I’ve been reading a book called How Tis Done, about cons and swindles of the 1800s in the US.
I get most of the cons, mostly just fast talking and such. But when it come to the Patent Rights, starting on page 217, I’m not sure what’s going on, or what’s being sold. I get that the machines the con artists are selling either don’t work, or don’t work well. But are they selling just the machine, the right to sell the machine, the patent for the machine, something else?
What exactly is going on here? I don’t see how someone can come in to a county, try and sell a bad machine to a number of different people, then go off to the next county and try again. If the swindler is trying to sell the actual patent to more then one person, I can’t see how the courts would allow that, and from the book it does seem some people tried to get out of the con by going to court.
I’m sure glad I don’t live in those times, I have a hard enough time with the telemarketers calling all the time. Imagine the Pit threads though.
Also of note was the idea of “copyrighted” seeds on page 221. An interesting read for anyone interested in cons.
That guy is awfully wordy, but I got through enough of it to think I understand.
First, the Patent Office required that a working model of the equipment had to be submitted until 1880. You link to an 1872 edition of a book first published in 1864, so the mindset that anything that was patented really and truly would work was pervasive at the time. That’s something we’ve lost today.
From the references to selling counties and townships, the con appears to have gone this way. The swindler makes a demonstration that works. He sells the exclusive right to peddle the machine in a certain location to one sucker. That’s small change, though. The sucker goes around to his neighbors and has them sign notes to buy the equipment from the factory. Sometimes the equipment arrived and is worthless, sometimes nothing at all comes back. (Claiming a copyright on seeds would effectively work the same way.) Either way they lose their money, because the swindlers can take the notes to a bank and sell them for a fraction of their worth in ready cash, leaving the bank to collect the whole. That’s no different from the reselling of mortgages today that led to the banking crisis in 2007. A long con, indeed.
Note that on page 222 the author explains why it’s a scam - because patent rights are too valuable for an itinerant salesman to sell to some farmer he just met. The earlier pages explain why the farmerwould habve trouble selling even a legitimate invention.
As for the copyrighted seeds, that’s still going on. Some seed hybrids truly are more disease resistant, drought tolerant, higher yielding, etc. But it’s impossible to tell which seed is which without detailed analysis, and there are still hustlers out there who bag up random seed and try to pass it off as the good stuff.
Yeah, but on p221 he says that they are selling the “right to sell or manufacture,” i.e. licensing rights. If the farmer is only getting rights to a county or township then he’s obviously not buying the patent itself, because that is good for everywhere. There is absolutely no need to sell the patent itself; the farmers would certainly expect that to cost too much. Selling patent rights, a phrase used multiple times, would only cost the $75 or $100 mentioned, but the patent itself remains intact.
I caught that part, but from what I gathered the machines they were selling were junk and no one who had a good machine would bother to even try and sell it like the swindlers were.
I think the phrase “patent right” was really throwing me. I kind of got the majority of the con down, but some of those old terms, even with looking them up, were hard to figure out. I didn’t know if patents worked differently then or not, and it seems they did.
The part about notes kind of got me too, I understand the buying and selling of notes, just seemed to be small notes for these things and I didn’t think banks would want to deal with them. Anyone the banks you would think would be the ones to not buy the notes.
I started reading the book for the cons on the county atlases and histories, both of which are quite useful for genealogist, the rest has been an eye opener too.
Patents themselves worked the same way. You could still pull this con in theory, although in practice information about it would be far easier to obtain.
Why wouldn’t the banks buy the notes? The notes are perfectly good promises from farmers to spend money.