Light bulbs, patents and genealogy
There’s a wonderful daily feature from the United States National Archives (NARA) called Today’s Document.
Once upon a time, you could get it on your phone or tablet, but software issues put an end to that, so now we need to read and view it daily online at the National Archives website.
Today, November 1, the document being featured is “Thomas Edison’s handwritten specifications for an Improvement in Electric Lamps, 11/01/1879”–a key part, NARA tells us, of Edison’s successful application for a patent for an “Improvement in Electric Lamps.” And, we are informed, “On January 27, 1880, Thomas Edison received the historic patent embodying the principles of his incandescent lamp that paved the way for the universal domestic use of electric light.”1
Now, it should come as no surprise that The Legal Genealogist loves patent records as part of our genealogical research. I’ve even done a webinar earlier this year on Inventing America: Records of the United States Patent Office for Legacy Family Tree Webinars that’s part of its subscribers-only series.2
That’s because these records are just so cool.
Issued under the authority of the U.S. Constitution itself — Article I, section 8, clause 8, gives gives Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful acts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries”3 — and federal statutes beginning in 1790,4 patent records can do a lot for us in our family histories:
• They can flesh out the story of an individual, since so many people appear as inventors, as witnesses for applications, as objectors to patents. The files provide insight into the activities of individuals on a professional and intellectual level that’s just not available anywhere else.
• Like the Edison patent, they can provide original signatures, of inventors and witnesses and lawyers and more.
• And they can link individuals and family members — all those lovely FAN club members (friends, associates and neighbors5) who could show up among witnesses and co-inventors. And since patents could be inherited, that alone can give rise to hints of family relationships in the records.
So on this anniversary of Edison’s light bulb application, take a look at your own family’s history and check to see if maybe somebody in your family filed for a patent somewhere in the past.
A place to start is Google Patents. Its advanced search page lets you search for specific words — and that can include names like “Thomas Edison.” That will help you find the patent number, and with that number, you can then go to the website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and its search page to check for some of the documents that may be available there.
There’s more, of course, much that will be available only from the National Archives6 but this will give you a starting point.
Let there be light… on your family’s inventiveness.
SOURCES
- “Thomas Edison’s Patent Application for the Light Bulb (1880),” U.S. National Arcives, OurDocuments.gov (https://www.ourdocuments.gov/ : accessed 1 Nov 2018). ↩
- Truth in advertising: I get a royalty if someone watches, buys or downloads one of my webinars from a Legacy subscription. ↩
- United States Constitution, Article I, section 8, clause 8; html version, Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institution (https://www.law.cornell.edu/ : accessed 1 Nov 2018). ↩
- “An act to promote the progress of useful arts,” 1 Stat. 109 (10 April 1790). ↩
- See Elizabeth Shown Mills, QuickSheet: The Historical Biographer’s Guide to Cluster Research (the FAN Principle) (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2012). ↩
- I did mention that webinar for more info, didn’t I? I thought I did… ↩
We not only have the information regarding the patent, we have the original Letters Patent issued by the Commissioner of Patents and the Law Examiner to my wife’s father, issued the thirteenth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine. How cool and exiting it was to find that!
Excellent!
Thanks for this. My father, Irving Spinner, a Canadian professor, had numerous inventions with his university graduate students. Yet I have never thought of those patents as historical documents. I have always read them only as technical reports. I shall now retrieve them and treat them as FAN documents. And attach them to his genealogical record.
I’m glad this made you think about getting them!
Excellent suggestion! In 19thC, technology was such that many ordinary people or tradesmen could bring technological innovation.
Don’t neglect local newspapers, too. Some just lauded local talent. A few had regular columns with items plucked from patent announcements. And then there are advertisements from the inventor trying to sell the item or a franchise to use it. One local plumber announced a patent for a better gas-fired bath tub hot water heater – only to have another plumber claim he stole the idea.
At my family history society I have one friend whose ancestor came up with a model of a new invention in one generation, taking out a patent but only getting as far as a table-top working model. Another friend’s ancestor worked on making this technology a practical reality, while my collateral ancestor achieved the first commercially viable machine.
We owe our present comfortable life to many like this who worked very hard to improve existence – for their own family, and often everyone else too.
Raise the topic at your genealogical society and see what people can find.
My grandfather was very circumspect in discussing his Uncle Alex (though he did maintain contact with Alex’s son and daughter).
I learned within the past 15 years that Uncle Alex ran for Congress from Pennsylvania’s 27th District in 1932 on the Communist Party ticket (finishing in 6th place in a field of 6 candidates); for various reasons this went quite far towards explaining my grandfather’s reluctance to discuss Uncle Alex (together with the hammer and sickle logo on Uncle Alex’s gravestone, as discernable on the Find-a-Grave photo).
Family lore had it that Uncle Alex had invented a device of relevance to his optometry practice. A few years ago I searched the USPTO database and found that Uncle Alex was a co-inventor of Patent No. 1,381,603.
The patent application was filed on 23 August 1919. The letters patent recite that the patent application was filed on 23 August 1919, and also recite that Uncle Alex was a citizen of Russia.
I have yet to find naturalization documents for Uncle Alex, but he presumably became naturalized by the time he ran for Congress from Pennsylvania’s 27th District in 1932; given that he was up against 5 opponents and was running on the Communist Party ticket, it would seem more likely than not that someone would have called him out had he not been a US citizen at the time of the election campaign.
We’ve talked about your Uncle Alex before, and how the patent records by themselves help narrow down the time frame within which he would have had to seek naturalization.