The
Constitution offered protection to countless inventors who helped shape the
nation. Documentation of these rights, such as above, is stored in the National
Archives.
By
John Carlin
October
20, 2003
Throughout
the nation's history, our great thinkers and inventors have given meaning to
the concept of American ingenuity. The founding fathers recognized the need for
our Constitution to carefully balance the rights of these great thinkers and
inventors to earn a living against the needs of society to benefit from their
ideas and innovations. When they framed the Constitution, they were careful to
include language that empowered Congress "to promote the progress of
science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors
the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
These
rights became the basis for the Patent Act of 1793. This law originally granted
the secretary of State--then Thomas Jefferson, a great inventor in his own
right--the power to issue a patent to anyone who presented working drawings, a
written description and a model and paid an application fee.
Patents,
and the ingenuity they were designed to protect, have helped shape our
commerce, our culture and our way of life. More than 125,000 original patent
documents and drawings are among the billions of documents maintained by the
National Archives and Records Administration. In addition to patent, census and
military records, NARA also holds in trust for the American people the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights--
documents that framed our democracy.
Here
are highlights of two patents that have changed the course of our history:
Barbed
wire. Life in the American West was
reshaped by a series of patents for a simple tool that helped ranchers tame the
land: barbed wire. Barbed wire not only simplified the work of the rancher and
farmer but it significantly affected political, social and economic practices
throughout the region.
Wire
fences used before the invention of the barbed wire consisted of only one
strand, which was constantly broken by the weight of cattle pressing against
it. Michael Kelly made a significant improvement with an invention that
"twisted two wires together to form a cable for barbs--the first of its
kind in America," according to Henry D. and Frances T. McCallum, the
authors of "The Wire That Fenced the West." Known as the "thorny
fence," Kelly's double-strand design made the fence stronger, and the
painful barbs taught cattle to keep their distance.
Predictably,
other inventors sought to improve upon Kelly's designs; among them was Joseph
Glidden, a farmer from De Kalb, Ill. Glidden's invention made barbed wire more
effective not only because he described a method for locking the barbs in place
but also because he developed the machinery to mass-produce the wire. Glidden's
patent remains the most familiar style of barbed wire.
The
invention and widespread use of barbed wire changed life on the Great Plains
dramatically and permanently. Land and water once open to all was fenced off by
ranchers and homesteaders. Cattlemen, increasingly cut off from what they
regarded as common-use resources in such territories as Texas, New Mexico,
Colorado and Wyoming, first filed land-use petitions and then waged fierce
range wars against the property-owning farmers. Gradually, there was a
discernible shift in who controlled the land and, subsequently, the power.
Barbed
wire also had a major effect on Native Americans. Further squeezed from lands
they had always used, they began calling barbed wire "the devil's
rope." Fenced-off land meant that more and more cattle herders--
regardless of race--were dependent on the dwindling public lands, which rapidly
became overgrazed.
The
cotton gin. In 1792, Eli Whitney,
a young graduate of Yale University working on a plantation in Georgia, quickly
learned that Southern planters were in desperate need of a way to make the
growing of cotton profitable. Whitney knew that if he could invent a machine
that could separate the cotton from the seeds, he could hope to reap a handsome
profit from it.
His
invention, dubbed the cotton gin, could be hand-cranked; larger versions could
be harnessed to a horse or driven by water power. "One man and a horse
will do more than 50 men with the old machines," wrote Whitney to his
father. After the invention of the cotton gin, the yield of raw cotton doubled
each decade after 1800. Demand was fueled by other inventions of the Industrial
Revolution, such as the machines to spin and weave cotton and the steamboat to
transport it. By mid-century, the United States was growing three-quarters of
the world's supply. However, like many inventors, Whitney (who died in 1825)
could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society
for the worse.
The
most significant of these was the growth of slavery. At the same time that the
cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it increased the need for
slaves to grow and pick the cotton. Cotton became so profitable for the
planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor.
By 1860, approximately one in three Southerners was a slave.
For
more than six decades, the National Archives has worked to preserve and provide
access to the records of the American people: records that not only open the
door on our past but help provide a road map to our future.
John Carlin is archivist of the United States. Joseph Glidden's and Eli Whitney's patents are among the documents in the "American Originals" exhibit at the Los Angeles Central Library through Jan. 4.