the old days of patent struggles

I recently finished reading a fascinating doctoral thesis on steamboats. A couple of remarkable facts stand out about patents in those days.

*Individual U.S. states were handing out patents, and sometimes even granting monopolies. The status of state vs. federal patents was not yet settled in 1809, and eventually the Supreme Court had to get involved. (For non-American readers of this blog: no, there is no such thing as state patents in the U.S. anymore. This sounds utterly bizarre to us today, even though murder is always a state rather than federal crime and the death penalty is used or not used on a state by state basis. But back then, Fulton and Livingston actually had a New York state patent on their steamboat design.)

*The U.S. Federal Patent Office consisted of just one man, a guy by the name of Thornton.

*Thornton sometimes tried to strike business deals with the people who wrote in to apply for patents, which by today’s standards is obviously completely inappropriate.

*It wasn’t yet clear in 1809 whether the public could see patent filings, though to us today it’s obvious that this is the whole point of having such filings. Thornton, when asked about this, had to write to the Attorney General for an opinion. The Attorney General decided that, yes, anyone can see a patent filing.

Another of my favorite aspects of the story was that Fulton’s steamboat was rammed 2 or 3 times by anti-steam ship operators, causing serious damage to the boat and a lot of danger to the steamboat passengers.

I hope this thesis becomes a book. You might not think you’d be interested in reading about steamboats from an actor-network theory perspective, but ANT histories often produce very good reads, and this is one of those cases. You find yourself as a reader getting emotionally involved in the history of steamboats.