Charles Osborne & Co Improved Patent Corkscrew.

A Thomason type corkscrew with decorated barrel has come to light this month in the UK. This Thomason has a bronze barrel embossed with leaves, grapes and fruits, often refered to as "the autumnal fruit design". This example is unusual in several ways.

The embossed decoration to the barrel as shown in the images is very crisp and detailed.

The neck of the barrel has an unusual shape, it gradually reduces in size, and has several turnings.

The embossed barrel includes a raised plaque marked "OSBORNE & Co IMPROVED PATENT". 

Very few examples of Thomason type corkscrews with decorated barrels seem to surface that can be attributed to specific manufacturers. What if anything is the relevance of the inscription “IMPROVED PATENT” on the plaque?

There is no doubt marking the corkscrew “improved patent” gives it more importance and would make it easier to sell.

Making a profit from a patent of a corkscrew was very difficult, some unscrupulous manufacturers marked their corkscrews PATENT or IMPROVED PATENT to give themselves an advantage over other manufacturers, even though they had not been granted patent protection.

Charles Osborne was a corkscrew manufacturer based in Birmingham in the nineteenth century. Osborne was granted patent protection for a corkscrew design in 1839, No 8,139. In the patent specification, he writes of his design being an “improvement”, this design was based on applying a spring to a corkscrew to aid extraction. To date no known examples made exactly to Osborne’s design are known to exist.

Was Charles Osborne an unscrupulous  manufacturer or did he feel he could mark his Thomason type corkscrews IMPROVED PATENT due to being granted patent protection for his corkscrew design of 1839?