Alas, I haven't posted much lately. I hoped to regain the pace I had before becoming an administrator, but it has not happened yet. However, I figured the release of my new book was worthy of a post.
Along with co-authors Scott Guthery and Julie Burke, we have published Unfettered Invention: How the X Patents Sparked Early American Technology.
Here is the description from the sales page, which is pretty complete:
Between 1790 and 1835, inventors simply described their ideas in an application form, sent with a $30 fee to Washington, DC. Almost 10,000 applications streamed into the newly created Patent Office, describing looms, water wheels, printing presses, pumps, bridges, and all the other technologies that powered early American industry. The ideas ranged from breakthroughs to small improvements to dead ends. Taken together, they offered an extraordinary window into the technological imagination of the founding era.
Then they were all destroyed in a catastrophic 1836 Patent Office fire. That same year, Congress passed a new patent act, setting more stringent requirements and restarting the patent numbering system. As a few thousand of the early applications were recreated over time, they were designated as “X Patents.”
The authors analyzed almost two hundred years of patent recovery attempts, and then went searching for more. They combed through scattered archival records, auction catalogs, courthouse filings, local museums, private collections, and US records repositories. A deep dive into the pages of The Franklin Journal, whose editor, Dr. Thomas Pascal Jones, tracked patent filings during the X patent era, revealed previously untapped records.
The result is a fascinating, eye-opening story of how the X patents ignited and shaped America’s appetite for innovation in everything from butter churns, washing machines, pumps, plows, spinning machinery, and printing presses to the most demanding engineering problems of the age: steam engines, locomotives, suspension bridges, automated mills, hydraulic machinery, and the transformation of the traditional water wheel into the modern water turbine.
Unfettered Invention starts by describing the chaotic early years of the Patent Office, followed by the rapid evolution of America's intellectual property law from twenty-seven words in the US Constitution to the writing of the Patent Act of 1836, the foundation of today's patent system. These chapters reveal how thinking about patents and a patent system matured over time, and describe key court cases addressing the thorny issues that the patent system underpinning an industrializing nation needed to address.
In the Notables chapter, the authors review high-impact X-patent inventions and the innovators who created them. These include commercially successful breakthroughs such as Cyrus McCormick's reaper. Other inventions had an impact despite being too far ahead of their time for mass production, for example, Samuel Morey's internal combustion engine.
The core of Unfettered Invention is the seven specific technical domains: bridges, water wheels, mathematical instruments, looms, printing presses, pumps, and railroads, describing the evolution of each technology as it adapted to the emerging needs of an industrializing nation. Bridges had to go over broader rivers, looms had to weave new kinds of fabric and do it faster, railroads had to get over the Appalachian Mountains, pumps had to drive city water systems, and water wheels had to be more efficient. These chapters document attempts to make technology work faster, cheaper, safer, more reliably, and, most importantly, at scale.
It is available in hardback and paper - I hope you give it a look!The book concludes with an appendix that describes in more detail the data that the authors used to build the story of the X patents.
For patent attorneys and IP professionals, the book offers a rare look at what American patent practice looked like before examination existed. For readers of technology and industrial history, the book is a fascinating account of a nation teaching itself to invent,
Part legal history, part technological archaeology, part detective story: Unfettered Invention captures early American industrial history.
