Today is the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. While Thomas Jefferson is best known as the third president of the United States, one of the Founding Fathers and main authors of the Declaration of Independence, few people realize that he was also an inventor, the first administrator of the American patent system and one of the first patent examiners in the United States.
On April 10, 1790, President George Washington passed the first United States patent act, which provided inventors patent rights to their creations and paved the way for the modern American patent system. Under this act, the Department of State formed a patent board consisting of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. The members of the patent board were tasked with administering the patent laws, whereby fees for a patent were set between $4 and $5 and the duration of a patent was set not to exceed 14 years. The new patent law gave the patent board the authority to grant patents to the inventor of “any useful art manufacture, engine, machine or device, or any improvement thereon not before known or used.” Board members were authorized to make such a grant of patent rights if it was found that “the invention or discovery [was] sufficiently useful and important.”
The very first patent granted by the board was issued on July 31, 1970 to Samuel Hopkins from Pittsford, Vermont. Hopkins’ invention was directed to improvements in “the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.” 1 The patent was signed by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Attorney General Edmund Rudolph and President George Washington.
During that first year the patent act was passed, two more patents were granted by the board. Although the process was time consuming and arduous, the board members were proud of their work and recognized its importance to the Republic. After time passed, the volume of filings created by the new patent act soon became much more than the board members could handle. By 1791, Jefferson’s office took part in granting 33 patents. Jefferson quipped that the reviewing of patent applications was the most time-consuming of his various domestic responsibilities. By 1793, Jefferson and the other members of the board happily relinquished their burdensome patent examiner duties. The patent act of February 21, 1793 made the granting of patents almost an entirely automatic matter, with the three-man review board replaced by an administrative structure. It was not until 1802 when, then Secretary of State, James Madison formed the United States Patent Office, which established a more systematic patent-granting procedure. In 1836, the patent law was overhauled, creating a compromise between the strictness of Jefferson’s review approach and the more liberal acceptance of all patent claims, which occurred during the intervening years. During his tenure, Jefferson is credited with establishing three criteria for a receiving a patent, which were adopted by the 1836 law and are still in effect today. In order to receive a patent, an inventor’s invention must be: new, non-obvious, and useful. The 1836 law is still largely in effect today. 2
Although Jefferson never held any patents himself, he was recognized for creating and/or improving many products and technologies such as a portable desk, the polygraph and the spherical sundial to name a few.
- http://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/us-patent-system-celebrates-212-years
- https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/patents