Actors You Didnt Know Were Twins

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Prince. musician Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson). Prince WELCOME 2 AMERICA tour. Exclusive North American Performances, 2010-11 — PRNewsFoto/42 Due west/AP Images

Since 1790 there take been more than viii million patents issued in the U.South. Some of them have been given to great inventors. Thomas Edison received more 1,000. Many have been given to ordinary people who thought of a better mode of doing things. And a few have been given to people you wouldn't retrieve of as the lone inventor toiling in a garage, hoping to change the earth. See the motion-picture show stars, pop singers, and even a boxing champion and their inventions.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson, 1996.
Phil Walter—Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In the video for his 1987 vocal "Smoothen Criminal," Michael Jackson leans forward at an incommunicable gravity-defying bending. This was done with cables hooked up to a harness Jackson wore effectually his waist. However, he couldn't do this onstage, since information technology would require stagehands to hook and unhook him. Jackson invented a system whereby a hitch could come through the stage floor that he would and so grab with a slot in the heel of his shoe. Jackson patented this method with Michael Bush and Dennis Tompkins in 1993.
Florence Lawrence

Florence Lawrence was the kickoff movie star. She began in movies in 1906, and soon she was working at Biograph Studios with manager D.W. Griffith. Films oftentimes did not have credits, simply Lawrence became a favorite with audiences, who knew her as "the Biograph daughter" and later every bit "the IMP daughter," when she switched studios. In 1914 she invented a plow signal for automobiles. "I accept invented an 'auto-signaling arm,' " she said, "which, when placed on the back of the fender, tin can be raised or lowered past electrical push buttons. The one indicating 'finish' works automatically whenever the foot restriction is pressed." She was non the kickoff to invent such a device, and she did not patent it. Her mother, Charlotte Bridgwood, invented and patented the electric windshield wiper in 1917.
Marlon Brando

The Wild One
Marlon Brando in The Wild Ane (1953), directed by Laslo Benedek.
© Columbia Pictures Corporation

Toward the cease of his life, Marlon Brando, who had been an avid drummer, worked on patenting a new conga pulsate that, instead of beingness tuned by five or six screws at the top, could be tuned by but a single crank at the lesser. Beginning in 2002, Brando received iv patents for his drum-tuning system. However, he died in 2004 earlier he could achieve his dream of seeing his invention actually enter product. In 2011 drummer Poncho Sanchez actually played one of the Brando drums. "It sounded pretty skillful," he said, merely, when asked about its practicality, "It'd be too expensive to brand and people would be sending it back all the fourth dimension.…Merely it was a cool thought."
Prince

Prince
Prince.
© Dave Hogan—All Action/Retna Ltd.

About the time he changed his proper noun to a symbol and became "the creative person formerly known as Prince," the Purple One designed a keytar that, with its swooping curves and arrows, resembled his new proper name. Prince never played the musical instrument—dubbed the Purpleaxxe—himself, and it was his keyboardist Tommy Barbarella who wielded the new invention. Prince received his patent as "Prince R. Nelson" in 1994.
Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In September 1940 a High german U-Boat sank the British freighter City of Benares; 262 died, including 87 children who were being evacuated to Canada. Hedy Lamarr, one of the top stars in Hollywood, began wondering how to make a remote-controlled torpedo that could attack a submarine. Nonetheless, how could the torpedo avoid having its control signal jammed? During her disastrous marriage to Austrian arms dealer Fritz Mandl, whom she fled to arrive in Hollywood in 1937, she had learned much near armaments, especially torpedoes and radio jamming. She devised a system that she worked out with her friend, avant-garde composer George Antheil, in which a piano coil could switch the control signal among 88 different frequencies. They received a patent in 1942, but the U.South. Navy was unenthusiastic. Lamarr and Antheil's patent expired in 1959, simply their method, at present known as spread-spectrum engineering, became widespread in wireless technology like Wi-Fi. In the late 1990s Lamarr finally received recognition for her invention. Since her expiry in 2000, she has become as well known every bit an actress and an inventor.
Jack Johnson

Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson.
UPI/Bettmann Archive

At the height of racial segregation in 1908, Jack Johnson was the first black man to get the world heavyweight champion in boxing. In 1912 Johnson was arrested nether the Mann Human activity for taking his white girlfriend Lucille Cameron, whom he later married, across state lines "for immoral purposes." He was sentenced to ane year in prison house, simply he and Lucille fled to Europe. Johnson returned to America in 1920 and served his sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas. While in prison, Johnson invented an improved wrench that could be easily taken apart for cleaning and repair. He received his patent for it in 1922.
Eddie Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen
Eddie Van Halen, 1986.
© Ross Marino/Retna Ltd.

The lead guitarist of Van Halen, in add-on to beingness a metal god, has received 3 patents for his inventions. Fresh from the success of the 1984 album, in 1985 Eddie Van Halen devised the most rocking of his inventions, a "musical instrument support," U.Due south. patent 4656917A, in which a guitar rests hands-free on a support attached to the histrion's waist, "thus allowing the actor to create new techniques and sounds previously unknown to any player."