On Monday,

I made a post about patents, 

this is it here, and then today I happened on the above, Paul Di Filippo of Weird Universe looks through the digital records of the US Patent Office for bizarre, wonderful, and wonderfully bizarre inventions that never quite made it to mass production. Today, he shares with us this unusual device granted a patent in 1942, the inventor Benjamin L. Dorsey calls his device the "antiholdup cashier's cage." It appears to be a sealed chamber accessible through a locking revolving door. The cashier controls entry and exit. If a bank robber is able to persuade the cashier to part with money, s/he may not escape with it until the cashier unlocks the chamber,

as it happens in one of my favourite London gangster films, Snatch, a similar device to separate the robber from the staff is used, with hilarious results.