When the board did grant a patent it was sent to George Washington for signature. Jefferson signed, too, as did the Attorney General. To get a patent cost the inventor about $4. An old record kept by the clerk showed that John Fitch paid $4.39 for his steamboat patent. The clerk pocketed the fees. About all the inventor had to do now was to present his petition in proper form and pay $30. The Secretary of State could not refuse a patent. The resuit—a craze of patenting anything and everything whether it was old or new. The country was flooded with invalid, conflicting and worthless patents; courts were clogged with patent suits, and legitimate inventors were harmed. There was no presumption that any patent was valid, although it carried the President's and Secretary of State's signatures.
The Patent Office soon became a separate bureau under the Department of State, with a Commissioner of Patents. Patent fees for United States citizens were $30, for British subjects $500—because Great Britain charged American inventors that sum for a British patent. Other foreigners paid $300. Now the application fee is $30 for everybody. So well did the new patent system foster ingenuity that there soon follows ed such a period of invention as never before was recorded. In 1840 came Morse's telegraph; in 1844, Goodyear's invention of vulcanized rubber; in 1846, Howe's sewing machine.
Today inventing and patenting are going at an ever-increasing pace. The Patent Office reselves 70,000 or more new applications each year. Instead of a single room as in 1790, the Patent Office occupies 8% acres of floor space, There are 1,354 employees, 703 of whom are technically trained examiners who pass upon the applications for patents. Over fifty miles of filing space hold the records. The Patent Office has a scientific library of more than 10,000 volumes. It has over 6,000,000 copies of patents of foreign countries, the only collection of its kind in the United States. Its annual printing bill runs to $1,000,000, which is larger than that of any other bureau in Washington. According to the patent laws, a patent grant gives the inventor the right to exclude all others from making, using or selling his invention for seventeen years, A patent is granted only upon a regularly filed application, complete in all respects, upon payment of the fees, and only after a determination of the invention's utility and a search to, ascertain its novelty.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.