Designing the TAG Heuer 1500

I had a question last week from Stefan Naninck, a reader who was looking for information about the TAG Heuer 1500 series. His question was whether Eddie Schopfer, the man responsible for the TAG Heuer S/el and 2000 Series, also designed the 1500 series. I didn't really have a good answer, but said that maybe it was Schopfer, given he also designed the updated 2000 series from 1995.

https://www.calibre11.com/tag-heuer-1500-professional/

To Stefan's credit, he kept digging and got TAG Heuer to confirm that the 1500 was designed by Scarinzi SA, a design firm run by two brothers, Renato and Marco. They also designed the Ebel Wave (Ebel was once part of LVMH https://www.watchonista.com/articles/october-2001-i-was-there-when-ebel-relaunched-its-wave ). Stefan also found some patent filings of the 1500 (below).

Thought this was a fantastic addition to what we know about the 1500

Were the patents granted?

Looking at the figures, it's hard to conceive what aspect they were hoping to patent.

They did:

https://patents.google.com/patent/USD337277

US patents are weird - you can attempt to patent virtually anything, whether it's "innovative" (the usual criteria) or not. It's up to other people to proove your patent wrong, rather than you to proove your invention is new. (as I understand it anyway).