Patents are an important means for protecting ones intellectual property, and at least arguably promote scientific progress. Now and again, patent applications are filed, and sometimes issue for devices and methods that seem just a little, well, unbelievable…
United States Patent Application 20060014125 to John Quincy St. Clair entitled "Walking through walls training system" is such an application.
According to the abstract, this invention is a training system which enables a human being to acquire sufficient hyperspace energy in order to pull the body out of dimension so that the person can walk through solid objects such as wooden doors.
The idea is not new of course. Houdini walked through a wall on stage some 80 years ago. His system involved going under the wall, through a space created by lowering a trap under a carpet. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was a great believer in spiritualism and was less than consistent in following his fictional character – Sherlock Holmes' famous maxim about eliminating the impossible, refused to believe that Houdini cheated.
Britain's leading magician of the 1980s, Paul Daniels, revived the effect on TV, where he used Houdini's method to walk through a wall made of baked bean tins (that's cans for US readers).
David Copperfield walked through the Great Wall of China in one of his TV Spectaculars. I cynically thought I could see where the film was cut, but perhaps he's perfected Mr. St. Clair's technique.
So how is it done?
This is the main claim:
A training method comprising the steps of: generating a banner having a plurality of footprints spaced at regular intervals wherein the banner is placed on the ground; generating a periodic audible signal, whereby the audible signal repeats at a regular interval of time equal to the period; and walking on the banner by tracing the footprints spaced at regular intervals, wherein one step is made with each audible signal.