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A U.S. patent application for a data-organising method called Fractal Gridding, filed by Sierra Leonean-born inventor Rodney Kuhn King and his daughter Ecy Femi King, remains pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to agency records. The application, published as US20240095226A1, describes “methods and related devices for storing and accessing data using multi-level fractal grids”.
The filing, submitted in September 2023, lists both Kings as inventors and claims priority to a provisional application filed in September 2022. Google Patents currently shows the application’s legal status as “Pending,” not granted.
The Fractal Grid is a visual tool that arranges information in a hierarchical, nine-cell grid structure designed to mirror how the brain organises data. Rodney King has described it as a “visual tool to organise information in a brain-friendly manner”. He first filed a related application for “Fractal Grid Hierarchical Presentation of Information” in 2007.
Rodney King attended the Prince of Wales School in Freetown, where he was Head Boy in 1976, and graduated from Fourah Bay College in 1980 with a civil engineering degree. He later earned a master’s in infrastructure planning from the University of Stuttgart and lectured at Bell College of Technology in Scotland before moving to the United States in 2003.
Ecy King, born in Scotland and raised in California, studied at Stanford University and is a fellow at Harvard’s Centre for Digital Thriving. She has authored three Fractal Grid comic books, including “Bit by Bit,” published by Stanford University Press.
The application’s publication has drawn attention in Sierra Leonean media, where the invention has been framed as a source of national pride. However, the USPTO has not yet issued a final decision on the patent’s claims.
Attempts to independently verify several biographical claims in recent media coverage—including the assertion that a Dr William Fitzjohn served as King’s lecturer at Fourah Bay College—were unsuccessful. Public records identify a William Henry Fitzjohn who taught at the college in the 1950s, decades before King’s enrollment.
