Just in time for the holidays, we bring you ten patented inventions designed to rock the ad world –  more than a century ago.

“Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic,” was a complaint made long before the TiVo days.

Sublime or pathetic, you decide.

“I, George McMullen, have invented a new and useful Improved Advertising Brick. The invention consists in a paving or building brick of transparent material, having an interior recess, in which a printed or other card or advertisement is placed.”

The original tweet ads! As birds adjust themselves on a perch, the contraption rotates and “the movement of the advertising disk or plate will attract attention to the advertisement thereon.”

“This invention has for its object to utilize chairs, benches, and other seats for displaying suitable advertisements. We desire it to be expressly understood that we do not seek to claim the mere attachment of and advertisement to an ordinary chair or bench.”

Ad avoidance built into the medium;  sit on it and — zap! — the ad is gone.

Considering how long a chess game takes and how the board is where everyone looks, placing ads on chess boards must have made perfect sense.  And Mr. Henry Eysenbach of Ohio, the inventor, had a solid grasp of usability principles:  by engraving ads to run in opposite directions, “the advertisements attract the attention not only of the players, but of the bystanders on either side.”

Meet advertising magic lantern, the great-grandfather of a PowerPoint pitch.

Almy Le Grand Peirce invented not only disposable paper cups we all take for granted today, but also suggested offsetting costs through selling the ad space. “A certain new and useful Ephemerous Drinking-Cup and Advertising Medium” allowed frequenters of public drinking places to avoid “the objectionable features of a successive use of one and the same vessel by a great many persons.”

Simple:  a blank scrapbook with ad pages in it, “preferably at least two other leaves”.

Improvement in Transparent Advertising-Soap: “The object of my invention is to produce a transparent soap representing business-cards or other advertising mediums”.

Interactive signage of the yesteryear: a cardboard cut-out figure with a hand that waves when the door is opened or closed.

Finally, our favorite, this invention “relates to an improvement in that branch of the art in which advertising is displayed upon floors, sidewalks, or in similar places under foot.”