Abraham Lincoln only US president ever to receive patent

Former US President Abraham Lincoln was the only president ever to have received a patent.

Lincoln had brought forth a new notion for improving river navigation and received a patent.

According to a page from ‘Sunday Morning’ Almanac, dated March 10th, 1849, Lincoln had filed a patent application for his imaginative method of ‘Buoying Vessels Over Shoals’.

According to CBS News, at the age of 22, Lincoln had been a crewman on a flatboat that got stuck on a dam at New Salem, Ill.

After another riverboat grounding incident in 1848 when he was serving as a Congressman, Lincoln got to work.

“Continual thinking on the subject of lifting vessels over sand bars and other obstructions in the water suggested to him the idea of inventing an apparatus for this purpose,” as his law partner William Herndon later wrote.

And the next year Lincoln came with a solution: a ship equipped with chambers along the side that could be lowered into the water and inflated like balloons to lift the vessel over the obstruction.

Just two months after filing his application, Lincoln received approval, making him the only US President ever to have received a patent, the report added.