143

Electrified

On January 20, 1987, United States Patent Number 4,637,283 was issued for an

electric

―

Corkscrew Device.

‖

The U. S. Patent was assigned to U. S. Philips

Corporation, New York. The inventors were Leo Bertram, Stolberg, Germany;

Romuald L. Bukoschek and Peter Steiner, Klagenfurt, Austria.

The patent abstract gives this description:

A corkscrew comprises a sleeve coaxial with a corkscrew spiral and

formed to cooperate with a bottleneck provided with a cork. An electric

motor drives the corkscrew spiral by means of a reduction gear, the

corkscrew spiral being capable of being screwed into the cork in one

direction of rotation with the cork being drawn from the bottleneck

without the direction of rotation being reversed, the reduction gear

providing a reduction ratio of 60:1 to 100:1, the electric motor being a self-

starting two-pole single-phase synchronous motor with a diametrically

magnetized permanent-magnet rotor. A reversible unidirectional latch is

situated at the driven side of the corkscrew spiral for defining the

direction of rotation of the motor, such unidirectional latch cooperating

with a part of the reduction gear driven by the motor with an integral

reduction ratio. Provision is made to reverse the blocking direction of the

unidirectional latch to select one of the two directions of rotation of the

motor.

The U. S. Patent application was filed May 24, 1985. It was preceded by a patent

in Austria filed June 1, 1984 and issued September 15, 1985 (No. 380,222). The

assignee of the patent was N. V. Philips, Gloeilampenfabrieken, Eindhoven,

Netherlands.

Subsequent to the Austrian patent, the trio had received:

U. K. Patent No. 2,160,183A (filed May 29 1985; published Dec. 18, 1985)

Spain Patent 287,184 (filed May 29, 1985; issued Dec. 16, 1985)