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To persons unfamiliar with the natural history of the industrial arts, who know little or nothing of the incessantly varying needs of our multiplying industries; nothing of the numberless lines of progress, each impinging somewhere upon the unknown, bafiled for the moment, but certain sooner or later to shoot forward the instant the needed invention or discovery is made ; and whose vision of the future is clouded by ignorance made denser by prejudice and professional biasto such persons it naturally seems impossible for the human mind to find out much more that is new. The unoccupied field of invention, which to the intelligent is boundless and barely entered upon, is to them inconceivable; at best they can figure it only as a narrow circuit in which the future must endlessly tread upon the heels of the past. A charming example of this perverted and fallacious thinkingperverted by prejudice and fallacious through almost incredible unfamiliarity with the facts involvedappears in a recent issue of the Western Rural. The editor, discussing "Patents and Agriculture," makes the astonishing yet characteristic assertion that " it is pretty safe to say that nine-tenths of the things patented are worth less, and equally as safe to say that three-quarters of them are unpatentable because of prior use. Judging from the number of patents in existence, it is the easiest thing in the world to discover something new. On the contrary it is one of the most difficult things. The world makes mighty slow progress. It lives itself over and over again. It adopts new methods and forgets old ones. Then somebod', following the natural bent of the human mind, happens to stumble upon some of these obsolete methods, concludes he has found something new, and applies for a patent. The lost arts will be gradually revived, as the human mind becomes tired of what it knows and seeks for something else. The mind runs too much in one groove to make it possible for all our patents to represent something new. Discoveries of new forces and principles and the invention of new applications of forces and principles are rare exceptions, and we can almost count all the prominent ones that have been made in the whole of the world's history upon the ends of our fingers, and some of these have been found to be literal imitations of what at the time was unknown in nature. We are not nearly so fertile in inventive genius as the records of the Patent Office would appear to indicate. uBut original or otherwise, patentable or not, when anything is covered by a patent it becomes a source of a world of trouble, under our patent laws, to the people." It may be safe enough for the Rural to say that nine tenths of patented things are worthless, or that all of them are. It probably knows its own constituency, and there is no penalty for talking nonsense save loss of favor among one's friends. To say it, however, betrays a recklessness with respect to truth or an ignorance of the actual outcome of inventions that we should not have believed possible in these days of general popular intelligence. And each and every one of the dozen or more assertions in the rest of the paragraph we have quoted is equally wide of the truth flagrantly and ridiculously wide of the truth. One and all, they betray a perversion of view, a misreading of the plain evidences of fact, a misunderstanding of the conditions of invention, a misstatement of the effects of patented inventions upon public peace and wellbeing, that cannot be attributed solely to prejudice and misinformation. The little world the Rural writer lives in must certainly make "mighty slow progress;" but how it is kept from touching at somepoints upon the real world that does move, and move rapidly, is a mystery which we will not attempt 321 to solve. To those that are intellectually alive and actively engaged in the affairs of men, the world does not live itself over and over again. Every new day brings a new life with new needs, new inventions to meet them, and new problems for coming days to solve. A large part of all the inventions made are intended merely to improve, to simplify, to cheapen the means and processes of established arts. Others are absolute advances opening up new regions of research, discovery, and invention. The former, in helping to perfect a single art or process, so far help to improve the general conditions of living; and the smallest are often the basis of a competence for the inventor. The latter are germinal, creative; like the steam engine, the telegraph, and numberless other new departures, they open up ever widening spheres of human knowledge and activity; and at every advance an increasing number of newer departures and still newer improvements are called into existence. That por tion of the human mind not represented by the Rural does not "run in one groove," to anything like the degree the Rural imagines. And to one standing where there is a clear view of any portion of human activityhowever limited the marvel is not that inventions are so many and novel, but that they are comparatively so few; that so many inviting fields are wholly or to a great extent unworked ; that so few men and* women are educated to perceive the urgent necessities of the arts in every direction, or trained in the constructive arts whereby the world's needs in such directions are to be met. The greatest bars to useful invention are the mistaken notions which papers like the Rural take pains to foster that there is no great need of new inventions, and that few patents are of value to their owners. Both are radically false, as false as the assertion that patented inventions are burdens upon the public and sources of trouble; or that any considerable portions of the patents issued by the Patent Office are, or should be, "unpatentable" for lack of novelty. To argue against such assertions is like bringing evidence to prove that strawberries do not grow on cucumber vines, or wheat on apple trees. Yet it is well for inventors to know that such absurdities have currency in certain quarters, and that people who listen to such teachings have representatives in Congress who may cater to Rural ignorance and prejudice for purposes of their Own.
