Patents on the soles of your shoes...: Oh, patents! The Rolodex®

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Oh, patents! The Rolodex®

Does anyone still use a Rolodex®? Hard to believe that the Rolodex® is almost 70 years old! The trademark Rolodex® is a portmanteau term combining “rolling” and “index”. Invented in 1958, the Rolodex® is an office supply device meant to organize index-card contacts on a cylinder that rotates. The term “rolodex” has certainly endured since people refer to their “rolodex” even when it is an electronic version. In any event, non-electronic Rolodex® organizers are still available on the market.

The Rolodex® is a patented invention. A French patent, FR1197557A, titled Fichier rotatif, was filed on July 3rd, 1958 and awarded the following year, on June 1st, 1959, to Arnold Neustadter, residing in the United States. He was the founder of Rolodex, Inc., a company manufacturing Rolodexes®, as well as many other sorts of office supplies.

Interestingly, the French patent also specifies that an earlier US patent had been filed in the United States, by Mr Hildaur Lykee Neilsen, on March 25th, 1958. An annotation that is consistent with claims by Hildaur Neilsen’s daughter, who specifies that Arnold Neustadter was the entrepreneur who manufactured and marketed patented products, whereas her father, Hildaur Neilsen, was the commissioned inventor and licensor for many years at Rolodex Inc., without ever being an employee on record (Hall, 2014).

The French patent recites an index-card organizing device where it is far easier to consult and annotate information, because the index cards are not positioned directly horizontal, relative to the user (as they might be in a tray), but rather at an angle. Thus, the invention seeks to resolve the issue of easy access to card contact-information, rotating through the stack, both forward or backward, while able to set card position at an optimal angle for consultation and annotation. The invention also seeks to minimize wear of the rotating drum.

The patent Figure 1, depicting a perspective view of the device, is included below, together with the image of a vintage Rolodex®. Specifically, the patent Figure 1 depicts a tubular metal support, comprising two opposite and similar sides connected by a transverse element 10, each side of the support further comprising a base piece 12 and an upright 14. The uprights 14, on each side of the support, rise at the same angle, and are attached at their upper end with openings for supporting pins, provided on each side of a rotor formed by a drum 20. On at least one of the pins, or to each of them, a handwheel 22 is fixed. One or two handwheels 22, which can be operated by a user of the device to rotate the cards 26. Some of the cards 26 have tabs 30, indexed with letters of the alphabet, or numbers, to facilitate the task of locating and annotating a particular card 26.