WILLIAM SIEMENS, l-'.R.S. 55 



of science on the part of the devotee ; but a practical invention 

 has to be regarded as the result of a first conception elaborated by 

 experiments, and their application to existing processes in the face 

 of practical difficulties, of prejudice, and of various discourage- 

 ments, involving also great expenditure of time and money, which 

 no man can well afford to give away ; nor can men of merit be 

 expected to advocate their cause before the national tribunal of 

 rewards where at best only very narrow and imperfect views of the 

 ultimate importance of a new invention would be taken, not to 

 speak of the favouritism to which the doors would be thrown open. 

 Practical men would undoubtedly prefer either to exercise their 

 inventions in secret, where that is possible, or to desist from 

 following up their ideas to the point of their practical realization. 

 If we review the progress of the technical arts of our time, we 

 may trace important practical inventions almost without exception 

 to the Patent Office. In cases where the inventor of a machine, 

 or process, happened to belong to a nation without an efficient 

 patent law, we find that he readily transferred the scene of his 

 activity to the country offering him the greatest encouragement, 

 there to swell the ranks of intelligent workers. Whether we look 

 upon the powerful appliances that fashion shapeless masses of iron 

 and steel into railway wheels or axles, or into the more delicate 

 parts of machinery, whether we look upon the complex machinery 

 in our cotton factories, our print works, and paper mills, or into a 

 Birmingham manufactory, where steel pens, buttons, pins, buckles, 

 screws, pencil-cases, and other objects of general utility are pro- 

 duced by carefully elaborated machinery at an extremely low cost, 

 or whether we look upon our agricultural machinery by which 

 England is enabled to compete without protection against the 

 Russian or Dauubian agriculturist, with cheap labour and cheap 

 land to back him, in nearly all cases we find that the machine has 

 been designed and elaborated in its details by a patentee who did 

 not rest satisfied till he had persuaded the manufacturers to adopt 

 the same, and had removed all their real or imaginary objections 

 to the innovation. "We also find that the knowledge of its con- 

 struction reaches the public directly or indirectly through the 

 Patent Office, thus enlarging the basis .for further inventive 

 progress. 



The greatest illustration of the beneficial working of the Patent 



