How Two Major Fires Changed US Patent Law

But justin brief to cover what I talked about yesterday, I explained what patents are for, and I gave a short explanation of how patents and patent law got started in the United States, keeping in mind that other countries had already had their own patent laws at that time.

It's not like the United States invented patent law. And I talked about how in seventeen ninety the young government of the young United States established patent law, which initially was incredibly strict, and then it did a one to

eighty and became the opposite. I mean, like, the first year of issuing patents, the US only granted three patents total, and then in seventeen ninety three, a big revision to the law meant that the office was technically supposed to approve any and all patents as long as they had the proper application fee, So just from one extreme to

the other. I concluded yesterday's episode by talking about the first superintendent of the US Patent Office, a doctor named William Thornton, and now we're going to pick up with his successor, Thomas Jones, another physician. So Jones changed how some things worked at the Patent Office, including a change that carries through to modern patents today, that being that he started the specification of the invention was allowed to

reference the accompanying sketches of that invention. It's kind of hard to even imagine that there was a time where this wasn't a case where you would have a sketch and or a model, almost definitely a model, but probably a sketch too, and a set of specifications, but they didn't reference one another. That changed with Jones's tenure as superintendent.

If you read over a modern patent, you'll often see that there will be a sketch that's frequently labeled with several parts that are called out like part A or Part B or sometimes their numbered or whatever, and then the actual specification will reference those parts and explain how they work within the grander functionality of the invention. So Jones, like doctor Thornton before m felt that patent applications definitely

needed to meet a threshold of usefulness and inventiveness. So both of them had expressed concern that stripping that power away from the Patent Office meant that folks with file patents for stuff that was already in existence or that they just plane didn't work. So both Jones and Thornton ignored that revision to the patent law that dated back to seventeen ninety three, that bit saying hey, you don't have the right to reject patents. They both said, you

know what, I kind of do. I know the government says I don't, but I disagree with that. So they took a much harder stance on pattens that you know, either failed to describe a new invention or were deemed to not meet the threshold of usefulness or both. William Elliott, who was doctor Thornton's chief assistant, he had felt that he should have been promoted to superintendent and he was

deeply upset when it's instead went to Thomas Jones. So he then accused Jones of having opened all the mail that was being sent to the Patent office himself Now you might say, well, what's the big deal with that, Why shouldn't the superintendent open the mail that's sent to the patent Office. Well, according to Elliott, his accusation was that sometimes people would stuff application envelopes with filthy lucre. That is, you know, they would put cash in their

application in an effort to grease the wheels of bureaucracy. Essentially, they would include a bribe with their application. So Elliot said that before Thomas Jones took over as superintendent, the Patent Office had it as a matter of fact that any money that was sent in this way would be returned to Cinder and that way you avoid impropriety, right,

you're not taking bribes. But since Thomas Jones was demanding that he be allowed to open all the mail personally, the implication was that he was possibly pocketing this money, that he was essentially taking bribes. Now, whether that accusation had any merit or not, or whether the fact that Jones had a dispute with Elliott because his sons were running a business out of the Patent office. One of Elliott's sons was a freelance draftsman and was working out

of the Patent office. And so there's the possibility that the Thomas Jones was having words with his chief clerk because he felt it was inappropriate for the clerk's sons to be able to run a business out of the patent office. That's not what the patent office was for. But I don't know if that's the reason why this all blew up. I do know that ultimately Thomas Jones received a reassignment. He moved on to work in a

different office within the US government. However, William Elliott didn't like get to do a victory lap because he was also told he had to vacate his position. However, his son was able to retain his freelance draftsman job at the Patent Office. That son was named William Parker Elliot.

So he had William Elliott and William Parker Elliott. And as a draftsman, he would work with inventors to create the sketches of their invention as part of their patent application, and he would charge the inventors a fee for doing this. So that was how he was making his living as

part of this process for patents. He'll figure more in our tail as we continue this journey through the history of the Patent Office, which, y'all, if you read over histories of the patent office, it sounds like it would be the most boring thing in the world, right, But as you read about these interpersonal conflicts, you start to think, like, wow, this is more Game of Thrones than I expected it to be. Well, anyway, our next superintendent was John D. Craig.

He would serve as the superintendent from eighteen twenty nine to eighteen thirty five. Craig was, let's call him a divisive figure. So, according to historian Kenneth Dobbins, Craig was quote arrogant, subject to rages, disagreeable to patent applicants and their agents, and a domineering tyrant towards the subordinate employees

of the Patent Office end quote. So Craig inherited an office that was really short on cash, Like according to Craigzone calculations, the Patent Office was short to the tune of around four thousand dollars. And keep in mind, this is eighteen twenty nine. He suspected hanky and or panky had been going on, but he didn't find any evidence of it, Like he thought maybe one of his predecessors perhaps doctor Thornton had been embezzling money from the Patent Office,

but he couldn't find any evidence supporting that hypothesis. Now, it's also true that during his tenure, when doctor Thornton was the first Superintendent, he would often request that Congress increase funding to the Patent Office, but Congress kind of ignored him for the most part. This would become something of a time honored tradition for many years. The Patent Office would argue it needed more funding, and no one

would seem to care that much at that point. So Craig had a different approach to granting patents than Thornton and Jones did. So his predecessors had felt like a patent review was a vital part of the process that it really needed to happen. Craig felt the most important part was that the applicant paid their application fee, and if that happened, well, then we're good to go. It just you know, stamp approved on those patent applications if

the fee comes in. So Craig wasn't so fussed about patent specifications and rarely, if ever, even bothered to read them. According to contemporary reports, he was adhering to that change in patent law, the one that dated all the way back to seventeen ninety three. And if any disputes arose due to a patent being say a copy of another invention that had already received a patent, or any other problem like that, well that was a matter for the courts.

It wasn't a matter for the patent office. So he was like, Nope, we're going to follow the law and get all those fees and not worry whether or not the thing where granting a patent for actually works or if it's new. He did, however, find the lack of organization in the office appalling, so he created a system in which he classified inventions according to subject matter, specifically for all the models of the invention, so like models that were designed to do things like farm work would

be grouped together that sort of thing. So he did bring a certain kind of organization system to the patent process. Remember, at this stage, the patents that were being granted and the applications that were being submitted, none of them were being numbered. There was no numbering system with patents at this point, so as they were starting to mount up in the thousands, it was getting more and more difficult

to keep everything sorted and organized. In a little bit of foreshadowing, Craig also sought a sizeable grant for the office for the purposes of constructing a fireproof building into which the Patent Office would then move, because he said, you know, it would be disastrous if there were a fire, because we have all these models and stuff. We don't have copies of these patents. It would be a huge loss.

So Congress surprisingly actually voted to fund the project. But before that could happen, Before the building could be built, Craig found himself at the center of an investigation. An employee at the Patent Office had argued that Craig was ill suited for his position and that he should be dismissed from it. That employee was the son of William Elliott, also named William Elliott. You know William Parker Elliott. So

why did Billy junior take aim at Craig? Well, as I mentioned earlier, Elliot the younger was a freelance draftsman for the Patent Office, and Craig had ended up hiring one of his former students. He had been a teacher in the past, and one of the students had become a draftsman. So Craig hired this former student to come and work at the Patent Office as essentially another freelance draftsman.

But that meant that this student was a compet editor to Elliott Junior, and so, like his father before him, Elliot the second filed a complaint against his boss and it worked so allegedly, President Andrew Jackson himself signed the dismissal papers in eighteen thirty five and JD. Craig had to leave as Superintendent of the Patent Office. The Elliots continued in their role as kingmakers, or at the very least,

as superintendent destroyers. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors and we'll pick up with the next Superintendent of the Patent Office. Okay, So JD. Craig is out. He's been dismissed from his position as Superintendent of the Patent Office. So who next leads the office? That would be James Chamberlain Picket. What a fantastic name.

He was a veteran of the War of eighteen twelve and he would become the penultimate superintendent for the Patent Office in February of eighteen thirty five, but he only stuck around for three months. He was not the superintendent for very long at all. He actually resigned his position because an opportunity opened up in the Department of Treasury and he thought that looks like it's better worked for me.

So I don't have very much to say about him as leader of the Office because he wasn't around very long in that capacity. But then we get to our final superintendent of the US Patent Office, a guy named Henry L. Ellsworth, another great name. He was said to be methodical and meticulous. He whipped the office into shape where there had been chaos. He instituted order, and he

would serve as superintendent until eighteen thirty six. But he remained the leader of the Patent Office until eighteen forty five. So how is that possible? How could he be superintendent until eighteen thirty six but lead the office till eighteen forty five. Well, it's because in eighteen thirty six, the US government changed its approach to patent law again. Actually, this time, the government essentially scrapped all existing patent law

and started over. So once more, clerks had the legal authority to screen patent applications, and to deny applications that were for an obvious invention or a copy of something that already existed, or otherwise failed to qualify for a patent. Since seventeen ninety three, they technically didn't have the right to do that. Eighteen thirty six they get the right to do it again. The length of protection for a patent expanded from fourteen years to twenty one years at

that point. Now, this would change several times over the years. I'm not going to go over every single change of patent law. That would just be exhausting and and not really that interesting. I will say that currently patent law allows for twenty years of protection from the date that the patent is issued, and then you are also able to file for an extension of up to five more years. Anyway, the eighteen thirty six Act officially established a Patent Office

as a division of the State Department. No longer would there be a superintendent in charge. Instead, the head of the Patent Office would now hold the title of commissioner. So you might say, well, that's a kind of fine point. But it's true that Ellsworth was the last superintendent, but he was also the first Commissioner of the Patent Office, because the title changed while he was holding that position,

and he took his duties really seriously. One of those was that for all new incoming patents, the office would assign a number to that patent. Finally, we get to patent numbering, where we actually can see the chronological sequence of patents that were granted. The very first patent, in case you're curious, Patent number one was for a new design for locomotive wheels, as filed by one John Ruggles.

The changes to patent law happened in the summer of eighteen thirty six, but it was the winter of eighteen thirty six where we would see another massive change happen to patents, this time not because of legislative maneuvers, but because of a disaster. So on December fifteenth, eighteen thirty six,

the worst case scenario for the Patent Office happened. There was a fire in the Patent Office, and it was a massive fire that essentially wiped out all the patents, the models, and the drafts that had been made since seventeen ninety. Now at this time, the Patent Office occupied US section of the Blodget Hotel, which also had a couple of other tenants in it. Right, you had the US post Office. But ironically, the other big organization that had a space in the Blodget Hotel was a fire department.

And as Steve Martin would say in the documentary Roxanne, we're supposed to be putting them out, But seriously, the cause of the fire was due to a really dumb practice that the US Post Office workers were following. All right, so let's set the scene. It's December, it's Washington, DC. Things can get really cold. So to keep warm, some of the offices had wood burning stoves where you would, you know, put some wood in the stove and burn it in order to generate heat and keep the office comfortable.

So at the end of the workday, the Postal Office workers would collect the ashes from their wood stove and then they would bring those ashes down into the basement and they would store them in a box at the basement of the hotel. And the box was made out of wood. And I think you can probably see where this is going. So on that night in December of eighteen thirty six, the ashes that they dumped in this

wooden box were still hot. There still had some coals inside those ashes, those coals ultimately set fire to the wooden box, and the wooden box happened to be right next to the post offices supply of firewood in the basement really convenient, right. So the fire grew and in the wee hours of the morning, people began to notice

that something was a miss at the Blodget Hotel. As for the fire department, it had equipment, but it didn't have any firefighters because the firefighter force was a volunteer force and for reasons I'm not aware of, I'd need to look into it further, but apparently early they had faced such a discouraging experience that they disbanded, so there

was no actual firefighting force in that fire department. So the fire ended up spreading mainly to the areas that were inhabited by the Patent Office, and they destroyed thousands of documents and models and sketches. The Post Office actually got off pretty lightly. Their documents were in a separate section of the Blodget Hotel, and so Post Office workers were actually able to get in there and rescue important

stuff from the Post Office before the flames could spread there. Now, early on, some folks suspected that the fire was actually arson, that someone had said it on purpose, and the reason was that the US government was currently in the middle

of an investigation into the Post Office itself. There were various charges of corruption that were playing out with the US Post Office, so rumors began to spread that may this was actually an effort to remove evidence by burning it, that someone working at the Post Office, perhaps a leader, had decided to try and do this in an effort

to confound the investigation. But since the actual fire ended up impacting the Patent Office but not really the Post Office, that hypothesis was ultimately rejected, and later investigations showed it was more likely this carelessness and bad practice of storing ashes in a wooden box in the basement that actually led to the fire, not intentional arson. Now, former Superintendent Craig's requests to build a flame resistant Patent office really

became a top priority. If you remember JD. Craig had, while he had some really controversial opinions about patents and it was apparently a terrible boss, he did really believe that the Patent Office needed to move into a more fire resistant building, and so he had petitioned Congress to fund that, and in fact Congress did, but it would

take a while for that to get built. Most of the old patents that had been stored in the Blodget hotel were lost, and that would also prompt changes to how the Patent Office would store patent sentiment that the office would require copies of patents to protect against another catastrophic loss in the future, so that you're not storing the one and only copy of a patent in a

single place. It's a bit hard to believe that no one bothered with copies up to that point, but I guess until there's a disaster, there's not much incentive to protect yourself. Also, making a copy was not the easiest thing in the world necessarily at the time, so it could be a pretty time consuming process if you don't have access to the like a printing press or something,

and so maybe that was part of it as well. Anyway, the Office was able to restore around two thy eight hundred old patents, designating them with a number that was preceded by the letter X. This distinguished them from new patents that were being filed with the office under the eighteen thirty six Revised Law, so we do have a record of some of the patents between seventeen ninety and eighteen thirty six, and like I said, they're designated as

X and then a number. But again it's just a fraction of all the patents that were received by the office leading up to eighteen thirty six. I think there was something like more than ten thousand patents total, so you know, between a fifth and a fourth of them

survived and all the rest were destroyed. By the way, the office was actually able to restore patents mostly by talking to the inventors or patent holders who had filed for the patent in the first place, to to recreate their initial patent and their sketches and stuff like that. They had to remake them, so it wasn't like there was just a copy hanging around for most of these. It would take four years before the Patent Office's new

digs would actually be ready. Most of the new building was made of stone and marble, and it was thought to be far safer than the Blodget Hotel had been, at least with regard to fires, and for nearly four decades it served as a decent but not perfect place for the Patent Office. As I mentioned, you know, the early practice with patents was that inventors were to include a model of their invention if possible, and models take

up a lot of space. So it wasn't a perfect place for the Patent office because there was no such thing as an office that was accepting models, physical models. It took up a lot of space. They would rapidly start to run out of storage space and they would have to request things like an extension to the building

or something along those lines. So if you review the work of the commissioners who held the office from say eighteen forty onward to like eighteen seventy seven, you see a lot of requests for new construction work so that they can have more space to store things like models. But things would change in eighteen seventy seven. The office made sure to make copies of stuff. With the introduction of photography, that included actually making photographs of the models.

You know, obviously, it's a much harder thing to make a copy of a model than it is a copy of a document, so photographs are largely used as instead of creating a copy. Obviously, if you made a copy of every single model, well now you've just doubled the challenge of storing everything, so they would photograph the models

rather than ask for a replica of a model. But yeah, they really changed their approach and made sure they had copies stored in different places, so that should something like this happen again, it would not result in as big a disaster as the eighteen thirty six fire did. And this sets us up for the second big fire, which would happen on September twenty fourth, eighteen seventy seven. We're coming up to the anniversary of that major fire of

the US Post Office, the second major fire. Before we get into any of that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So obviously, between eighteen thirty six and eighteen seventy seven, there were a ton of different commissioners who led the Patent Office. Most of them only held the position for like a couple of years at most. But in eighteen seventy seven, the

Commissi was a guy named Ellis Spear. He was a veteran of the Civil War on the Union side, I should add he had also been a farmer, and he loved classical literature. He had joined the Patent Office in eighteen sixty five, right after the end of the Civil War, and by eighteen seventy seven he found himself promoted to commissioner. And while his time as leader overall has sort of a positive aspect to it, the eighteen seventy seven fire

is an obvious exception to that. Right, it's not that it was his fault, but that was a big, expensive catastrophe. So the fire seemingly started in the room that they were using to store the models. How it got started remains a mystery, so there are various hypotheses suggesting how the fire might have started. One suggests that some chemicals that were being stored in that room perhaps created really flamm fumes, and maybe there was even a case of

spontaneous combustion, which is possible that can happen. Others suggested that maybe one of the models had like a lens, an optical lens that perhaps focused some sunlight onto a flammable surface, and that's how the fire got started. So essentially like having a magnifying lens position just right so that when sunlight is coming through, uh, it's focused on a point that heats up and then bursts into flame.

Maybe that's how it happened. Others said that, well, it was probably closer to what happened in eighteen thirty six. That maybe it was that the day was unseasonably chilly, because again this happened in September, not in December, and that because it was unseasonably chilly, some office workers, you know, set a fire in their office, like a in a grate in order to keep the heat up, and that this ended up creating barks that set the fire. It's

hard to say what it was. No one really knows, but whatever the cause, the fire quickly engulfed those models. Among them was a model of Eli Whitney's cotton Gin, the only model that was produced for that patent, and that was completely destroyed by the fire. The fire claimed far more individual pieces than the fire that happened in eighteen thirty six because there had been more than forty

years of additional patents granted since then. So while the fire didn't destroy the whole building or anything like that, there had been a lot of patents granted between eighteen thirty six and eighteen seventy seven. I mean, the pace of innovation had picked up considerably as the nineteenth century went on. All told. Estimates put the fire's tally at consuming around eighty thousand models and six hundred thousand drawings attached to patent applications. But and this is a key element,

no patents were completely lost, not a single one. There were some partial losses, but nothing was lost completely. So that meant the new processes were protecting those patents. The patent office did not find itself starting from nothing. Again, the preventive measures actually worked. The copies helped mitigate some

of the problems that would follow. So back in eighteen thirty six, when all of those patents were destroyed, it meant that inventors, patent holders and their lawyers were able to argue that no, really they held the rights to a particular invention. And because the patents were gone, there

was nothing to refer to, right. You couldn't go and see like, oh, did you actually file that patent because the patents didn't exist, So people could make false claims left, right and center, and people with the real claim found themselves fighting for their rights court, but they lacked the documentation to show that they actually had the authority to make that claim. So it was a really messy legal situation.

A similar thing happened in eighteen seventy seven, but the copies and documentation were able to mitigate that a bit, not totally, but a little bit. The monetary cost of the eighteen seventy seven fire was by far much greater than the one that happened in eighteen thirty six. However, the fact that the office lost none of the patents

was a huge deal. So one change that ended up being the result of this fire is that the Patent Office deemed it was no longer necessary for inventors to include a model of their invention with their patent application.

So until eighteen seventy seven that had still been the custom, but the challenges of storing and caring for the models had just become too great as more applications were pouring in from inventors in the United States, so the Patent Office would no longer accept models of inventions from eighteen seventy seven on. That's understandable, it's also kind of a bummer. It also meant that sometimes it was difficult to determine

if a particular invention would work or not. Like with a model, you could at least take a slightly more educated guess as to whether or not the underlying functions of the invention would work without the model. When you're just looking at a two dimensional sketch and then a list of specifications, it's a little more challenging. As I've mentioned in this show, patent law has changed a few times since the nineteenth century, but the intent largely remains

the same. It's meant to provide protection and incentive for inventors, and in return, inventors share their work so that future generations can continue to benefit from their innovation and then build upon it further. And while it doesn't always work out that way, and issues like patent trolls can still become a real headache, in general, I think it's been a pretty good idea. Someone should probably patent it now.

Before I sign off, I want to remind y'all that I'm going to be at this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival at the House of Music that's happening this weekend on Friday and Saturday. I'll be recording in the iHeart Podcasts Studio powered by Bose. Come by on Friday at six pm to the Free House of Music outside T Mobile Arena. I will see you there and you can look out for my episode that I record there next week. It should be live on Monday. Also to remind you of

what the House of Music actually is. I can't wait to see this in person. I've been reading about it and I'm really intrigued. So it's a selection of interactive exhibits and these experiences that are in the House of Music are modeled after some of the artists that are performing at the Music Festival, and they include people like Kelly Clarkson on one side and Public Enemy on the other. I mean, it's a big spectrum. Fallow Boy has a

room in there. TLC has a room in there. Not all of them are necessarily mixed reality experiences, but they're all interactive and they're meant to kind of encourage the joy of music and the sharing of joy in music. So I'm really looking forward to seeing it for myself and to record in this special studio that Bose has worked with iHeartRadio to create. So again this Friday at six pm in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the T Mobile Arena. Outside the T Mobile Arena, you'll find the House of Music.

That's where you're gonna find me, the bald guy talking about technology and Yeah, I hope to see y'all out there, and I hope you're well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.