Patent No. 2,000,000

The U. S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 2,000,000 last week, but it was the 2,009,957th US. patent issued since Thomas Jefferson granted the very first one to a man whose name and invention record a fire erased from history. The Patent Office was not set up formally until 1836, when the present series began.

Recipient of last week's milestone was Joseph V. Ledwinka, 64, Vienna-born chief engineer of Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co. (Philadelphia), makers of automobile and railroad equipment (see p. 49). The company sent him to Washington to be photographed receiving his papers from the hand of Conway Peyton Coe, young Commissioner of Patents. Engineer Ledwinka was not excited by the event. This was the 248th U. S. patent he has received since, in 1899, he invented "a means of propulsion of vehicles by electricity."

Patent No. 2,000,000 is for an "improvement for pneumatic tires for railroad cars."* Inventor Ledwinka thinks very little of it. Said he: ''Rubber at high speeds builds up a tremendous heat, enough to blow out the tube, or in solid tires to melt them internally. We were forced recently to replace pneumatic tires with metal wheels on a train we shipped to Texas." Budd Co. will develop his railroad tire, said he, "to meet competition."

The U.S. Patent Office is a bureau of the Department of Commerce. It employs about 600 clerks in addition to 700 examiners who must hold engineering degrees to be permitted to take the entrance examination, law degrees to be promoted after reaching a certain grade. The bureau has taken in $8,000,000 more than it has spent, pays the largest printing bill of any Government bureau, trains patent lawyers, stays constantly behind in its work, resists the onslaught of its critics, continues to grant more & more patents. Seven hundred thousand patents are now in force.

Subject to both uses and abuses, patents are granted on the theory that, in return for making a full and complete disclosure of his secret, an inventor is entitled to the exclusive right to make, use and sell it for 17 years. To be patentable, inventions must fall within one of six different classes of subject matter: 1) an art or process, 2) a machine, 3) an article of manufacture, 4) a composition of matter, 5) a plant asexually reproduced other than a tuber-propagated plant, 6) a new and ornamental design. It takes at least three months to get a patent examined; on the average, two years to get one granted.

Most patents granted or applied for today are owned by corporations maintaining scientific research laboratories. Professor Hornell Norris Hart of Hartford Theological Seminary, upon studying the lives of 171 inventors, found: 80% worked for corporations, 28% got wealthy, 37% famous, 53% some recognition while living.

With the thorough and painstaking development of scientific discovery, few basic inventions are now made, although a patent covering a slight improvement may often be of equal commercial importance.

Great fun has Patent Commissioner Coe when he assembles his assistants--Professor Richard Spencer, Bryan M. Battey and Leslie Frazer--and they go over such patents as these: Balloon Propelled by Eagles, Vultures, Condors. The birds wore harnesses which could be pulled in any direction by the operator. Birds had "merely to fly." They could also be pointed up or down. The drawing for the patent showed a balloon like a big inverted umbrella, with a bird cage mushrooming above it.

Improvement in Privy-Seats "renders it impossible for the user to stand upon the privy-seat; and consists in the provision of rollers on the top of the seat, which, although affording a secure and convenient seat, yet, in the event of an attempt to stand upon them, will revolve, and precipitate the user on to the floor. . . ."

Device for Preventing Dog Nuisance consists of an electrical grille. "When, therefore, the device has been placed in position in front of a building, or the like, where dogs have been in the habit of committing a nuisance, the next one that attempts the act, will receive a severe shock ... by reason of the grounding of the current through the dog's body. After receiving one such shock it is believed that that particular locality will be shunned in the future by every dog so punished. . . ."

Other Devices: Alarm clock which squirted water on a sleeper's neck; rat exterminator which snapped a collar with bell attached on the rat; electrocuter of bedbugs; eyeglasses for chickens to keep them from being pecked by other chickens; small round-pointed drill to produce dimples; egg-marker to be attached to the hen; automatic hat-tipper, to work which the user needs only to bow his head; combined rocking-chair and churn.*

"Perpetual motion" machines are the patent examiner's biggest annoyance. A popular bicycle idea was one in which, besides the usual chain, there was a second chain connecting the rear wheel with the front wheel. Thus when the bicycle was fairly going, the rear wheel drove the front wheel, which pulled the bicycle, which turned the rear wheel. One inventor of such a bike was pretty persistent. He would not go away until an examiner asked him how he would stop the bicycle.

One of the biggest perpetual-motion men of recent years turned up his nose at the Patent Office. Garabed T. K. Giragossian went directly to Congress and enthralled Congressmen for seven years (1917-24) with stories of how the Garabed Free Energy Generator would save the U.S. a $30,000,000,000 annual power bill, win the War, redeem the Sahara, rescue Mankind from the curse of the steam engine, crime and insanity. Mr. Giragossian asked for a special Act of Congress to protect his discovery--"not a perpetual motion machine"--and got such an act (1917). President Wilson vetoed the bill, Congress again took up the matter. This time the Senate Committee on Patents (Hiram Johnson, chairman) cagily asked for a model.

When the machine was finally produced (1924), it was a heavy cast-iron flywheel to which a one-quarter horsepower electric motor was clutched. After Mr. Giragossian ran the little motor two weeks, the flywheel turned so fast that a braking force of 150 horsepower was necessary to stop it. The 150 h. p. merely represented the accumulated energy of one-quarter horsepower applied over a two-week period. When it was discovered that Mr. Giragossian had made use of a "time-lever," he was told to get out of the halls of Congress until he could prove that he was the "first and original discoverer or inventor." Last February his good friend, Representative Clarence John McLeod of Michigan, again persuaded Congress to consider the Garabed wheel.

* Patent No. 1,000,000, granted in 1911 to Francis H. Holton of Akron, Ohio, was for "an improvement in [rubber] vehicle tires."

*All described in BEWARE OF IMITATIONS--by A. E. Brown & H. A. J effcott Jr.--Viking ($1)

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