Keep in mind that the patent offices are run by people who are not scientist or engineers or historians so all you need to do is find something that has been done for years, then in a patent describe it in a way that the average person who knows what it is, would not think to describe it, then it is likely to make it through, then after that, you can sue people for violating it.
Just like apple suing people for violating patents for crap like bounce back (which were actually done in old game boy games to give scrolling text a more cartoon look. It was also done in windows, pocket PC 2000 OS, and pinch to zoom was done is pretty much all old movies when people were shown interacting with a computer or machine navigating an environment in 3D