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Patent to Product. Most new products, great and small, make their first appearance at the U.S. Patent Office. Though it is no easy jump from patent to product (only a fraction of the ideas patented are ever manufactured, only one in six of these turns a profit), last year 79,331 inventions were submitted to the Patent Office; patents were granted on 50,545 inventions. The rates Jor this year are running well ahead, and the Patent Office is buried under a backlog of nearly 200,000 patents pending.
Well over half of all patents are granted to corporations. Reason: U.S. corporations will spend about $5 billion this year on research and development, since nearly 75% of the U.S. growth in sales volume in the next three years will come from new products. To some critics the growth of corporate research is a mixed blessing; they argue that corporations so blanket a field that they freeze out the individual inventor. Yet individual inventors last year claimed 40% of new mechanical patents, 35% of those granted in electricity and electronics, 30% of new chemical patents.
The Upstart Americans. The U.S. has no monopoly on invention, but the Yankee tinkerer has a long and prolific line of descendants—including Abraham Lincoln, who patented a buoyant chamber for small boats; Singer Lillian Russell, who designed a trunk that converted into a dresser; and Actress Hedy Lamarr and Composer George Antheil, who co-patented a "secret communication system" for wartime. To spur inventive talents, a patent law was one of the first laws passed by the new nation in 1790, and Weekend Inventor Thomas Jefferson was aptly named the patent office's first boss.
Between 1790 and 1838 only 11,098 patents were granted. But two were of incalculable value to the growing nation: Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1794) and Cyrus McCormick's reaper (1834). In the next two decades. U.S. inventive genius exploded: more than 20,000 patents were issued. When all Europe gathered at
Paris' International Exhibition in 1867, prepared to show off to the world its industrial triumphs, it was the upstart Americans who carried off the prizes. Mc-Cormick's reaper won the Grand Prize and a French Legion of Honor. Howe's sewing machine won a gold medal, as did a host of lesser U.S. inventions, including a pencil maker and a button holder. In all, one-half of the U.S. exhibits won prizes, and Europe's industrial pre-eminence was dealt a blow from which the U.S. never let it recover.
More surprises were in store at the first U.S. Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876. The Atlantic Monthly marveled at George H. Corliss' giant, 2,500 h.p. steam engine and 8,000 other U.S. machines—all powered by it—on exhibit: "Surely here, and not in literature, science or art. is the true evidence of man's creative powers. Here is Prometheus Unbound." The Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil was more astounded. Picking up a curiously shaped device invented by a man named Alexander Graham Bell, the Emperor exclaimed: "My God, it talks!"