Where Ideas Go To Die
A little article on the Patent Office and its teensy-weensy museum. Again, because the Sun’s website is crappy and mortal, I reproduce the piece below.
***
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is to America what the Statue of Liberty is to America. Ever since George Washington and Thomas Jefferson signed the first proof of intellectual property on July 31, 1790, over 7 million more have been issued by an institution now employing 7,300 people. The sturdy Francocrafted dame may score higher on grandeur and be considerably easier to get into, but as an active symbol of good-old Gringo values, the PTO is tough to top.
Located in the heart of Alexandria, it is the largest operating American dream-catcher. With a mission “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries,” it also captures many important side-effects of the American dream: comedy, failure, and prolific litigation.
Some of us are a few miles from punctual, some a few minutes from witty, and some ever a sprained ankle or missed cab-ride from having beaten Ford to the T. For those who love to pour the bitter whine of sour grapes, the PTO must prove a fruitful vineyard. Failed patent stories abound. They range from coincidental—same invention, similar time, different inventors—to tear-jerking. Imagine the grief of a man who, upon being dumped by his mistress, coiled into a fit of absorbed and tireless dedication from which he managed to invent the Two-Way Street…only to get a rejection letter from the Patent Office saying “Already exists. See: Love.”
Let’s focus on the positive. The PTO is a repository of such monumental contributions to our way of life as the telephone, the efficient light bulb, air conditioning, and Birth Control Pill Dispenser in the Form of a Hair Brush (Patent No. 4,690,279: “ease your groom while you broom!”). Abraham Lincoln, for innovations in the manner of vessel-buoying, is the only president to score a patent. And possibly the most famous patent belonged to Frederic Auguste Bartholdi for, yes, his design of the Statue of Liberty.
Expectant mothers already subject their fetuses to Mozart. Soon ambitious potential fathers will be able to get an even better head start in the child-cultivation craze, if the patented Force-Sensitive Sound-Playing Condom (No. 5,163,447) ever bears fruit. And thanks to the Grave Alarm (No. 500,072), the miser whose life-long goal is to take his money with him to the grave, can now make sure it stays there. As you can see, patents mean joy for more than just inventors.
The annual theme of the PTO’s one-room museum, easy to miss if you lack 20/20, is dedicated to the oldest form of private transportation—“Shoes: Innovations at Your Feet.”
From the automatic shoe lasting machine to the footrest to Ruffwear: For Dogs on the Go, every crucial advancement in footwear is on display. A commemoration of our national canon’s most nuanced portrayal of a shoe salesman, Al Bundy, is inexcusably absent, but that’s okay. In tribute to the proficiency of American manufacturing, the mechanical tap-shoe exhibit wasn’t working.
Some exhibits offered interesting factoids. I learned all baseball shoes were brown until the Reds wore whites in 1967. Other exhibits posed more questions than answers. One of these, entitled First Lady Footwear, featured the favored pairs of Julia Grant, Edith Roosevelt, Lou Hoover, and Mamie Eisenhower. “Each pair offers insights to their characters,” a spunky video guide informs me. But this was impossible to verify, given the unfamiliarity of those particular first ladies. Eleanor Roosevelt would’ve been a much more useful example. I’m sure she wore a goody two shoes. But were they, I wonder, built to traverse both steep inclines and flat carpets?
These uncertainties aside, the museum’s showcases ultimately impart the important paradox that innovation tends toward the irrelevant. America’s distinctly practical creativity is usually in pursuit of the immediately useless, producing stuff that on its face is neither needed nor even wanted, before developing into integral enhancements of life. How many of today’s vital inventions were inconceivable to previous generations of homo sapien, let alone desired?
Consistent with its symbolism, the PTO’s small but effective gift shop hooked this reporter to overpay for a pair of the funniest coffee mugs he’s ever seen. Their content had nothing to do with patents or trademarks or even America. Somehow this seems perfectly appropriate.
