Historical First Patents

Presents the earliest patents for many everyday items and the stories of the inventions.

"Inventions and Patents" is the first of WIPO's Learn from the past, create the future series of publications aimed at young students. This series was launched in recognition of the importance of children and young adults as the creators of our future.

Dobyns' book, The Patent Office Pony, is a cronicle of the United States Patent office from 1791, the year America's first patent law was enacted, to the present. The book concentrates on people and personalities rather than technologies and legalities. Patent office commissioners and examiners, presidents and senators, inventors and solicitors all cross the stage in Dobyns' detailed history.

This essay is the introduction to a book of the same title, forthcoming in summer of 2021 from Oxford University Press. The purpose is to document the ways in which patent systems are products of battles over the economic surplus from innovation. The features of these systems take shape as interests at different points in the production chain seek advantage in any way they can, and consequently, they are riven with imperfections. The interesting historical question is why US-style patent systems with all their imperfections have come to dominate other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The essays in the book suggest that the creation of a tradable but temporary property right facilitates the transfer of technological knowledge and thus fosters a highly productive decentralized ecology of inventors and firms.

It develops an extended historical and conceptual exploration of the invention in modern patent law.