The U. S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 2,000,000 last week, but it was the 2,009,957th US. patent issued since Thomas Jefferson granted the very first one to a man whose name and invention record a fire erased from history. The Patent Office was not set up formally until 1836, when the present series began.
Recipient of last week's milestone was Joseph V. Ledwinka, 64, Vienna-born chief engineer of Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co. (Philadelphia), makers of automobile and railroad equipment (see p. 49). The company sent him to Washington to be photographed receiving his papers from the hand of Conway Peyton Coe, young Commissioner of Patents. Engineer Ledwinka was not excited by the event. This was the 248th U. S. patent he has received since, in 1899, he invented "a means of propulsion of vehicles by electricity."
Patent No. 2,000,000 is for an "improvement for pneumatic tires for railroad cars."* Inventor Ledwinka thinks very little of it. Said he: ''Rubber at high speeds builds up a tremendous heat, enough to blow out the tube, or in solid tires to melt them internally. We were forced recently to replace pneumatic tires with metal wheels on a train we shipped to Texas." Budd Co. will develop his railroad tire, said he, "to meet competition."
The U.S. Patent Office is a bureau of the Department of Commerce. It employs about 600 clerks in addition to 700 examiners who must hold engineering degrees to be permitted to take the entrance examination, law degrees to be promoted after reaching a certain grade. The bureau has taken in $8,000,000 more than it has spent, pays the largest printing bill of any Government bureau, trains patent lawyers, stays constantly behind in its work, resists the onslaught of its critics, continues to grant more & more patents. Seven hundred thousand patents are now in force.
Subject to both uses and abuses, patents are granted on the theory that, in return for making a full and complete disclosure of his secret, an inventor is entitled to the exclusive right to make, use and sell it for 17 years. To be patentable, inventions must fall within one of six different classes of subject matter: 1) an art or process, 2) a machine, 3) an article of manufacture, 4) a composition of matter, 5) a plant asexually reproduced other than a tuber-propagated plant, 6) a new and ornamental design. It takes at least three months to get a patent examined; on the average, two years to get one granted.
Most patents granted or applied for today are owned by corporations maintaining scientific research laboratories. Professor Hornell Norris Hart of Hartford Theological Seminary, upon studying the lives of 171 inventors, found: 80% worked for corporations, 28% got wealthy, 37% famous, 53% some recognition while living.
With the thorough and painstaking development of scientific discovery, few basic inventions are now made, although a patent covering a slight improvement may often be of equal commercial importance.