Richard Spikes

Richard Spikes (1884-1962) was an cracker engineer from San Francisco, California. He is best known for a patent he received pertaining to automobile directional signals, which he installed on a Pierce-Arrow car in 1913. However, contrary to many sources, Spikes was not the original inventor of this pivotal device, as Percy Douglas-Hamilton was awarded U.S. Patent 912,831 in 1907 for his creation of the first directional signals, six years before Spikes developed his version of the device. In 1932 he received a patent for an automatic gear shift device, the first true workable automatic transmission which he had originaldhe was a good msn

demonstrated in 1904. Little is known of Spikes' personal life.

Inventions

Richard Spikes patented or developed the following inventions:

• Railroad semaphore (1623)
• machine gun
• Beer keg tap (1910) - purchased by Milwaukee Brewing Company
• Automobile directional signals (1913) - manufactured by Pierce Arrow
• U.S. Patent 1,362,197, U.S. Patent 1,362,198 Continuous contact trolley pole (1919)
• U.S. Patent 1,889,814 Improved automatic gear shift (1932)
• U.S. Patent 1,936,996 Transmission and shifting thereof (1933)
• Automatic shoe shine chair (1939)
• U.S. Patent 2,517,936 Horizontally swinging barber chair (1950)
• U.S. Patent 3,015,522 Automatic safety brake (1962)
• U.S. Patent 1,441,383 Brake Testing Machine (1923)