The engaging artifacts on the preceding page are, for all their quiet simplicity, survivors of an extraordinarily harrowing career. More important, they are part of a national treasure that is now threatened and dwindling almost daily. They are patent models, and each of them is a small monument to the native genius for invention that has put its stamp on all our national development.

The models go back to the earliest days of the Republic. While the thirteen states were still coping with the ratification of the Constitution, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, together with Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph, formed the Patent Commission. George Washington signed their bill, and for the first time in history the right of an inventor to profit from his invention was recognized by law instead of an occasional royal whim. From the very first an inventor who applied for a patent was required to submit not only a drawing of his invention but also a model to show how it worked. This Jeffersonian stipulation remained in effect for eighty years and caused chaotic difficulties from the beginning.

The models came into Washington in such unexpected quantity that by 1810 Congress had to appropriate funds to purchase Blodgett’s Hotel—actually an old theatre—for storage and display space. The local citizenry took to touring the building on Sundays and admiring the products of Yankee ingenuity.

The first of many threats came to the models four years later when the British burned Washington. Dr. William Thornton, superintendent of the Patent Office, had fled the city but returned when he learned that Blodgett’s was endangered. He accosted a British colonel whose men were about to put it to the torch and with desperate, high-flown rhetoric compared his imminent burning of the models to the Turkish destruction of the library at Alexandria. The colonel was won over, and Blodgett’s was spared from the flames.

Thornton’s eloquence was the high-water mark of the government’s concern for its patent models, and the rest of their history is a catalogue of disasters. In 1836 all the collection of seven thousand models was lost when a fire levelled Blodgett’s.

A fine new patent office with vast east and west wings was designed and built, but the enormous influx of new models prevented proper cataloguing and storage. In 1870 a new law made the submission of models discretionary with the commissioner of patents, but the models kept coming in. Ten years later the stipulation was dropped completely, with the major exception of patents for flying machines. This last requirement was waived after the Wright brothers coaxed their biplane into the air in 1903, but the Patent Office still prudently demands a working model before it will issue a patent for a perpetual-motion machine.

With the flood of incoming models stopped, space still had to be found for well over 200,000 already on hand. Another fire tragically disposed of 76,000 of them in 1877, and the