Midwestern farmers, Heide says, because the hook can bear the weight involved in farm labor. "As crude a device as it is, it has an advantage of an interlocking finger pad. The fingers have little serrated teeth. That's a mechanical advantage for people who want to grab ahold of something and hang on." For some reason, it stopped being manufactured sometime in the 1980s.

Heide is an old-school practitioner of orthotics and prosthetics. He learned from his father, a below-the-knee amputee, how to carve wooden legs, feet and sockets and how to mold leather-laced prostheses. "The old art has not been lost," he says. That's why the old-timers come to him. People tend to prefer the prosthetic devices they're used to, and he's had more than one patient with an $8,000 state-of-the-art leg and gel liner come in and ask him to replace it with the old-fashioned model, which run $5,000 at the most. "In this profession, the trade secrets are not what you know, it's how did you do it?" Heide says.

click to enlarge

• Derek Anderson
• Kuniholm watches as Messer moves from Legos to computer-assisted design to develop the device.

He's observed a fierce devotion to the Trautman hook among his patients over the years. When bringing one in for repair, they'd wait four or five hours rather than leave it at the shop. "There's like a black market out there for these terminal devices," Heide says. Having obtained Paul Trautman's blessing, Heide estimates he's spent approximately $10,000 of his own money over the past three and a half years trying to bring it back.

He started by contacting tooling shops and engineering firms. They wanted money up front to pay for the development and prototyping. He tried that, with poor results. Tackle didn't ask for a consulting fee; they wanted him to contribute the design to OPP. "He was willing to do whatever he could to further the process of getting these hooks made," Kuniholm says. "And because he agreed to open source it and let us publish the design, we agreed to do the reverse engineering for free."

Heide gave the designers a couple of the best hooks he could borrow. They reverse-engineered them, creating a Computer Assisted Design model they could then improve upon. Finally, the CAD design was presented to a metal manufacturing company, which produced a prototype. Now Heide can take orders for the device; he needs at least 10 orders to have a batch made, and he expects to sell them for about $700 each. Heide guesses he'll sell between 100 and 200 a year. "Those guys over there did a fantastic job," he says. The CAD design is available for free at the OPP site. It's the closest OPP has come to producing a prosthetic device that's been put to use.