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Patent- Medicine Vendor: In some quarters the poem was accepted as genuine; in others it was denounced as a fraud and its alleged discoverers as impostors. To Riley's delight it proved that he was a real poet; but the stonm of protest that the ultimate disclosure aroused made him think he had ruined his future with the public. He shouldered the burden and returned to sign-painting. For a time he traveled as a sort of minstrel with a patent- medicine vendormedicine vendor and played the violin to attract crowds to be solicited to buy nostrums.
Howard Bearing Johnson was an undistinguished patent medicine salesman in 1925, when he borrowed $500 from a friend to swing the purchase of a small retail store in Quincy, Massachusetts. The primary feature of patent medicine stores in the 1920s was a soda fountain for mixing "medicinal" tonics and flavored syrups with carbonated water. Howard Johnson's soda fountain also served soft drinks concocted from flavored syrups, but his real love was ice cream. His store sold three flavors—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.
On Feb. 14, 1876, Gray filed with the U. S. Patent Office a caveat (an announcement of an invention he expected soon to patent) describing apparatus "for transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically." Unknown to Gray, Bell had only two hours earlier applied for an actual patent on an apparatus to accomplish the same end. It was later discovered, however, that the apparatus described in Gray's caveat would have worked, while that in Bell's patent would not have. After years of litigation, Bell was legally named the inventor of the telephone, although to many the question of who should be credited with the invention remained debatable.
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