THE STATE OF THE ART
Taking it for granted, now, that you have drawn out your invention on
paper and have made cardboard models of the more difficult parts so
that you can see about what your device or machine will look like and
how it will work your next move is to look up the _state of the art_.
~What is Meant by State of the Art.--~The state of the art means
everything that has been published either in books, papers, or in
patents about anything that has been discovered or invented, which has
a bearing on your invention.
As an instance the _state of the art_ of the _dynamo electric machine_,
or _dynamo_ as it is called for short, goes clear back to 1833 when
Faraday made the experiment of passing a wire across the pole of a
magnet and found that a current of electricity was set up in it--that
is in the wire. Since that time hundreds of patents have been taken out
and thousands of articles have been written about dynamos.
All of this information, or _data_ as it is called, goes to make up the
state of the art in the class of dynamos and all of the patents can
be had and many of the articles too if you know how to go about it to
find them and one of the purposes of this chapter is to tell you how
to do it.
~Use of the State of the Art.--~You can easily understand that with all
the thought that has been given to, and the experimental work that has
been put on, dynamos to the end of bettering them it is a pretty hard
thing to make an improvement that has not been made before, though it
is still quite possible to do so.
Suppose, then, you had thought of and worked out on paper some
improvement on the dynamo which you believed to be new and original and
of great value. Certainly since you know that inventors like Edison,
Brush, Weston, Thompson, Tesla, and a hundred other men almost as big,
had applied themselves with diligence to dynamo problems during the
last 40 years you would not care to go very far in spending your time
or your money working on it until you learned whether or not some one
before you had thought of and used the same _principle_.
Yet hundreds of beginners in the field of inventing work along in the
dark because they do not know the state of the art, and always to their
sorrow. So don’t be one of them.
~How to Learn the State of the Art.--~For the reasons I have given
above you will see that it is bad practice to go beyond the point of
working out your invention on paper before you know whether it is
really new or not for though it may be entirely original with you, if
it has been thought of and read before some learned body of scientists,
or printed in some musty trade paper prior to the time you conceived
the idea you haven’t the slightest claim to it, nor is it of the least
value to you.
And so after you have thought out your invention and have made drawings
of it the next step _is not_ to apply for a patent as most patent
attorneys will advise to do, or to have a model made as many model
makers will tell you to do but _to look up the state of the art_ and
see where you are _at_.
~Having a Patent Attorney Look it Up.--~The easiest and quickest way to
learn roughly the state of the art is to have a _preliminary search_,
as it is called, made by a _patent attorney_, which means that he will
look through the files of patents that have been granted by the _United
States Patent Office_ to other inventors for devices or machines of the
kind you are working on.
To do this you must, of course, _retain_ a patent attorney, that is
employ him, and turn the drawings and written description of your
invention over to him. Every patent attorney outside of Washington,
where the patent office is located, has a _correspondent_ or an
associate, that is another patent attorney, who lives there and who
acts for him when necessary.
This latter patent attorney will take your drawings and description
to the library of the patent office, look over the files of patents
there and pick out those which seem to him are most nearly like your
invention.
He will get copies of these patents, send them to your patent attorney
who will in turn hand them to you with your original drawings and you
can then go over them and compare them and judge for yourself whether
you have a really new invention or if it burned in the brain of some
other inventor before you ever dreamed of it.
From the above you might infer that it would be a good scheme to
employ a patent attorney who lives in Washington; but on the contrary
it is better to have a patent attorney in your own city transact this
business for you, if one is to be had, for then you can talk with him
and you will learn many things you couldn’t begin to find out through
correspondence.
Many advertising patent attorneys agree to make what they are pleased
to call a _free search_ for you--and do it while you wait, so to speak.
A free search, or _desk search_, as it is dubbed by those who don’t
make them, is of no value whatever for it is the snap-shot opinion, or
rather a notion, of a patent attorney who is drumming up business by
un-business like methods.
To show how absurd an opinion of this kind is just consider that there
are 43 _divisions_ of inventions in the patent office; each division,
is split up into anywhere from a dozen to nearly 200 _classes_ and that
in some of these classes as many as 12,000 patents have been granted as
in the case of the sewing machine.
And when you ask a patent attorney of this ilk to make a free search
for you he will write back a letter in this tone of voice: I have very
carefully considered your _sketch_, etc., etc. The first payment of
fees necessary to start your case is $20 and upon receipt of this
amount I will be very glad to carry the case forward, etc., etc.
All patent attorneys who advertise that they will make a search for you
free of charge will also make what they call a _special search_ for
which they charge $5.00, and any other patent attorney will make one
for the same price and which is, after all is said and done, only a
_preliminary search_.
You can buy a copy of any patent that has been _issued_ by sending
5 cents in coin--the government won’t take its own stamps--to the
_Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D. C._, that is if you know the
number and date of it and the name of the inventor to whom it was
granted. The patent attorney who makes the preliminary search will send
you several copies of the patents nearest like your drawing without
extra charge as these are, or should be, included in your $5.00 fee.
When you get the copies of these patents go over each one carefully and
see how nearly the pictures are like yours; then read the description
of the invention, or _specification_ as it is called, and compare it
with your own statement, and, finally study the _claims_ at the end of
the specification and pick them to pieces for in these are to be found
what has really been allowed to the inventor by the patent office.
The patents found by the patent attorney in making a preliminary
search of the files and which are sent to you does not by any means
represent the whole state of the art, but they serve a useful purpose
as a starter. The reason it is not complete is because the patents are
usually selected by patent attorneys in virtue of their similarity to
the drawings you have submitted to him. Sometimes, to be sure, he reads
what the specification says and if he is a real good patent attorney he
will sift out a few of the claims, though this is usually due to his
patent training rather than to any conscientious desire on his part to
get at all the facts in the case.
But when you have applied for a patent on your alleged new and useful
improvement and it is being scrutinized by the _examiner_ in the
patent office, he will look up the state of the art in all its devious
_ramifications_ for this is what he is paid to do by the people of the
United States, though he thinks it is the officials in Washington who
employ him. At any rate he has plenty of time to do it in and ample
assistance to do it with.
Nor does he merely take a glance at the drawings, specifications and
claims of your patent application and compare them casually with others
that have been granted along the same line of endeavor, but, instead,
when enough pressure is brought to bear, he will look up everything
that has ever been published in all languages, including the barbaric
_ro_,[1] since Adam was a boy.
At other times and for no reason at all, or so it seems, he will of a
verity go to sleep on the job in his sub-cellar and let an application
slip through his room in a few months, while he will spend years
on another application of the same kind. Of course if you are the
fortunate one you will be glad to get a patent granted so easily; your
patent attorney is glad because he has your money in his pocket and the
examiner is glad because he has made a friend of his glad.
To have everybody glad is a nice thing, you will allow, but don’t
crow too soon for there is a hole in the average patent big enough to
drive a horse and wagon through. If your patent is for an invention of
genuine merit you will not be alone very long in the field and should
you commence to make anything that looks like real money out of it you
will find some other genius with an invention and a patent, as like
yours as the other Siamese twin and if you don’t sue him he will sue
you and then you can fight it out in the courts.
Even as right is always on the side of the army with the heaviest
artillery, if there are enough shells, so, too, justice is always on
the side of the inventor who has the smoothest patent attorney and the
cleverest experts if they have enough ammunition in the way of some
claims. While it requires skill to draw up good claims they can in any
case be made better where the state of the art is known by yourself and
your patent attorney.
~How to Look It Up Yourself.--~Whatever the nature of the invention
you are working on you should read up its history from its earliest
beginnings and in this age of papers, books and public libraries this
is an easy, entertaining and profitable thing to do.
As an illustration take the art of flying and let’s suppose you are
working on a new _wing_, or _main-plane_, for an aëroplane; if you
will go over the list of books sold by book publishers, or consult
the catalogue of a public library you will find books on flying, or
_aviation_ as it is called, that will give you a full account of the
development of flying machines; and if you will get the right book
it will picture and describe all the forms of wings that have been
invented and patented up to the time the book went to press. Then there
are weekly and monthly papers published which are devoted entirely to
the theory and practice of flying and by reading these you will be able
to keep right up to the _entering edge_ of the art.
Now what I have said about flying is just as true of whatever else
you may happen to be working on, for books and papers are printed and
published about nearly every subject you can think of, from aviation to
wireless telegraphy; by reading up on the subject of and allied to your
invention you will soon have the history of it by heart and this makes
up a large part of the state of the art.
Another and fortunate thing when you look up the state of the art a lot
of other ideas will surge helter-skelter through your mind and if you
are careful to write them down many of them will be of much value to
you in the furtherance of your invention.
If you live in a large city it is an easy matter to look up the
patents that have been granted for inventions in your class, for you
will find an _Index of the Patent Office_ in the public library which
gives the number and date of the patent you want and the _patentee’s
name_. The _Index_ is published every year by the Unites States patent
office and it gives the alphabetical list of the patentees and of the
inventors to whom patents were granted for that year.
[Illustration: FIG. 34. THE OFFICIAL GAZETTE
FIG. 35. PATENT SPECIFICATIONS
FIG. 36. INDEX TO PATENTS]
Having found the patent you want to look into, get the _Official
Gazette_ of the patent office for the same year and by looking up the
number, or patentee, or invention, or all of them, you can easily
locate an _excerpt_ of the patent and then you can take a look at the
drawing and read the principal claims.
The _Official Gazette_ is published every week by the patent office and
it contains a picture and a brief description of each patent issued for
that week, together with the number and date of the patent, the name
of the patentee and of the invention.
Should you require more information about a patent than is given in the
_Gazette_ you can look up a copy of the patent, or _full specification_
as it is called, and these are bound in handsome volumes of 100 patents
each, or at least, this is the practice of the New York Public Library.
In every library that has a _patent section_, that is a part devoted
to patents, there is a librarian in charge who will either find any
patent you want or who will show you how to use the _Index_, _Official
Gazette_ and the volumes of the _full specifications_.
The patent attorneys in Washington have things much easier as all of
the patents are bound in books according to the class they are in and
they only need to look over the volumes of a given class to choose
those they want.
When you have learned everything you can from books, papers and copies
of patents already granted about the subject you are interested in you
will have a pretty clear idea of the state of the art and whether you
are working in a virgin field or one that has been sown with the same
kind of inventions by others.
But there is another and most important part of the state of the
art which neither you nor your patent attorneys can find out about
until after you have filed your application for a patent; this is
the information contained in the applications for patents by other
inventors before your application was filed.
Should another application _disclose_ either in whole or in part an
invention like, or nearly like, yours, or rather that your invention
is like, or nearly like, some one’s else, the patent examiner declares
what is called an _interference_, of which more will be said in another
chapter, and this gives the patent attorneys on both sides another
chance to rake in a few more fees.
~What to Do When You Find There Are No Other Improvements Like
Yours.--~After you have looked up, or have had looked up, the state
of the art as carefully as possible, and you are satisfied that your
invention, or improvement, is different from everything else you have
been able to find, you should by all means go ahead and make such
experiments, or build a working model, as the case may be, in order
that you may know that all you have thought about it is really true.
As soon as your experiments are completed or your model is finished so
that you know exactly what you want to _claim_ as being strictly new
and novel and original with you, then you are in shape to hire a patent
attorney to draw up your patent application and file it and don’t do
the latter a moment before.
A patent application based largely on what you _guess_, is a patent
when granted without value for it can no more cover the exact facts in
the case when these are finally worked out than a description one might
write about an imaginary trip to Europe would be likely to fit the true
details of a real trip which he would make sometime thereafter.
~When You Find There is a Resemblance.--~Very often you will find
after you have looked up the state of the art that some other inventor
has patented a device that seems on the face of it quite like yours and
yet when you examine them critically, compare them closely and bring
thought to bear upon them you will be able to distinguish a difference
and often in several respects.
Sometimes this difference, though it seems to be small, is a mighty one
when it comes to producing results as for instance when Elias Howe used
a needle with the eye near its point instead of in its head and so made
the sewing machine a commercial success. And yet a patent examiner of
to-day would not be likely to see any difference in a needle with an
eye in its head and one with an eye near its point, that is, if he had
never seen either one before.
If you have made a machine to do a certain thing and you find that
another machine has been invented that does the same thing and in
the same way you may be able to change the mechanical movements, or
electrical devices, until you are able to get the same or a better
result by other and better means. It is all very easy to tell you to do
this but in practice it is often a mighty hard thing to accomplish.
The Bell telephone is an example of such difficulties, for while both
transmitters and receivers can be made which work on principles quite
different from those now in use the results are not nearly as good and
hence the inventions have no practical value.
~When Others Are Exactly Like Yours.--~But when you find that your
great idea has been thought of and worked out and patented by some
other inventor ahead of you and that both the cause and effect which
you and he arrived at are the same, then the best thing to do is to
drop it like a hot potato and invent something else.
NOTE.--The Patent Office publishes a _Manual of Classification_, price
$1, which lists all of the sub-divisions of each class. Take as an
illustration _Explosives_, which is _Class 53_. This is subdivided
into six such classes, namely: (1) Blasting Powder; (2) Fulminates;
(3) Nitro Compounds; (4) Gun Powder; (5) Matches; (6) Pyrotechnic
Compounds.