Inventors and Patents From the City of Midland

Midland has produced many innovators in many different fields, including automobiles. For instance, Jim Hall, a native of Midland, was the founder of Chaparral Cars, which developed innovative automotive designs that were a hit in the Indy car racing industry.

Inventorship

Inventorship is the process of bringing an idea from the imagination to reality. The city of Midland is home to more than 100 places of worship, earning it the nickname, the “City of Beautiful Churches.” The city also has a volunteer center that recruits up to 2,000 volunteers each year. The United Way of Midland County supports 25 nonprofits in the city. The following professional sports teams are based in the city:

Inventorship is not shared by everyone in an invention. A patent attorney must determine who is an actual inventor and who is merely a co-inventor. The patent attorney will examine the co-inventors’ contributions and decide whether they contributed to the conception of the invention. For an individual to be considered an inventor, they must have contributed a substantial amount of time to the conception of the idea.

If there are two or more people involved in the invention, each of them must make at least one claim. There is no need for the two of them to have worked together at the same time or in the same place. Each of them should have made some sort of inventive contribution to the invention.

Inventing

There are several notable inventions in Midland. In the 1920s, the Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company invented pneumatic tyres for buses. The company also invented petrol and diesel engines. By the 1940s, they were developing under-floor engined single-deck buses. They also developed rubber suspension and glass fibre construction. In the 1950s, disc brakes and high-speed buses were developed, along with passenger toilets.

Patenting

The Midland area has a rich history of inventions. Jim Hall created the world’s most extreme race car in Midland, and Ken Nolan created a new way to increase oil well productivity. In the last decade, Midland has experienced an increase in patents. Between 2009 and 2019, the city registered nearly two-thousand patents. But the number is expected to drop slightly in 2020.