Talk:Catherine the Great's Washing Board/@comment-5782071-20190411020302/@comment-5782071-20190411034420

I suppose it's possible the invention could have been invented sometime before it was actually patented (she died late 1796, and that artcile (which I also found) didn't say when in 1797 it was patented, whatever it was).

I'm willing to let this slide, in the end, not only because it's a canon artifact, but because the show actually has a precedent for something being created or invented well before it was irl (not counting the obvious Farnsworth or AI): the Original Sticky String. Invented sometime in or prior to 1962 by Gerald X. Oskerfarb of M. Zunderman Novelties, they predate the earliest real known invention of silly string by a decade, when Leonard A. Fish and Robert P. Cox patented their accidental creation.