Talk:History of United States patent law

A fact from History of United States patent law appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 26 April 2008, and was viewed approximately 1,416 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the first U.S. patent, numbered X000001, was issued to Samuel Hopkins on July 31, 1790 for "the making of pot ash and pearl ash"?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2008/April.

Wikipedia

'Dubious' tag discussed:

The sentence to which the 'dubious' tag has been attached is:

"In the colonial era, all intellectual property in America was owned by Great Britain."

(No dispute is raised about the next following sentence: "In order to protect an invention, a formal approval from the colony's chief was required.")

There are two problems with the dubious sentence:

(1) There appears to be no evidence that the concept "intellectual property" was current at all in colonial North America: Patents were seen as temporary trade monopoly privileges -- for example, they were described as such in Coke. "Intellectual property" here looks like an anachronism -- or else it clearly needs a specific citation.

(2) "Owned by Great Britain" is clearly not true: the narrative and the sources show that patents were owned by the people to whom they were granted -- just as they generally have been in other times and places. (Maybe this was just an awkward way of expressing the fact reflected in the next sentence? -- that the patent-granting authority was then either the governor or other appointed representative of the King, according to the law in force in the colony concerned.)

It looks as if the dubious sentence ought to be deleted, but I tagged it as a precaution in case someone has a source. Terry0051 (talk) 15:10, 13 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Update re 'dubious' tags: (1) No-one supported the statement discussed above, so it's now been deleted. (2) Some while back a 'dubious' tag was put on the statement that patents were granted in medieval times. That's now clearly supported by citations [3] and [4] (Terrell, and Wyndham Hulme) so the dubious tag has been taken off. Terry0051 (talk) 19:09, 7 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The oldest form of patent was found in Ancient Greece, not in medieval times. See History of patent law. --Edcolins (talk) 20:42, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

[From Terry0051] It's an unsourced and dubious statement to call those Greek privileges a "form of patent" -- unless you are going to define any kind of innovation privilege as a "form of patent" (what, even a copyright for a new book? if you stretch 'patent' that wide then you are adopting a special and unusual usage). No challenge is raised against mentioning the Greek privileges as relevant to the history of patents, only against calling them something anachronistic that they were not. (By the way, the statement you are now challenging as dubsious does not seem to be same as the one that was challenged before, seems to me you have not 're-added' but made a new challenge.) Terry0051 (talk) 20:58, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply. Interesting debate indeed. An additional source could be [1]:

"On the other hand, great encouragement was held out to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury, the profits arising from which were secured to the inventor by patent for the space of a year.."

It seems to be an early form of patent. But, you are right, I am not in a position to clarify whether these so-called refinements in luxury could be some kind of inventions, as we now understand it. --Edcolins (talk) 22:34, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

[From Terry0051] Thanks for your interesting comment and citation.

I'll return shortly to this, in the meantime you might be interested in a citation that seems to be closer to the earliest surviving historical source for the report about inventors' privileges at Sybaris. (As far as I can see it may be the only surviving ancient historical source, in the sense that all the others I've seen so far derive from it or cite to it.) Sybaris, destroyed in BC 510, seems to be the only Greek city for which such a matter is reported -- or are there others?

The historian Athenaeus (who flourished about AD 200), wrote in "The Deipnosophists" (see Deipnosophistae), Book 12, pages 518-544, as translated by C.D.Yonge (1854) (see translation at page 835, paragraph 20), a passage about Sybaris that quotes or paraphrases, perhaps we can't be sure which, the third-century-BC historian Phylarchus (from the "25th book of Phylarchus' History" -- a work itself now lost): "And if any caterer or cook invented any peculiar and excellent dish, no other artist was allowed to make this for a year; but he alone who invented it was entitled to all the profit to be derived from the manufacture of it for that time; in order that others might be induced to labour at excelling in such pursuits." (Alternative online source at for an html extract.)

That seems to be all the information that has survived from the ancient historical sources on this matter -- or is there further material of independent origin? Terry0051 (talk) 22:05, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment on unsourced material

The following material was added to the main article, but besides being unsourced, there is a lot wrong with it: "Joseph Jenkes I of Lynn, Massachusetts, was the first patentee of inventions in America, having introduced the idea (first granted in England by act of Parliament in 1625) of protection for the manufacturer of improvements by petition to the government of Massachusetts Bay. So it appears that the first patent granted in America was to Joseph Jenkes in 1646."

What's wrong with this includes --

Even if true that Jenkes was a patentee in 1646, the article already mentions and cites a source for an earlier patentee of 1641. So Jenkes' patent of 1646, citation-supported or not, was in either case not the first.
The parenthesis is wrong: material elsewhere in this article, and in other related WP articles, already shows that patents were not 'first' granted in England by Act of 1625, they were older than that. The relevant Act was of 1623/4 not 1625, and it did not begin the grant of patents, it only regulated and restricted the already-existing practice of granting patents (by setting, and in part confirming, specific criteria of validity).

Clearly the material should not be re-entered without being amended for correctness and properly supported by reliable source. Terry0051 (talk) 19:10, 18 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Need help with first patent holder

Hi, there are conflicting stories about the first patent holder in the US, which are also mentioned in this article, and were included in the DYK. See Talk:Samuel Hopkins (inventor)#Maxey: wrong Hopkins for more details. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 03:13, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Who Promoted the Patent System

Who were the primary proponents of the patent system? Was it Jefferson? What did Franklin have to say about it? Is there any of this history that would be good to have in this article? KellyCoinGuy (talk) 22:45, 30 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Copyright violation (not)

I just reverted myself after finding portions of this text verbatim at [2]. That website claims a copyright in the text back to 2006, but the original poster of the article here is the actual author of the text on that site. If you look at the edit history of the first editor's edits to this page, you can see his compositional process - he is generating the article's contents from scratch. The Mike Ervin site has taken the text from here, not the other way around. Chubbles (talk) 22:03, 23 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for pointing it out. I've added a {{Backwards copy}} to this talk page. TJRC (talk) 00:18, 24 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]