Models of Invention and Enterprise: 150 Years of the American Patent System-Two Exhibits at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

Abstract

patent system as we have it today. To commemorate that anniversary, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History (NMAH) mounted not one, but two, exhibitions, titled Invention and Enterprise and Pending: Models of Invention. One was confronted by Invention and Enterprise just inside the museum's Constitution Avenue entrance. From there one beheld, filling the entrance hall, nearly a dozen large, mysterious objects standing on three floodlighted platforms (fig. 1). The immediate effect of this sight was a quickening of curiosity which seemed to sweep one, willy-nilly, into the exhibit itself. The objects turned out to be various products of invention and enterprise-a McCormick reaper, a Blanchard-type wood-turning lathe, the vacuum pan used by Gail Borden to produce the first condensed milk in 1853, and others. Off to one side was a selection of finely crafted patent models from the period 1836-80, when applicants for patents were required to submit models to the Patent Office. This period could be called the Golden Age of patenting solely on the basis of its average annual rate of increase in patent applications, a rate which far surpassed that of any subsequent period of the same number of years.1 Although the models were presented as a group, the housing