4 - Technical Imaginaries

Summary

Unlike rival systems in France and Britain, early United States law from 1790 until 1880 required patentees to supply working models of their inventions. Although the US system was widely copied later in the century (e.g., by Germany and Japan), by that time the models requirement was widely obsolete. Thus by the time of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1883, the prior tradition of making and examining models was virtually irrelevant: it curtailed the possible scope of patents, excluding, for example, patents on pure processes. So for these and other reasons inventors’ lobbies vehemently opposed it. Nevertheless the culture of patent models is worth studying both for the light it sheds on shifting concepts of innovation, and as an instrument of international publicity for the US patent system: the requirement of a model shifted attention from motive concept to the apparatus represented. The models requirement, moreover, sustained a culture of invention populated by professional model makers and lawyers clustered in the nation’s capital, as well as a popular public museum.