Recently I noticed that only one ace of spades had a patent date on it and started tracking it down. Going through the patents accepted on June 30, 1896 there was only one playing card listed. It was by John Omwake.
1896 Patents
If you are not familiar with John he was a manager at Russell & Morgan. A month after this patent he became the Treasurer of the United States Printing Company when the United States Playing Card Company was formed. You can read all about this at my website about the history of Russell & Morgan.
Unfortunately, the ace is not shown on the patent. The patent states "My invention relates to playing-cards, and is more especially applicable to that character of cards employed for playing poker, wherein eleven and twelve spot cards of each suit are employed, in addition to the ordinary deck of fifty-two cards. Heretofore “squeezers", or cards which have representations of the denominations and suit indicated in the corners of the cards, have been employed to ascertain the character or value of the card without the necessity of exposing the faces of the cards. However, where two numerals are employed to designate the denomination of the card, trouble has been experienced because of the necessity of exposing both numerals and a considerable portion of the faces of the cards, in order to determine the character of all of the cards held in the hand. The object of my invention is to obviate these difficulties heretofore found in playing cards; and to this end my invention consists in employing signs, preferably numerical signs of different characters, as Arabic and Roman numerals."
Why don't any of the others have a patented date? I have not been able to find any other patent that mentions the National Card Company.
You probably notice John had another application patented listed just above this patent. Checking it out I found it was for the game of Whist.
You probably notice John had another application patented listed just above this patent. Checking it out I found it was for the game of Whist.
Omwake did patent another playing card design in 1894. It was one of the ever popular Bicycle designs.