EXHIB 1 TIO X A DD U ESSES. 137 



woiikl liave seemed madness to have dreamed that we sliould ever dare 

 to dream of them thereaftei;. In the jvatent otiice, under the act of 

 1836, the commissioner and " one examining clerk," were thought to 

 be sufficient to do the work of examining into the patentability of the 

 two or three hundred applications that were oifered. Now sixty-two 

 examiners are over-crowded with M'ork, a force of over three hundred 

 employes is maintained, and the applications have swelled to 

 over twenty thousand per annum. This year the number of patents 

 granted will average 275 per week or 14,000 in the year. These 

 numbers are so startling, when compared with the days of which 

 I have been speaking, that people are sometimes ready, in their 

 haste, to suppose that their must be something wrong about 

 the system, and some have doubtless been prepared to join 

 hands with a few of your disaffected cousins across the water, 

 and to demand a repeal of the patent laws and the aboli- 

 tion of the system itself. It has occurred to niQ, that, standing here 

 to-night as the official representative of this system, it would not be 

 inappropriate for me to say a few w^ords in its behalf In the first 

 place no comparison can properly be made between our system and 

 that of other countries. In England and on the Continent all appli- 

 cations are patented, without examination into the novelty of the 

 inventions claimed. In some instances the instrument is scanned to 

 ascertain if it covers a patentable subject matter ; and, in Prussia, 

 some slight examination is made into the character of the new idea ; 

 but in no case are such appliances provided, such a corps of skilled 

 examiners, such provision of drawings, models and books, such a col- 

 lection of foreign patents, and such checks to prevent and review 

 error as with us. As a result an American patent has, in our courts, 

 a value that no foreign patent can acquire in the courts of its own 

 country. This has rendered property in foreign patents exceedingly 

 precarious. Such as are granted have not been subjected to exami- 

 nation ; they have no prima facie weight. Yet they may be valid. 

 It is true that no one knows this — not even the inventor ; but the 

 possibility that they may prove so makes them weapons in the hands 

 of unscrupulous men, to frighten and coerce manufacturers who have 

 very imperfect means, short of litigation, of arriving at the truth or 

 falsehood of the self-asserted pretensions of the patentee. On the 

 other hand, the inventor is in as much doubt as the manufacturer. 

 He does not know what to claim as his invention. As he alone is to 

 fix the limit, as there is to be 710 revision, he may claim much or lit- 



