Title: Glass support member
Type: issued patent
Patent number: 7,165,362
Issue date: January 23, 2007
Filing date: July 8, 2003 (priority to July 15, 2002)
Link to PDF: 
AIPW Summary: This seems like one of those highly incongruous things – who’d expect a patent on stairs from a computer/consumer electronics company? Regardless, it’s here, and I don’t really have a special category for it. Anyway, this patent is about stair construction (in a specific example), and uses several layers of glass held together by bonding layers with spaces cut out to fit a connector (see the exploded view in Figure 2). This type of patent is nice and easy to follow, as compared to some of the computer science and EE-heavy applications we usually see.