Patricia Billings, born in 1926 in Clinton, a city in Missouri, is an aged artist at heart, and an inventor and businesswoman by profession. She started her career as a medical technician in 1946, and then later, embraced her love for sculpting and began studying art in 1956.
Billings ventured into sculpting and opened her own store in Kansas City. She poured her skills into creating and selling beautiful plaster of Paris sculptures over the years. In the late 1970s, Billings was working on a sculpture of a swan for few months and accidentally broke it.
It was a precious piece and the accident sparked the motivation to find a stronger material that could take a beating. She tried different combinations but nothing seemed to work. Plaster of Paris mixed with cement was too brittle for sculptures.
Patricia was determined, after 8 years of researching, trying out different combinations, she found her answers in Botticelli’s famous frescoes, paintings that remained quite intact for hundreds of years in Italy. The answer was a secret catalyst (yes, still a secret).
“I am a Taurus, very stubborn.” – Patricia Billings in her interview with Wall Street Journal
Her determination led to the creation of Geobond, a fireproof, non-toxic building material. With its amazing heat resistance and its non-toxic nature compared to other products, Geobond carried the potential to become a multi-million product in the future. Coated on houses, this material could save hundreds of lives and property damages in case of fire-related accidents.
Patricia Billings Patents
Patricia Billings’s patent portfolio contains 8 patents that belong to 5 unique patent families. The below exhibits highlight the key statistics of her patent portfolio.
Technology Distribution
The patents in the table below are filtered by including only one patent from each patent family.
| Publication Number | Title |
| USD601452S1 | Planter |
| US20080044648A1 | Heat Protected Construction Members And Method |
| US5647180A | Fire Resistant Building Panel |
| US5795380A | Lightweight Roof Tiles And Method Of Production |
| US6230409B1 | Molded Building Panel And Method Of Construction |
Legal Status (Alive/Dead)
The exhibit below distributes Patricia Billings’s patents into active and inactive categories which are further divided into total, application, and granted parts.
Worldwide Patents
Patent Families
Country-wise distribution of Patricia Billings’ patents
The patent count in the exhibit below is calculated by including each family member of a patent family. A patent family can have multiple patent documents – filed globally or in a single country – covering a single invention. There are 8 patents globally in her portfolio which belongs to 5 unique patent families.
An Interesting Patent
The most cited patent in Patricia Billings’s portfolio is US5647180A. It has a citation count of 50 by companies like Life Shield Engineered Systems Llc, Ecovative Design, and Saint-Gobain. The patent has family members in the United States and Australia.
If a technology/patent is cited by a lot of other patents, it implies that the technology is being followed and incrementally innovated by a lot of companies. This indicates the importance of a patent. Furthermore, it also indicates that citing companies are working on similar and closely related technologies.