Historians Fear U.S. Inventive Drive Has Waned : Patent Models a Mirror of 19th Century

The finely detailed spools and ratcheted wheels move with the precision of a printing press. Easily mistaken for a child’s toy, the device is a tiny model of a textile loom that was patented in the 19th Century.

Between 1837 and 1880, such models were an obscure but essential part of the federal process by which inventors proved that their innovations were unique and obtained legal patent protection for them.

Now, more than a century later, long after they were discounted as unnecessary and the government dispersed its inventory as a warehousing nuisance, patent models suddenly have become more than historical oddities. Historians, educators and museum curators have seized upon the Lilliputian artifacts as valuable reflections of an era when the power of individual ingenuity dramatically changed the economy and way of life of a nation.

Disquieting Comparisons

They provide insight into the way 19th-Century America aggressively approached the obstacles that confronted it. And, some say, they evoke disquieting comparisons with a modern society in which that drive or inspiration seems to be waning.

J. Morgan Greene, vice president of a privately financed foundation that is seeking to acquire the miniatures, blames “the good life” in America for creating complacency and sapping the inventive spirit that prevailed in the last century.

“There is no real need to jump in there and invent something new or to have a creative thought,” the former investment banker from the San Francisco Bay Area lamented. “It’s all done for us.”

On the 150th anniversary of the 1836 Patent Act, the U.S. Patent Model Foundation has launched a nationwide corporate campaign to raise $20 million to acquire the approximately 100,000 existing patent models for display and study at the Smithsonian Institution. Most are now scattered among private collections and in attics across the country.

Cultural Artifacts

“If necessity is the mother of invention, in a sense these models reflect the responses of individuals to their times and what they needed and what they wanted,” said Douglas E. Evelyn, deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“As cultural artifacts, they are as valuable as Indian arrowheads and Neanderthal flints,” architect-designer George Nelson wrote in a museum catalogue. They have “much to tell us,” he added, “about the forms of a life that has changed beyond recognition, not always for the better.”

Currently on display at the Smithsonian is a selection of patent models, each no more than 12 inches in any dimension, heralding the introduction of devices that helped push America from a sweat-and-muscle, agrarian society to a mechanized, urban culture.

An Improved Typewriter

Easily recognizable among them is an improved typewriter submitted by inventors Sholes and Schwalbach in 1876, a device whose gradual evolution had a significant effect on American business efficiency. The miniature power loom submitted by Erastus Bigelow in 1876 represents a device that enabled textile manufacturing to become the first American industry to be mechanized.

Other models mark the labor-saving revolution in American home life: a better iron stove and Isaac Singer’s version of the sewing machine.

The models reflect the inspiration and energy of their times, museum officials say. In the mid-19th Century, many Americans were hungry for individual challenges to make their mark, to win a stake and to get rich. Inventing a useful device and getting a patent, which provided exclusive rights to the design for 17 years, was a tempting route to success.

“Americans had more fire and drive and ambition compared to Europe and other parts of the world where people had been born into their way of life and accepted it,” said Barbara Janssen, curator of the Smithsonian exhibit. “If you came to America you had the new world open to you and there were endless possibilities.”

‘A Social Need’

Economic and social conditions were right, added Frederick Schult, associate professor of history at New York University. “You had the capital to invest and you had a social need for it in light of population growth and the development of towns.” The result, he said, was a “healthy pursuit by individuals to come up with a new way of doing things based on something familiar.”

Between 1830 and 1880, the McCormick reaper, the telegraph, the modern Yale padlock and thousands of agricultural inventions and refinements were patented. In 1849, Abraham Lincoln, the only President to receive a patent, invented a device using giant bellows to float steamboats off shoals. It reportedly never got past the design stage.

Patent applications grew to such numbers that producing the models alone became an industry supporting full-time a community of professional model makers. Inventors submitted more than 200,000 models before Congress, confronted with a growing warehousing problem, dropped the requirement.

Historians’ Fear

Some patent historians fear that more than the model making has lapsed since the middle of the last century. The drive by individual Americans to invent is also declining, they say.

Last year, 43% of of the 42,763 U.S. patents issued went to foreign applicants, compared with 11% in 1961. In 1985, Japanese inventors alone received 12,783 U.S. patents.

“It’s really a reflection of the fact that the U.S. is no longer a leader in technology as we used to be,” says Judge Pauline Newman of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent case appeals.

Donald J. Quigg, commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said the trend threatens not only the nation’s economy but its security.

Innovating Needed

“We are going to have to do a lot of innovating or we will become a second-class nation before too long,” he said. “Otherwise, in the next war in this country we will have to use Xerox machines to defend ourselves because our manufacturing base is eroding.”

Greene, of the patent foundation, said he hopes that reacquiring the patent models for display at the Smithsonian will help spark national interest in inventing.

The Smithsonian already owns about 10,000 miniatures. About 80,000 of the original government inventory were destroyed in fires and the others went to museums and private collectors through government auctions and private transactions after the turn of the century.

Besides gathering them, Greene said, the foundation hopes to provide research and exhibit space at the museum for patent models and to sponsor scholarships and contests for inventors. His fondest hope: “that people will look at them and say: ‘They did that in the 19th Century. I can do that today.’ ”