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Kenji Hashimoto applied for another Japanese Patent on January 28, 1981. His

description of prior art is too humorous to pass up in this document:

Known cork-extracting devices are such that consist of a

screw rod with a handle, which screw rod is to be screwed

into the cork thereby to be pulled out. Such screw rod,

however, often screws into the cork aslant that sometimes

causes damage of the cork. In order to avoid such

inconvenience, skill is required to operate it properly. In the

worst case, the cork comes to pieces which fall into the

bottle and as the result, to uncork the bottle become[s]

difficult.

There has been proposed a cork-extracting device by which

carbonic acid gas from a gas bomb is fed into a bottle

through a probe inserted in the cork to raise the pressure

within the bottle thereby to uncork the bottle. However, no

particular contrivance has been made on this kind device

with due regard to dealing with the gas itself. In this kind of

device, an expensive gas bomb is for one-time use and can

not be repeatedly used, which is really disadvantageous in

view of economy.

Other than a resilient valve seat for the needle, it does not appear

that Hashimoto came up with anything really "new." Hashimoto was granted Japanese

Patent 57-125194 in 1982. U. S. Patent No. 4,464,596 was issued to him August 4, 1984.

Patents were also obtained in England (2,094,275), France (2,298,581), and Germany

(3,130,364).

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