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The United States Patent and Trademark Office was established in 1790,
and since then the federal office has issued over 10 million patents for
all sorts of inventions. Virtually every patent is available to the
public, either on paper or microfilm, or digitized and searchable on the
Internet—except the first ten thousand patents. They went up in smoke
exactly 184 years ago.
At that time, the Patent Office was housed inside the Blodget Hotel
Building, in Washington, along with the post office. It was the only
government building that survived the burning of Washington during the
War of 1812, due to the efforts of William Thornton, the Superintendent
of the Patent Office, who successfully pleaded with the British troops
to spare the building.
The first patent issued by the US Patent Office on July 31, 1790 to
Samuel Hopkins.
The story goes that after the British had captured the city of
Washington and destroyed all government buildings, Thornton put himself
before a loaded cannon trained at the Patent Office and exclaimed: “Are
you Englishmen or only Goths and Vandals? This is the Patent Office, a
depository of the ingenuity of the American nation, in which the whole
civilized world is interested. Would you destroy it? If so, fire away,
and let the charge pass through my body.” Fearing condemnation from
future generations, the red coats turned away.
Under William Thornton’s leadership, the Patent Office underwent steady
growth. It goes without saying, the country’s inventive minds played no
small a part in the office's success.
In 1836, with ten thousand patents and seven thousand patent models
housed inside the Patent Office, the government decided that a bigger
office was needed, and authorized the construction of a new building.
That same year, a disastrous fire destroyed the current building, and
all the patents and models in it, with the exception of one book—Volume
VI of the Repertory of Arts and Manufacturers, which an employee of the
office happened to have taken home with him.
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The Blodget Hotel Building was the office of the US Patent Office until
1836.
The Congress immediately passed a law allowing the patents to be
reissued, and an effort was made to piece together the lost files. After
ten years of work, about two thousand patents were recovered, mostly
from their original inventors. But finding out who the inventors were
was difficult when all the records were destroyed. Often times, the
record themselves were incomplete and they frequently lacked
specifications and drawings.
Also, these patents were not numbered and were referred to only by the
name of the inventor and the issue date. This was changed on July 13,
1836, about five months before the fire, and the current numbering
system was adopted that employs sequential numbers.
To distinguish the new patents from the ones that were lost in the fire
and subsequently restored, the old patents were given different
numbering—an X followed by an arbitrarily assigned number in the
sequence in which they were issued. Thus the very first patent, issued
on July 31, 1790, to Samuel Hopkins for an improvement “in the making of
Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process” became X000001.
These patents are known as X-patents.
Effort was made to keep the sequence in order, but sometimes patents
were recovered out of order, and when that happened, the recovered
patent was given a fractional number such as 1/2 or 1/4 or even 7/8.
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Patent No. 1 issued to John Ruggles for a new rail-road wheel.
Although the work was wrapped up within ten years of the fire, lost and
forgotten patents continue to surface to this day. About eight hundred
more have been discovered since the Patent Office threw in the towel,
thanks mostly to the work of amateur investigators.
In 2004, fourteen patents turned up in the library of Dartmouth College.
Ten of those belonged to Samuel Morey, a well known inventor who had
built an early internal combustion engines and was a pioneer in
steamships. His family had donated the patents to the library. Many lost
patents have ended up in historical archives and academic institutions.
Others are in private collections.
“The X-patents are out there,” Sabra Chartrand wrote in The New York
Times, “ it just takes a little faith and a lot of persistence to find
them.”
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