Inventor walked the fine line of between lunacy and legacy
My favorite Gates invention is from 1903: Patent No. 741,903, "Educational Toy or Game Apparatus." It was a box whose lid had different shapes cut into it -- circles, triangles, squares -- and an assortment of similarly shaped blocks to go into it. Elmer R. Gates invented the square peg for the square hole, the round peg for the round hole.