On July 31, 1790, President George Washington signed his name to a modest sheet of parchment that would make history. The brief document recognized Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia for an “Improvement, not known or used before,” in the making of potash, a chemical used in fertilizer and other goods. It gave Hopkins “the sole and exclusive Right and Liberty of using, and vending to others the said Discovery” for 14 years.
With that act, the United States issued its first patent. Attorney General Edmund Randolph and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson also signed the document. Amid the enormous responsibilities confronting Washington’s young administration, securing the rights of a relatively obscure inventor might seem like a small matter. But for the nation’s founders, protecting innovation was a fundamental duty of government.
The U.S. Constitution, ratified only two years earlier, instructed Congress to “promote the progress of Science and Useful Arts” by safeguarding the rights of inventors and authors. As Antonin Scalia Law School professor Adam Mossof has written, it marked “the first time in history that a country’s founding document expressly authorize[d] the government to protect patents and copyrights.”
The principle of protecting inventors was not entirely new. English law had recognized patents for centuries. But in Britain, such privileges were issued according to the monarch’s discretion. The newly formed United States took a different path, granting patents on the basis of an invention’s originality rather than royal favor.
That distinctly democratic approach to intellectual property helped unleash a wave of innovation that continues to shape the country. By 1836, nearly 10,000 inventions had been patented. The total surpassed 1 million in 1911. Today, more than 12 million U.S. patents have been issued.
America has long defined itself as a nation of inventors, and many of its earliest breakthroughs were tied to agriculture. Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical grain reaper, patented in 1834, helped transform farming through mechanization. John Deere’s steel plow, introduced in 1837, allowed settlers to cut through the dense sod of the prairie. Even earlier, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, patented in 1794, demonstrated how a technical advance could carry consequences far beyond its original purpose.
By speeding the processing of raw cotton, Whitney’s invention made cotton cultivation extraordinarily profitable. The expansion of that industry intensified demand for enslaved labor on Southern plantations. As Northern states increasingly pushed against slavery, the South became more dependent on what it called its “peculiar institution,” deepening the divisions that would eventually lead to the Civil War.
At the same time, the country’s inventive culture created opportunities for free Black Americans. In 1821, Thomas Jennings, a New York tailor’s apprentice, became the first African American to receive a patent, earning recognition for an early dry-cleaning method. Other notable Black patent holders included Sarah Boone, who improved the ironing board in 1892; Garrett Morgan, who developed the three-position traffic signal after witnessing a car crash and received a patent in 1923; and Elijah McCoy, who secured dozens of patents, including one in 1872 for an automatic lubricator for steam engines. McCoy’s dependable devices are widely associated with the phrase “the real McCoy.”
As America’s innovation juggernaut gathered steam, inventors came to be seen in a heroic light. Painter-turned-entrepreneur Robert Fulton developed the world’s first commercially viable steamboat, which began plying New York’s Hudson River in 1807. Able to motor against the current — even on the mighty Mississippi — Fulton’s steamboats revolutionized transportation. Suddenly, America’s vast interior was open for business.
In Europe, status was still largely determined by hereditary class. In democratic America, technological innovators like Fulton formed a new kind of aristocracy, one representing the future rather than the musty past. Even today, dozens of streets, counties and towns carry Fulton’s name.
Fulton wasn’t the only inventor focused on moving people and goods. After all, America is a big country. In 1862, George Westinghouse patented an automatic railroad brake that allowed longer, faster trains to operate safely. Elisha Otis applied a similar insight to vertical travel: His fail-safe elevator brake (1852) reshaped city skylines by making skyscrapers feasible. The transportation revolution literally took off when the Wright Brothers’ hand-crafted airplane first flew in 1903. Humble bicycle mechanics, the Wrights had no formal training. But they applied a scientific mindset to their project, including building one of the world’s first wind tunnels to test their designs.
Henry Ford’s genius did not lie in trying to build the world’s best car. Rolls-Royce and others already made finely crafted automobiles for wealthy buyers. Ford instead created a revolutionary factory, one in which moderately skilled workers could build a sturdy, reliable car at a price most Americans could afford. Introduced in 1908, Ford’s Model T offered mobility to the masses, which, in turn, transformed the American lifestyle. For better or worse, the car-centric suburb was born.
US inventors also led the way in what today we call information technology. In 1840, Samuel Morse improved a process to send small jolts of electricity down a wire and invented a code to turn those blips into words. Telegraph lines — or what Morse called “lightning wires” — soon crisscrossed the country. Control over such a vital invention could be enormously profitable. Morse’s long legal battle to defend his patent rights led all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost in a still-controversial 1854 decision.
Alexander Graham Bell’s 1875 patent for his invention of the first practical telephone also faced legal challenges. Almost unbelievably, another inventor had submitted his similar telephone design to the patent office on the same day. The battle raged for years, but Bell ultimately prevailed.
Inventor Thomas Edison was lionized for his many inventions, including the lightbulb, the phonograph and motion-picture camera. But the “Wizard of Menlo Park” was also notoriously litigious, launching endless legal battles against rival electricity innovator George Westinghouse and other competitors. As the age of invention marched into the 20th century, it sometimes seemed that patent lawyers were getting most of the spoils.
By the end of World War II, America’s culture of innovation had changed. Most breakthroughs were no longer the work of lone tinkerers like Whitney. Now, big inventions required teamwork, often supported by the military or large corporations. In 1947, a group of Bell Labs engineers found a way to manipulate electrical currents using tiny crystals. The transistor was born, and the Electronics Age was off and running.
The breakthroughs started coming like clockwork: The integrated circuit (1959) allowed multiple transistors to be placed on a single chip. Those microchips became the building blocks of vastly more powerful computers. In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs showed they could use off-the-shelf components to build the home computer they named Apple I. Before long, we had the Worldwide Web, the dot.com era and all the rest.
In 2007, Apple changed the world again by combining over a century’s worth of breakthroughs in a single device, the iPhone. It’s been estimated that a single smartphone relies on some 250,000 patents. Experts now worry innovation might be stymied by litigation-choked “patent thickets.”
Today, we are entering another era of technological disruption as artificial intelligence gallops forward. Like the cotton gin, the automobile or the internet, AI will bring unimaginable advances, and no doubt, unanticipated challenges. But, if history is any guide, America’s spirit of innovation will carry us through.
James B. Meigs is the former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine and columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter.
