We heard earlier this week about the passing of 102-year-old Al Jaffee, who for many years wrote for MAD Magazine, and who only retired from cartooning three years ago. His most well-known (and most consistent) contribution to MAD was no doubt the “fold-in” on the inside back cover, which was the first thing any loyal MAD reader looked at (followed by Prohias’ Spy vs. Spy, the Don Martin cartoons, Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side of…”, and the doodles in the margins by Sergio Aragones. The last things a reader would get to were the movie and TV satires).
But another feature that Jaffee did from time to time involved showing useful gadgets from the distant or not-so-distant future, like a piece on improvements in the collection and disposal of what my colleague David Klein might refer to in patentspeak as “canine exudates”. At one point MAD collected these into a book called “Al Jaffee’s MAD Inventions”, which I’m sure my brothers and I owned at one point.
From time to time I’ve wondered if any of Al Jaffee’s invention were cited as prior art during the course of patent prosecution, either voluntarily by an applicant, or even better, by the examiner under 102 or 103, but neither my brother Aaron nor I bothered looking until now. Searching for patents that list “Mad Magazine” or “Al Jaffee” as prior art yields several examples, but the only cited MAD reference I could find that was archived on the internet was from the June 1964 issue which included a piece written by Al Jaffee entitled “The Great Cigarette Filter Tip War”. The second page of that piece is listed as prior art in US patents nos. 3439685 and 3528432. Although the file histories of these two patents are not available online, if at all, the fact that the patents issued to two different inventors but were examined by the same examiner would seem to suggest that, in at least one of the cases, it was the examiner who cited Jaffee's work.