What the U.S. Patent System Wrought Quiz

PDF page 38: Only two months after America’s first patent law was signed in 1790, in fact, Thomas Jefferson himself noted that it had “given a spring to invention beyond my conception.” Within 13 years, America surpassed Britain—until then, the unrivaled leader of the industrial revolution—in the number of new inventions

PDF page 38: Only two months after America’s first patent law was signed in 1790, in fact, Thomas Jefferson himself noted that it had “given a spring to invention beyond my conception.” Within 13 years, America surpassed Britain—until then, the unrivaled leader of the industrial revolution—in the number of new inventions

PDF page 39: patented, even though Britain still had more than twice America’s population. By 1870, as noted earlier, the United States was patenting more than five times the number of inventions as Britain, although their populations were by then roughly equal in size.

PDF page 39: At first, most British observers were dismissive of American innovation efforts, declaring that the former colony would never be able to progress beyond the simple imitation of superior European technologies. But eventually Britain and other nations took note of the way the U.S. patent system seemed to be stimulating invention and economic growth at an unheard-of pace.

PDF page 39: Street" (according to http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/hst/scientific-identity/fullsize/SIL14-T002-07a.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons / Public domain) Sir William Thompson (pictured above), a British inventor and scientist attending the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, looked at the amazing array of American inventions—including Bell’s telephone, the Westinghouse airbrake, Singer’s sewing machines, and Edison’s improved telegraph—and had this to say: “If Europe does not amend its patent laws, America will speedily become the nursery of useful inventions for the xxxvii world.”

PDF page 39: Street" (according to http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/hst/scientific-identity/fullsize/SIL14-T002-07a.jpg) via Wikimedia Commons / Public domain) Sir William Thompson (pictured above), a British inventor and scientist attending the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, looked at the amazing array of American inventions—including Bell’s telephone, the Westinghouse airbrake, Singer’s sewing machines, and Edison’s improved telegraph—and had this to say: “If Europe does not amend its patent laws, America will speedily become the nursery of useful inventions for the xxxvii world.”

PDF page 39: Meanwhile, the Swiss Commissioner in attendance, the shoe manufacturer Edward Bally, offered a similar warning to his Old World countrymen: “American industry has taken a lead which in a few years may cause Europe to feel its consequences in a very marked degree.” Then, there’s Japan’s Assistant Secretary of State Korekiyo Takahashi, who visited the U.S. Patent Office. Upon his return home, he said, “What is it that makes the United States such a great nation? We investigated, and we found it was patents. And we will have patents.”

PDF page 40: As historians Lamoreaux and Sokoloff noted, “[Foreign] observers attributed much of the country’s rapid technological progress to its distinctive patent system. Quite revolutionary in design at inception, the U.S. patent system came to be much admired for providing broad access to property rights in new technological knowledge and for facilitating trade in patented technologies. These features attracted the technologically creative, even those who lacked the capital to directly exploit [i.e., commercialize] their inventions . . . and also fostered a division of labor between the conduct of inventive activity and the application of technical discoveries to actual production. It is no coincidence that Britain and many other European countries [later] xxxix began to modify their patent institutions to make them more like those of the Americans.”

PDF page 40: The patent system’s central role in fostering innovation can be seen in the patenting spikes that occur with every major industrial breakthrough. A major surge in patenting took place in the 1880s, for example, when the number of new patents issued each year jumped 56 percent to about 20,000, compared with the 12,000 issued yearly during the previous decade. This patent boom corresponded with rapid advances in the emerging railroad, telegraph, telephone, and electric light and power industries that signaled the industrialization of the U.S. economy.

PDF page 40: The next sharp surge in patent issuances began around 1902 and lasted until 1916 or so, when the number of patents granted doubled from 20,000 per year to around 40,000 per year. This was the period of the newborn automobile and aircraft industries’ most rapid early-stage growth. Patenting levels then remained relatively stable at about 40,000 per year until around 1960 or so, when the revolution in plastics and other synthetic materials along with boom-time growth in the aerospace and computer industries pushed patenting levels to 60,000 per year. There they remained until the mid- 1980s, when the personal computer and emerging hightech industries of Silicon Valley began to power the whole of the U.S. economy and propel us toward the age of the Internet. Patenting levels then rose to around 80,000 to 100,000 yearly

PDF page 40: With the rise of the Internet, social media, mobile telephony, and smartphones over the last two decades, the number of patent applications filed each year with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has surged fourfold. In 2014, the USPTO received 578,802 applications, finding 300,678 of these applications worthy of receiving a patent. This is but the latest spike in innovation and patenting.

PDF page 41: Illinois USA. via Wikimedia Commons / Public domain) Clearly, whenever the United States has undergone a major industrial renaissance during which technology advances lead not only to the birth of new industries, but also to the reshaping of existing ones, patenting levels rise dramatically. It is no surprise, therefore, that Silicon Valley, midwife of many of the new Knowledge Economy industries of the past 60 years, is home to less than 1 percent of the nation’s population but earns 12 percent of its patents each year. The Valley is now the site of a new USPTO satellite office serving high-tech xl innovators there.