Patent Centennial

Before 1776, most of the American colonies granted patents. But an inventor had to obtain a separate patent from each colony in which he wanted protection. The name and invention of the man to whom Thomas Jefferson granted the first U. S. patent were lost to history because of a fire.

During the War of 1812, when British soldiers were firing Washington, a group of invaders arrived before the Patent Office, ready to apply the torch. Out on the portico strode Superintendent William Thornton, puffing and glowering. Bellowed he: "This is the emporium of the arts and sciences of America. Don't burn it!" The British commander stared, saluted, led his troops away.

Up to 1836, patents were granted by the Cabinet, signed by the President. On July 4, 1836, Andrew Jackson signed an act creating, as part of the Department of State, a separate Patent Office headed by a commissioner.* First patent under this jurisdiction went to Senator John Ruggles of Maine, for a system of cog gears.

Dental plates were first patented in the U. S. in 1840.

The player piano was patented in 1889.

The dial telephone was patented in 1892.

In 1930 Congress passed and President Hoover signed a bill enlarging the class of eligible patentees to include anyone who had invented or discovered a new plant, provided it was asexually reproduced and not a tuber-propagated plant.

In 1935 the Patent Office granted Patent No. 2,000,000 (TIME, May 13, 1935).

This week hundreds of scientists, inventors, engineers and industrialists assembled in Washington to observe the centennial of the U. S. Patent Office as an autonomous organization. Lionized were six famed inventors: Orville Wright; Simon Lake, pioneer submarine experimenter who is currently trying to salvage $4,000,000 in gold from the hulk of an old British frigate at the bottom of New York's East River; Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, RCA-Victor television ace; William David Coolidge, General Electric's No. 1 x-ray researcher; Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion radio tube; and Leo Hendrick Baekeland, inventor of Bakelite.

At the headquarters building of the National Academy of Sciences, the guests viewed models of historical inventions, demonstrations of current research, industrial films. They heard the voice of Thomas Alva Edison from an old phonograph record. First telegraph message, "What hath God wrought?", was again received from Baltimore on one of the two original instruments of Samuel Finley Breese Morse. In the evening, efficient young Patent Commissioner Conway Peyton Coe read a list of the twelve foremost dead inventors in U. S. history, as chosen by the ballots of a secret committee. The twelve: Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Alva Edison, Robert Fulton, Charles Goodyear (vulcanized rubber), Charles Martin Hall (commercial aluminum), Elias Howe (sewing machine), Cyrus Hall McCormick (reaper), Ottmar Mergenthaler (linotype), Samuel Finley Breese Morse, George Westinghouse, Wilbur Wright, Eli Whitney.

At the Mayflower Hotel, the celebrants sat down to a "patented" dinner. They sipped a cocktail--corn whiskey, port wine, ripe black currants, sugar, water--patented by Friedrich Wilhelm Emil Mueller of Chicago in 1909 as a hair tonic. Other items: lobster and last year's turkey preserved under quick-freeze patents, vacuum-packed coffee, dressing containing pecan nuts protected by a plant patent. Each diner was issued a license to partake of this patented feast.

*The Patent Office is now part of the Department of Commerce.

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