From Tony Marshallsay
For many years there has been freely available in the market a fairly large solar panel (which could act as a sunshade) intended for charging a car battery via the cigar lighter socket (do these devices still exist in this anti-smoking age?). The Lucent application should therefore fail due to this “prior art” (19 February, p 25).
After all, it was the US patent office which rejected a patent application for raising sunken ships by filling them with ping-pong balls, on the grounds that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had already published the idea.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
