MHM wrote:What interests me the most is that S&G even bothered to patent this - it was clearly never going to get made, and patents cost money. Gives you an interesting insight into the corporate culture of the time, and makes you wonder what other patents are out there with S&G's name on them...
When you spend some time browsing patents, you notice that there are lots of things patented that have never been close to seeing commercial production. Not only locks, but essentially every area. Electronics, software (where appliciable), pharmaceuticals, etc. You also - perhaps somewhat more surprisingly - find many patents that would never hold up to a challenge in court (due to prior art, obviousness, etc).
And this goes way back (early 1900s if not earlier) and continues to this day.
I think it's basically a way of making your competitors lives more difficult by filling any potential invention space with patent hazards that at the very least have to be investigated and occasionally also worked around.
And since everyone else is doing it, you'd be at a competitive disadvantage if you didn't.
Since the major cost when patenting something is the lawyers to do the necessary investigation and write the actual patents, you can probably achieve very good economics of scale if you're a major corporation with a fully staffed in-house legal department.
The upside of course is that we get a lot more weird inventions and Rube Goldberg-style locks to study, even if only on paper and described in legalese