504 
and placed the United States in the forefront of 
nations; but he has been compelled to spend 
practically all that he has received, in the ay- 
erage case, in the introduction of his invention 
—for the average inventor lives and dies poor, 
spending every dollar he can earn or borrow 
in promotion of his ideas and inventions—and 
he has, meantime, contributed over five mill- 
ions of dollars to the treasury of the wealth- 
iest nation on earth while giving that nation’s 
inconceivable advantage and position.* 
It would seem that the inventor may well 
claim that he is treated with unconscionable in- 
equity and ingratitude; but the depth of that 
inequity and ingratitude is not yet sounded. 
He has deposited in the United States Treasury, 
out of a painfully-earned pittance, in the course 
of a century, in the small contributions made by 
thousands of patentees, $5,000,000; which sum is 
definitely pledged by the nation to the purposes 
of the Patent Office and of the inventor for 
whose benefit it is in part established. Mean- 
time, the Patent Office has been for years pain- 
fully crowded, its work seriously impeded and 
its employees have suffered, as well as the 
inventor and the industries of the country, 
through lack of proper provision for its work 
and of suitable space for its collections, papers 
and models, and its library, all of which are 
in constant danger from fire. Other divisions 
of the Department of the Interior have been 
for years past squatting in its territory and 
occupying valuable and needed space, belonging 
to the Patent Office and in its own building, 
while five millions of dollars belonging to it 
and the inventor are hoarded in the United 
States Treasury with its hundreds of millions 
surplus, and its use withheld either for con- 
structing anew and suitable fire proof building 
—the proper course—or for relieving the exist- 
ing embarrassment in other ways. Truly ‘ Re- 
publics are ungrateful ’ ! 
During the year 1900, over forty thousand 
patents were applied for and nearly six thous- 
* This reminds one of the action of a Legislature of 
the State of New York which compelled Ezra Cornell 
to pay $25,000 for the privilege of endowing the Land- 
Grant College of that State with $500,000 and 200 
acres of land to be succeeded later by millions of dol- 
lars from Cornell, Sage, Sibley, White and others. 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Von. XIII. No. 326. 
ands caveats, trade-marks and designs. Twenty- 
six thousand patents were issued and twenty- 
one thousand expired. New York heads the 
list with 3,788 patents and Pennsylvania and 
Illinois follow with 2,564 and 2,439; but Con- 
necticut leads in inventiveness; securing one 
patent to every 1,203 inhabitants; although 
the District of Columbia is reported to have 
one to each1,110. The latter is of course not 
precisely comparable with the States; the 
patents being often taken out by immi- 
grants, coming to the capital for the purpose, 
or by residents uniting with the inventor in ap- 
plication for the patent. About one in 1,500 New 
Englanders takes out a patent each year. The 
average for the country is about one patent in 
the year for each four thousand inhabitants. 
The ‘Yankee’ is about twenty times as in- 
ventive as the South Carolinian. Women have 
about one patentin each 1,000. The number of 
patents issued has of late years been nearly sta- 
tionary at about 22,000 ; growth having appar- 
ently practically ceased about fifteen years ago. 
Inventors complain that the law and the 
administration, and especially the courts, have 
recently often been inclined to bear hardly 
upon the man who provides the people with 
their main instrument of prosperity. Certain 
States are well known among patentees as 
dangerous, through their adverse court-deci- 
sions, and the United States District Courts and 
even the Supreme Court of the United States 
are sometimes thought too indifferent to the 
rights of the inventor and of the people in this 
direction. It is, however, hardly possible for a 
court to invariably exhibit the knowledge or 
the judgment of the expert in the field of 
mechanics, and the-famous decision of the latter 
court, when it was decided in the great Sickels- 
Corliss case that a latch is not a catch and that 
a dash-pot and another dash-pot are not equiva- 
lent, must be expected to be occasionally par- 
alleled. Something should be done, however, 
to restore to the inventor that consideration 
which was formerly his and which has of late 
been in some degree lost to him, in part per- 
haps, through familiarity with his work and 
through the very extent and universality of 
his beneficence. 
As to the standing wrong—refusal to prevent 
