Very interesting. This aircraft was patented by Curtiss, but its general principles are quite clearly derived from the Burgess-Dunne Tailless Hydro designs (see Navy AH-10 image for instance).
Since Curtiss was still busy with trying to invalidate many of the Wrights' preposterous claims over everything that flew, whereby they would sue most anyone who would try to produce flying machines, first and foremost Curtiss. In his efforts to disprove the Wrights' paternity and exclusive claims over aviation, Glenn Curtiss spent a lot of time and energy to build and fly pre-Wright designs for instance, or to patent and test every possible aviation invention that shared no commonality with any of the Wright Brothers' airplanes. That is why I have a feeling this could be a case of Curtiss securing a patent for a non-Curtiss configuration that hadn't been protected before.
Also, I should add that during the late 1920s, the Dunne design principle apparently grew on Glenn Curtiss, and he devoted his last efforts to promoting the Safety B-2 Arrowhead aircraft, directly based upon the same general configuration.
Curtiss fully acknowledges Dunne's work and patents in the text but he does not expand upon this work as that is not the subject of the patent. This patent is actually for a three-float layout for a seaplane, which benefits from utilising Dunne's swept wing arrangement as it provides a good triangulation for the floats and hence stability on the water, or so he assumed. It was submitted in 1916, so roughly around the same time as the Burgess-Dunne Hydro was built. I wonder if that resulted in further patent arguments/
I came across a couple of Curtiss patents that I hadn't seen before and are hopefully of interest. The first appears to be a precursor to the AT-9? The second is some kind of wing-glove applied to an A-18.
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