Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent.
In 1849 he patented a device for lifting boats over sandbars and shallows using inflatable bellows attached to the hull. The idea came from his own experience getting stuck while working on riverboats.
Why is this true?
The invention was never manufactured, but the wooden model Lincoln whittled himself is kept at the Smithsonian. He remained fascinated by technology and later championed the telegraph and railways.
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More about famous people
Famous people accumulate stories, and only some of them are true. The entries in this category stick to documented episodes: the patents, the letters, the odd habits recorded by people who were actually there. Where a story is commonly retold in an exaggerated form, the explanation says so, which makes these facts safer to repeat than the version that usually circulates online.