Yol. LXVI. No. 3003. 
U B U R B A /\| 
NEW YORK, AUGUST 17, 1907. 
WEEKLY, $1.00 PEK YEAR. 
A TALK ABOUT PATENTS. 
What They Are; How Obtained. 
Within a short time a presidential campaign will be 
on, and then the voice of the politician will be heard 
throughout the land crying his wares. Whatever his 
party, the reason he will advance for his preferment 
will be that the prosperity of the country will be best 
promoted by his special scheme of government. The 
tariff, the trusts, the form of our money, etc., have been 
talked about so continuously and persistently by press 
and politician that thousands of good people believe 
those things are the prime cause of our prosperity. They 
have their decided effects, of course, but the thing that 
has placed us where we are 
to-day is the enormous devel¬ 
opment of our natural re¬ 
sources. The farmer, the 
miner and the lumberman 
obtain the raw material; the 
artisan fashions into a form 
desirable for use; the rail¬ 
road and vessel carry it to 
the desired place and the 
merchant sees that it gets in¬ 
to the hands of the consumer. 
Somewhere along this line 
from producer to consumer, 
every man, woman and child 
in the United States depends, 
either directly or indirectly, 
for his bread and butter. 
Now, our natural resources 
would be almost valueless to¬ 
day without means to secure 
and develop them. It should 
therefore be apparent to the 
dullest mind that the one 
thing that has placed an eter¬ 
nity of progress between us 
and our ancestors of a cen¬ 
tury ago, is the marvelous 
machinery by which we are 
able to handle, develop and 
transport our natural re¬ 
sources. Without all this 
machinery a large part of 
our natural resources, our 
raw material, would be prac¬ 
tically worthless. To go one 
step further, I believe that 
upon proper consideration, it 
will be just as apparent to 
everybody, that the direct 
cause of the production of 
that machinery is the reward 
the Government offers for 
the production of a new and 
useful machine, and that re¬ 
ward is the grant to the in¬ 
ventor of the exclusive fight 
to make, use and sell his invention for 17 years, pro¬ 
vided he will patent it, that is, make it patent or clear 
or plain, so that anybody can make and use it after the 
17 years have passed. No man could or would make 
any special effort to invent and build new machinery 
for his own personal use. When he has put his 
thought, his time and his money into producing some¬ 
thing useful, he has a right to hope to reap some profit. 
If we all stood around and grabbed his inventions away 
from him as fast as he made them, he would quit in¬ 
venting, or more probably never even try, just as you 
would quit planting corn if your neighbors carried it 
off as fast as it ripened and you were powerless to pre¬ 
vent it. If giving an inventor the exclusive right to 
his invention for 17 years has resulted in the produc¬ 
tion of means whereby nature can be forced to yield up 
her riches in the way she is now being forced to yield 
them up, that privilege must be valuable to us as a peo¬ 
ple, and should be guarded and extended wherever prac¬ 
ticable. At present the law only covers the granting of 
a patent for a “new and useful art, machine, manufac¬ 
ture or composition of matter, or a new and useful im¬ 
provement thereof.” It is unfortunate that no prac¬ 
tical way has been evolved for protecting one who has 
produced a new and useful organic product of nature, 
such as a new and useful plant or animal. If a reward 
commensurate with the value of their services to the 
world were given to some of the men to whom we are 
indebted for the creation of new plants or breeds of ani¬ 
mals, they would have died multi-millionaires. The 
difficulties surrounding the protection for a term of 
years of a plant or animal appear to be insuperable. A 
mechanical thing does not reproduce itself; it can al¬ 
ways be followed and identified, and as a rule can only 
be made in a factory where it could readily be detected. 
But a plant or animal reproduces itself. An inventor of 
a new and useful potato selling you one, sells you a 
complete potato factory, as it were, all equipped and 
ready for operation, and sells you the right to run your 
factory to its full capacity. In a few months from the 
time you put your potato in the ground, you have, may¬ 
be, forty fully equipped potato factories. You can 
readily see how impossible it would be for the courts to 
follow and punish infringements in such a matter. This 
matter has all been carefully thought out by the Gov¬ 
ernment and it is doing the best it can as a substitute by 
employing the most competent experts it can in the De¬ 
partment of Agriculture, to produce and develop the 
organic products. It has its agents in every corner of 
the globe searching out plants and animals that may 
prove to be useful to the American farmer, and its ex¬ 
periment stations are testing everything they can to 
determine the possibilities of the animal and vegetable 
kingdoms in their relation to the material welfare of 
this nation. Much that is being done along that line 
may seem unnecessary and even a waste of time, but 
on the whole great and lasting good comes from our 
Department of Agriculture. 
Most people think that the patent laws are made sole¬ 
ly in the interests of the inventors, and as a sort of 
reward for what they have 
done. Such is not the case. 
They are made solely in the 
interests of the whole body 
of the people, and not at all 
for the inventors. The sole 
object of the patent law is 
to excite into activity the in¬ 
ventive mind wherever it may 
be located in this world, so 
that we may get the benefit 
of it, without putting a di¬ 
rect charge on the people. If 
we could get inventions in 
any other better or cheaper 
way, we would do it. If some 
one has a better way of har¬ 
vesting hay than we have 
now, we want to know it, 
and know it quick, and we 
don’t care whether he lives in 
Greenland or in the Fiji Isl¬ 
ands. We will give him the 
sole right to his machine for 
17 years, and will buy it 
from him, if it is profitable 
for us to do so. If he asks 
too much for it, we are just 
as well off as we were be¬ 
fore, and go on using what 
we had before, holding our 
peace until his patent expires, 
when we can use it free for¬ 
ever.' In order to spur the 
inventor to his •supremest 
efforts, the Patent Office does 
the best it can to give him a 
good strong patent that will 
be of substantial value. In 
other words, the Government, 
through the Patent Office, 
tries honestly to carry out its 
part of the agreement, and 
the courts protect him when 
they can. At the same time 
the Patent Office and the 
courts do their best to care 
for the interests of the people by heading off hundreds 
of thousands of attempts to get patents that should not 
be granted. 
In order to obtain a patent four things are abso¬ 
lutely necessary. If one of them is absent a patent can¬ 
not be granted, or if it has been granted, it is held by 
the courts to be void. First, the thing for which a pat¬ 
ent is asked must be an invention. It must be some¬ 
thing more than what a skilled mechanic would do; 
it must involve the inventive faculty. To determine 
this point is extremely difficult, and requires sound 
judgment on the part of the examiner and a thoroughi 
knowledge of the attitude of the courts on what does 
and what does not involve invention. 
Second, the thing must be new. To determine this 
it is necessary to look up all that has ever been done in 
p*- 
A GIANT CHESTNUT TREE IN NEW ENGLAND. Fig. 304 . 
