Business Opportunities Weblog

August 2, 2007 by Dane Carlson | 4 Comments

Hi, this is Dane Carlson. Thank you for reading the Business Opportunities Weblog.

This voice post is sponsored by the HP iPAQ.

Last night, my wife and watched the season finale of American Inventor on ABC. While I think that the second the season wasn’t as good overall as the first season, something about the winning invention bugged me.

Greg Chavez, a firefighter from Camarillo, California, describes his Guardian Angel invention as,

A small, pressurized tank of water, disguised as a Christmas package, that is placed under the Christmas tree and attached to a small hose leading to the top of the tree where a fusible link is disguised as an angel. The heat from a fire pops the link and water suppresses the fire. There is also an alarm that works without a battery and is intended to suppress a Christmas tree fire and sound an alarm to get people out of the house alive.

I don’t recall where, but I seen this exact thing before.

A quick trip the Google Patent Search at and a search for “christmas tree fire extinguisher” revealed at least ten patents — most of which include the words “Christmas Tree Fire Extinguisher” in their titles!

Did no one at American Inventor take the time to check prior art? There’s even a patent from 1947, called the AUTOMATIC CHRISTMAS TREE FIRE EXTINGUISHER. I’ll read the first two paragraphs from the patent abstract and you decide.

In Inventions | 4 Comments
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