It is rare that we feel moved to republish an earlier SKEPTICAL INQUIRER article. But the myth that a patent commissioner once resigned because “everything that can he invented has been invented” keeps being uncritically repeated in prominent news outlets. So we thought it would he interesting and useful to reprint Samuel Sass’s brief article investigating that claim, “A Patently False Patent Myth,” from our Spring 1989 issue. The article has not appeared in any SI anthology. Author Sass has slightly revised one paragraph, and at the end he provides an update.
For close to a century there has periodically appeared in print the story about an official of the U.S. Patent Office who resigned his post because he believed that all possible inventions had already been invented. Some years ago, before I retired as librarian of a General Electric Company division, I was asked by a skeptical scientist to find out what there was to this recurring tale. My research proved to be easier than I had expected. I found that this matter had been investigated as a project of the D.C. Historical Records Survey under the Works Projects Administration. The investigator, Dr. Eber Jeffery published his findings in the July 1940 Journal of the Patent Office Society.
Jeffery found no evidence that any official or employee of the U.S. Patent Office had ever resigned because he thought there was nothing left to invent. However, Jeffery may have found a clue to the origin of the myth. In his 1843 report to Congress, the then-commissioner of the Patent Office, Henry L. Ellsworth, included the following comment: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” As Jeffery shows, it’s evident from the rest of that report that Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize that the number of patents was growing at a great rate. Far from considering inventions at an end, he outlined areas in which he expected patent activity to increase, and it is clear that he was making plans for the future.
When Commissioner Ellsworth did resign in 1845, his letter of resignation certainly gave no indication that he was resigning because he thought there was nothing left for the Patent Office to do. He gave as his reason the pressure of private affairs, and stated, “I wish to express a willingness that others may share public favors and have an opportunity to make greater improvements.” He indicated that he would have resigned earlier if it had not been for the need to rebuild after the fire of 1836, which had destroyed the Patent Office building. In any case, the letter of resignation should have put an end to any notion that his comment in the 1843 report was to be taken literally.
Unfortunately, the only words of Commissioner Ellsworth that have lived on are those about the advancement of the arts taxing credulity and presaging the period when human improvement must end. For example, the December 1979 Saturday Review contained an article by Paul Dickson titled “It’ll Never Fly, Orville: Two Centuries of Embarrassing Predictions.” He lists a pageflil of “some of the worst wrongheaded predictions.” Ellsworth’s rhetorical sentence is included with such laughable statements as that said by Napoleon to Robert Fulton: "What sir, you would make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I pray excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense.
If in the case of Commissioner Ellsworth there was at least a quotation out of context on which the “nothing left to invent” story was based, a more recent myth attributing a similar statement to a commissioner who served a half-century later is totally baseless. This news story surfaced in the fall of 1985, when full-page advertisements sponsored by the TRW Corporation appeared in a number of leading periodicals, including Harper’s and Business Week.
These ads had as their theme “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.” They contained photographs of six individuals, ranging from a baseball player to a president of the United States, who had allegedly made wrong predictions. Along with such statements as “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote,” attributed to President Cleveland, and “There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom,” attributed to physicist Robert Millikan, there is a prediction that was supposedly made by Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office Charles H. Duell. The words attributed to him were: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” The date given was 1899.
Since I was certain that the quotation was spurious, I wrote to the TRW advertising manager to ask its source. In response to my inquiry, I received a letter referring me to two books, although I had specifically asked for the primary and nor secondary sources. The books were The Experts Speak, by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, published in 1984 by Pantheon, and The Book of Facts and Fallacies, by Chris Morgan and David Langford, published in 1981 by St. Martin’s Press…
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