TY - JOUR
AU - Guise-Richardson, Cai
AB - The application is 358 pages long. It bears the number 7,479,949. It was filed in 2007 and approved in 2009. It is unlikely that you know this patent by number. But the odds are that you have heard of, and might even own, the technological marvel that it protects. The abstract of this patent begins: “A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics . . . .” The first inventor listed is Steven P. Jobs. By now, perhaps you have guessed that the marvel in question is the iPhone, designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer. Since we live in the early twenty-first century, we have a feel for the world—the current historical context—that surrounds this amazing device. We know, based on our own experience, what a “touch screen” is. And we know how this technology has affected our lives. But since we cannot jump back into the past in a time machine—at least not yet—we need some help in recapturing and reconstructing the historical context of previous technological advances or even ideas for such advances. In this regard, patent applications—their drawings, descriptions, and claims—offer a tantalizing glimpse at someone else's hopes and dreams. They show human curiosity in action, the beliefs and goals of real people at some point in history, technological ideas in physical form. Behind every patent lies a web of stories which make up the complex and fascinating history of technology. This article offers teachers some ideas on how to use patents and their associated narratives to help bring history to life for their students. What Is a Patent? Patents are essentially contracts through which the inventor of a process or technique makes information available to the public in return for a limited-time monopoly. In the United States, the patent system is rooted in the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The patent itself is a document explaining the discovery, how it is constructed or performed, and what is claimed as a rightful monopoly due to its novelty. All patents include a description and list of claims; many include drawings or were accompanied by physical models. Often the inventor explains why the discovery is needed. Patents are useful as documents or designs reflecting the ways people understood the needs and appropriate ways of doing things in their own time period. They show changes in what people sought to accomplish as well as different ways people sought similar end results. In some cases the dreams of patentees led to machines with obvious impact; U.S. history without railroads or cotton gins is hard to imagine. Other contributions are subtle or non-existent. Yet when you look around you, wherever you are, you see the physical results of patents. Accessing Patents Today teachers and students have free access to almost every patent registered in the U.S. A few thousand of the earliest were destroyed in an 1836 fire and could not be reconstructed; the remainder are accessible at <http://www.uspto.gov> or <http://www.google.com/patents>. Patents are issued numbers in chronological sequence, with reissues (patents modified during the period of their monopoly) and design patents numbered separately (as indicated by an R or D before the number). Those registered between 1790 and 1975 can be accessed by entering the date of patent enrollment or the patent number. Unfortunately, it is not possible at present to search these pre- 1976 patents by subject or name through the patent office. You need to have a number or date to locate a specific patent, although you can easily search for keywords via an optical character recognition tool available through Google patents. For patents issued after 1976, things get easier. In addition to being searchable by date and number, these patents are fully indexed by name and subject. Even without the more advanced search tool, students and teachers can still make great use of the entire run of patents. One can learn a great deal, for instance, simply by choosing a date, month, or year and surfing to see what sorts of problems and approaches occupied inventors of the period, or look at reissues alone to discover inventions which were more likely put into practice. Researchers curious about a particular technology can take advantage of the fact that many patents reference related patents by number. Students can begin with a single patent or name, such as Thomas Edison and incandescent lighting, and search out networks of ideas and people. Even a novice can often acquire a quick working knowledge of a given technique simply by hopscotching from one referenced patent to another. With en masse searching of scanned files through Google, you can look for interesting terms such as “biodegradable,” “shoddy,” “better mousetrap,” or “healthy and corset.” Or you can also try entering the name of a particular technology, object, or event, such as “squeegee,” “platypus,” or “food poisoning.” Websites such as the National Inventors Hall of Fame (<http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/1_1_search.asp>) can also be useful. Take names acquired from such sites, type them and the magic word “patents” into Google or another search engine, and specific patent numbers will usually pop up. From there you can move to the U.S. Patent Office site or Google Patents and pull up PDF files complete with description and pictures. In some cases, the search engine will take you directly to sites containing a PDF. Asking students to go to Google Patents and find three or five unique patents on a specific topic (paddle-wheelers in the mid-nineteenth century, gadgets for automobiles in the 1910s and 1920s, preprepared food in the late nineteenth century) can teach skills as well as help reinforce content. A scorecard posted on the office door or course website lets students check if their selections are different from those other students have found. The hunt for a unique set of patents compels students to try less obvious strategies than they are accustomed to when searching the Web. Within the confined but rich realm of patent records, they learn the importance of thinking through relevant search terms, pursuing links, and following leads. Visual Evidence One of the most enticing aspects of patents is that they include visual as well as written evidence. Patents for mechanical devices are often accompanied by detailed drawings, in addition to written descriptions of how the technology works and what novelty the inventor claims to have introduced. Consequently, patents are especially effective for reaching visual and experiential learners. By examining drawings, such students can often perceive how the device worked and envision how users operated it. From that, they may infer important lessons regarding the social conditions that prevailed at the time. Pictures of the massive diggers used in hard-rock mining, for instance, provide graphic statements of the ways nineteenth-century Americans engaged the environment of the West. Although such illustrations can help engage student interest, they have limits. Typically, the illustrations show the patented devices completely devoid of context. Patents for pneumatic drills, explosive charges, and other devices used in hard-rock mining, for instance, will not show the miners who worked in loud, dusty, and claustrophobic conditions. Students will have to infer the sweat, dirt, and fear that accompanied such activities. Supporting documents, such as photos and illustrations available at the Library of Congress, can help set the machines in human context. For user-friendly descriptions of many technical devices, try searching documents in the Making of America website (<http://dlxs2.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/>). Enter the inventor's name or terms from the patent title for a quick and dirty search. Yet if the illustrations in patents have limits, the descriptions and claims often hold unexpected insights. Patents frequently lay out grand claims for what the invention might accomplish. Such explanations can reveal a great deal about existing practices in various trades and industries, as well as broad and common assumptions. Patents might, for instance, specify in significant detail how a technique might save materials or alter work practices for certain groups. Such descriptions often reveal prevailing social conditions and assumptions regarding matters such as race, class, gender, or age (e.g. #199,774 of 1874, Improvement in Kindergarten Weaving-Needles). Why are some objects defined as female, and others male? The claims that inventors make tell us about the dreams and aspirations of their times (#456,831 of 1891, describes an engine “for practically and economically transforming heat into mechanical energy without increase in entropy”). They prompt us to inquire why people considered certain ends desirable while sometimes overlooking qualities we might see as advantageous. What, for example, is considered environmentally friendly, efficient, or better at the time? Mysteries Indeed, part of what makes patents such useful teaching tools is that they are such obviously incomplete stories. Each patent presents us with a small mystery. Who were these inventors? Did they invent anything else? What were they trying to accomplish? Why did they care about this? How did they come up with the idea, and why did they take the approach they did? What became of their invention? Did they intend to manufacture these things, and if not, why not? Questions persist even in the case of our most famous and prolific inventors. Could anyone contemplate the hundreds of patents granted to Thomas Edison (see <http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents.htm>) and imagine one man alone in a laboratory putting all of these things together? His name may be listed, but part of the story of invention is missing. During Edison's working life, invention grew increasingly industrialized. It became predominantly work for hire, performed by a series of specialists under company auspices. Patent records may suggest as much, but further digging is necessary to get the full story. Variety One of the most useful aspects of patents is that they address such a wide array of human activities. Amidst the machinery, light bulbs, carburetors, steam engines, and such, one can find vast numbers of creations intended to relieve daily toil or otherwise enrich life in some modest way. Consider pre-sliced bread, Velcro, washing machines, nylon fishing line, clothes hangers, contact lenses, or rubber bands. One of the largest areas of patenting in the late nineteenth century, for instance, related to the outsourcing of previously domestic industries. Prepared foodstuffs and medicines, machines for sewing garments and footwear, knitting machines, packaging—all of these attracted inventive talents. No one browsing through patents issued in the 1920s could miss the revolutionary changes in American kitchens and bathrooms wrought by indoor plumbing, electricity, and colored ceramics. Exploring an earlier period, one can spend hours poring over the extraordinary number of patents involving the home processing of fruits, vegetables, and meats. They remind us of how much time Americans used to spend working with their hands and doing for themselves things that subsequent generations would purchase from others. ople have always sought fun and entertainment. Sports and recreation, for instance, have long been fertile areas of invention, one that many students enjoy exploring. Football, basketball, cricket, baseball, and foosball all spawned patents. As electricity became more widely available at the turn of the twentieth century, the patent registers swelled with amenities such as invigorating electric belts, scalp massagers, furniture warmers, and other ideas of how electricity might enhance life. Dig into patents from the 1910s, and you will find a similar cavalcade of modest inventions conceived in the wake of the Model T and mass automobile ownership (e.g., #1,314,004, Cooking Vessel for Exhaust-Pipes of Internal-Combustion Engines; #785,831 Automobile Clock; #1,049,695, Combined Foot-Warmer and Muffler; #1,383,569, Parking-Light). These and many other examples suggest how patents can illuminate the ways in which ordinary Americans— as users and consumers—responded to major changes in technology and incorporated breakthrough innovations into their lives. In the patent records, one finds not only the iPhones of their day, but the holders, skins, and sometimes apps as well (although software patents remain contentious). Pitching an Invention >One engaging way to utilize patents is to have student groups select a well-known invention, then “pitch” it to a relevant group such as a board of directors, corporate shareholders, a prize committee, the board of prisons, families at an auto show, or television viewers. Students must get inside the heads of people at the time and figure out why they considered the patented invention worthwhile, even if that means trying to convince the prison board to use their new electric chairs. This project has been particularly useful in classes with significant numbers of non-history majors. Students start contributing to the group from within the comfort zone of their own discipline, and start seeking out more and more nuanced historical information in order to achieve a specific goal (to sell their invention). Value of Obscurity Famous patents have their uses, but in many ways obscure patents are more effective teaching tools. Undistracted by the reputation of a famous inventor, students can concentrate instead on what a patent tells us about the hopes and aspirations of the times. Often, you can hook student interest by focusing on something we would now consider fanciful or preposterous. Say you want to teach about early Cold War America. Go to <http://www.google.com/patents> and type in “bomb shelter.” Sort the patents from oldest to newest and look for something post-Hiroshima. One item you will come across is Corwin D. Wilson's Sedan Having Versatile Structure (#2,638,374). This marvelous document describes the reasons for building a bomb-shelter as a family vehicle. Once the chuckles subside, students reading even just the first page of the patent can ponder serious matters regarding the assumptions and concerns of the day. Cars are central to society. Atomic war is an imminent threat and would probably result in destruction of cities. Family units must stay intact as city-dwellers disperse during threatened atomic attacks. Shelters should be mass produced for purchase by families, who would not want to live in communal shelters. Bomb shelters would need to house people for “some duration” while the military reinstituted social organization. Patents as Touchstones When teaching history, I use patents as touchstones, visible markers that work as bridges between topics. The familiar cotton gin (X72, Cotton Gin), for instance, touches upon a cluster of important matters from the early nineteenth century. Patent diagrams of the simple cranked device suggest at once how useful it could be for those performing the troublesome task of cleaning short-staple cotton by hand and how easily someone could build such an uncomplicated machine. From there you can discuss how famed inventor Eli Whitney could not protect his invention from infringers and fulfill his vision of operating factories based upon his patented creation. Critics contended that gins predated Whitney and originated in Africa or among the local population of slaves and poor white women who customarily picked cotton. The contested patent claims left rivals free to concentrate on manufacturing gins cheaply, without paying royalties to Whitney, and selling them to slaveowners who were the real beneficiaries of the technology. With access to cheap gins, owners could redirect their enslaved labor to more profitable tasks, such as growing and picking cotton. This single patent thus encapsulates a host of themes involving early industrialization, the division of labor among men, women and slaves, and the differing trajectories of North and South. Hollerith Tabulator Far more obscure than the cotton gin, but no less influential, was the Hollerith Tabulator (#395,782). Developed by Herman Hollerith, founder of a company that eventually morphed into future computer giant International Business Machines (IBM), the Tabulator (see illustration on p. 46) counted punch cards that encoded social or business information in ones (holes) and zeros (no hole) in order to generate basic statistical information. (For more on Hollerith, visit: <http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hollerith.html.>) In the 1880s, the machine opened new possibilities in information management, part of a broader effort in the social sciences to gather quantifiable data to answer pressing social, political, and economic questions. This technology also helped transform the U.S. census, which is one of the places easiest to see how its development and use reflected contemporary concerns about health, race, and immigration. When Hollerith joined the census bureau in 1879, the office was in crisis. A booming population combined with governmental agencies asking for more extensive information made existing methods of tallying and sorting non-viable. With workers performing most of the calculations by hand, complete census results could take over ten years to compile. Hollerith's Tabulator, the winner of a three-way competition among inventors, substituted machines for hand methods. The move not only sped up the calculations; it also enabled census processors to sort the results in various ways and generate a much more nuanced picture of the American population. Effectively, the Hollerith system took information gathered on individual schedules (sheets with space to write answers to specific questions), and translated it onto a series of cards. Data from each household were contained on a single card containing rows and columns of potential holes. Holes punched in one area of the grid represented the number of people in the household. Other parts of the grid encoded information such as gender, age, ethnicity, education, marital status, occupation, and citizenship—whatever enumerators were instructed by Congress to ask. The tabulator took a card, checked for a hole in a specific place, and, if found, added one to the tally. By running stacks of cards through a sorting device, census processors could rapidly count the number of households containing an immigrant from Russia, for example, or those containing a person whose parents came from Russia. The selected cards fell into a specific slot, from where they could be collected and statistics on Russian immigrants calculated. The Hollerith system presented Congress with a powerful new tool, one which enabled it to slice and dice information on the American population and target legislation at particular groups. In 1890, for instance, a Republican-dominated Congress gathered data about Civil War military service in order to implement a controversial new pension system. This information had an overt political purpose, as Republicans sought to secure loyalty from Union veterans. As the Jim Crow era dawned and cities grew crowded with immigrants, Congress also asked for information regarding race, ethnicity, and status as a first- or second-generation immigrant. Questions established whether an individual was “white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian.” Some racial categories were absolute; a person was either classified as Indian or not. Black and white, however, were not discrete categories. Pressure from elements in Congress created categories that would provide ammunition for debates over miscegenation, fertility of “hybrids,” or the educational potential of various social groups. In addition to reading the basic Hollerith patent, students and teachers can easily access Schedule 1 of the 1890 census (<http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/questionnaires/1890_2.html>) as well as the diagrams from Hollerith's patent #395782 (Statistics). Just as the cotton gin patent serves as an overture to early industrialization in the antebellum period, the Hollerith documents provide an excellent point of entry into the Progressive Era, with its heightened concern for proper citizenship and its commitment to statistical evidence and government reforms that often worked to exclude and discriminate. (As a nice capstone to this discussion, instructors might point out that during the New Deal of the 1930s, the federal government filled large rooms with later versions of the Hollerith machines built by IBM for purposes of calculating Social Security benefits. And shortly thereafter, in 1940, the Selective Service Administration used them while implementing the military draft.) And since we are living through a census year, and the issues of race, immigration, and the census have hardly gone away, this exercise could be a particularly useful entry point into the history of technology. Conclusion From the cotton gin to the Hollerith Tabulator to the iPhone, patents provide a unique and accessible window not only into the history of technology, but into history at large. They act as markers of important events, trends, and issues. They tie together various themes. They reach out to broad groups of students, giving visual and experiential learners something tangible. And they can help us reach new audiences by refusing to divide the mechanical arts from the humanities, thus creating a more inclusive approach to the nation's past. Figures and Tables View largeDownload slide Considered the most prolific inventor in history, Thomas Edison (1847–1931) secured 1,093 U.S. patents and held many more abroad. A significant part of Edison's innovation, however, was his application of mass production and teamwork to the creative process. Though he did not conceive of the idea for the light bulb, Edison did significantly improve existing technology by using a carbon filament. In 1879, his prototype remained illuminated for more than forty hours and he received a patent (shown above) in 1880. (Courtesy of U.S. Patent Office) View largeDownload slide Considered the most prolific inventor in history, Thomas Edison (1847–1931) secured 1,093 U.S. patents and held many more abroad. A significant part of Edison's innovation, however, was his application of mass production and teamwork to the creative process. Though he did not conceive of the idea for the light bulb, Edison did significantly improve existing technology by using a carbon filament. In 1879, his prototype remained illuminated for more than forty hours and he received a patent (shown above) in 1880. (Courtesy of U.S. Patent Office) View largeDownload slide Before 1890, it took the U.S. Census Bureau up to ten years to tabulate the data from each decennial census collection. Herman Hollerith was a U.S. Census Bureau employee who entered a contest to invent a machine that could speed up the process. Patented in 1889, the Hollerith Tabulator counted punch cards to process raw data into basic statistical information. Because they could perform these operations at rates exponentially faster than existing technology, Hollerith's machines were widely utilized by governments and businesses alike. Hollerith founded the company that would eventually become International Business Machines (IBM). (Courtesy of the U. S. Patent Office) View largeDownload slide Before 1890, it took the U.S. Census Bureau up to ten years to tabulate the data from each decennial census collection. Herman Hollerith was a U.S. Census Bureau employee who entered a contest to invent a machine that could speed up the process. Patented in 1889, the Hollerith Tabulator counted punch cards to process raw data into basic statistical information. Because they could perform these operations at rates exponentially faster than existing technology, Hollerith's machines were widely utilized by governments and businesses alike. Hollerith founded the company that would eventually become International Business Machines (IBM). (Courtesy of the U. S. Patent Office) View largeDownload slide Census employee Ann Oliver, at left, operates a Hollerith unit tabulator to process cards containing 1940 census information, at the rate of 400 per minute. The machine could extract twelve separate categories of statistical information from each card. Later, Eugene M. La Boiteaux invented a more compact version of the machine, here operated by Virginia Balinger, at right, which extracted fifty-eight statistics from 150 cards per minute. With the aid of this new technology, statistical information from the 1940 census was compiled in just over two years. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) View largeDownload slide Census employee Ann Oliver, at left, operates a Hollerith unit tabulator to process cards containing 1940 census information, at the rate of 400 per minute. The machine could extract twelve separate categories of statistical information from each card. Later, Eugene M. La Boiteaux invented a more compact version of the machine, here operated by Virginia Balinger, at right, which extracted fifty-eight statistics from 150 cards per minute. With the aid of this new technology, statistical information from the 1940 census was compiled in just over two years. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) Copyright © 2010, Organization of American Historians
TI - Using Patents to Teach History
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.2307/maghis/24.3.45
DA - 2010-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/using-patents-to-teach-history-b71fp03L2d
SP - 45
EP - 48
VL - 24
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -