CHSI
Exhibitions
Special Exhibition Gallery, Science Center 251
May 1 - December 11, 2009
Patent Republic:
Materialities of Intellectual Property
in 19th-Century America
From its foundation in 1790 to the early 1870s, the U.S. Patent Office required models (in addition to drawings and textual descriptions) to guarantee the understanding and replicability of inventions. The Patent Act of 1836 emphasized that: “Before any inventor shall receive a patent [s/he shall] furnish a model of his invention, in all cases which admit of a representation by model, of a convenient size to exhibit advantageously its several parts.” Models played a crucial role in the courtroom too. In patent infringement cases, judges and jury sometimes struggled to understand the workings of the invention and the claims of the patent by looking at the specifications alone. In those settings, models provided key “reality effects.”
Beginning in the 1870s, however, models ceased to be required for patent applications. Their disappearance from patent law was quickly followed by their physical disappearance when a large fire at the Patent Office destroyed forty percent of them in 1877. By the end of the 19th century, the materialities of inventions came to be limited to printed matter only: highly codified black-and-white drawings and textual descriptions.
This exhibit retraces more than 50 years of patent-model making in the United States, presenting common inventions such as washing machines, carpet sweepers, and ice skates as well as Thomas Edison’s carbonizer – a crucial piece of apparatus for the production of filaments in electric light bulbs. The exhibit highlights more than the material ingenuity of a nation. It provides clues to the epistemic nature of models and their role in both technological innovation and the history of intellectual property law.
Read about Patent Republic in the Harvard Gazzette!
Now Available:
View instruments from Patent Republic... using Waywiser, our new online database!
Resources
Gallery Hours
Putnam Gallery
Science Center 136
Monday through Friday
11:00am to 4:00pm
Special Exhibitions Gallery
Science Center 251
Monday through Friday
9:00am to 5:00pm
Free and open to the public.
Children must be escorted by an adult.
Both the Putnam Gallery and Special Exhibitions are closed on University Holidays.
Inquiries: 617-495-2779
Directions
The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments is located inside the Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, on Harvard's Cambridge campus.
