John Knox's plan for insuring lives: a patent of invention in 1778

Abstract

Staple Inn and the Patent Office are only separated by the width of a garden, and it might be wondered why none of the many ingenious schemes of insurance has ever been protected by patenting it. Such protection of an idea should be impossible, as will be explained later, but in 1778 one John Knox ‘Of Richmond in the County of Surry, Gentleman’ took the first step towards such a patent by petitioning King George III ‘that with great assiduity, art and pains and after many laborious calculations and at a considerable expence’ he had invented ‘A Plan, Different to any before that Time Discovered, for Assurance on Lives from Ten to Eighty Years of Age, upon a Twofold Beneficial Principle, Making a certain provision as well for Subscribers or their Representatives upon the Death of the Person on whose Life Assurance should be made within the Term Assured for, as also by Means of a Reserved Capital for the Surviving Subscribers whose Nominees should be Living at the Expiration of such Term….’

Low Temperature Thermo Compression Bonding with Printed Intermediate Bonding Layers

“…The raw material to be deposited must be in a liquid form (viscosity between 1 cP and 1000 cP) and is first placed into an either ultrasonic or pneumatic atomizer, which is utilized to generate a dense mist of material droplets between 1 µm to 5 µm in size (10). The working principle of such an Aerosol Jet Printer can be categorized into three parts: (i) atomization of fluids, (ii) guiding the atomized material towards the deposition head and (iii) deposition of atomized material onto a substrate (11). With ultrasonic atomization and pneumatic atomization (Figure 5) the Aerosol Jet Printer 300CE uses two different atomization principles.…”

“…The used ink has 40 wt% silver particle loading (10 nm particle diameter), a sintering temperature starting at 100 °C, a viscosity of ~10 cP and is commercially available from Japanese company Bando Chemical Industries Ltd. Figure 6 shows the typical appearance of deposited Ag tracks and the ability to achieve printed features with less than 30 µm in width (10,11). Sintering of the ink was observed starting from 100 °C by SEM investigations and electrical measurements.…”