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6.1 Patent models
One of the most interesting early features of the U.S. patent system was the requirement of patent models. A patent model was a scratch-built miniature (small-scale model) no larger than 12" by 12" that showed how the patent works. Since most early inventors were ordinary people without technological or legal training, it was difficult for them to submit formal patent applications. Actually, the patent system then was very crude by today's standards. It was a good idea for these amateur inventors to submit a model with a brief explanation or drawing of it.
Patent models were required since 1790. The Congress of the U.S. abolished the legal requirement for them in 1870. The U.S. Patent Office kept this requirement until 1880. However, some inventors still willingly submited models at the turn of the 20th century.
7 Quotes
- If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
- - Thomas Jefferson
- Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive liberal encouragement. In the arts, and especially in the mechanical arts, many ingenious improvements are made in consequence of the patent right giving exclusive use of them for fourteen years.
- - Thomas Jefferson
- In the field of industrial patents in particular we shall have seriously to examine whether the award of a monopoly privilege is really the most appropriate and effective form of reward for the kind of risk bearing which investment in scientific research involves.
- - F.A. von Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 1948
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