Inventing for Boys

by A. Frederick Collins

Yet hundreds of beginners in the field of inventing work along in the dark because they do not know the state of the art, and always to their sorrow. So don’t be one of them.

How to Learn the State of the Art.—For the reasons I have given above you will see that it is bad practice to go beyond the point of working out your invention on paper before you know whether it is really new or not for though it may be entirely original with you, if it has been thought of and read before some learned body of scientists, or printed in some musty trade paper prior to the time you conceived the idea you haven’t the slightest claim to it, nor is it of the least value to you.

And so after you have thought out your invention and have made drawings of it the next step is not to apply for a patent as most patent attorneys will advise to do, or to have a model made as many model makers will tell you to do but to look up the state of the art and see where you are at.

Having a Patent Attorney Look it Up.—The easiest and quickest way to learn roughly the state of the art is to have a preliminary search, as it is called, made by a patent attorney, which means that he will look through the files of patents that have been granted by the United States Patent Office to other inventors for devices or machines of the kind you are working on.

To do this you must, of course, retain a patent attorney, that is employ him, and turn the drawings and written description of your invention over to him. Every patent attorney outside of Washington, where the patent office is located, has a correspondent or an associate, that is another patent attorney, who lives there and who acts for him when necessary.

This latter patent attorney will take your drawings and description to the library of the patent office, look over the files of patents there and pick out those which seem to him are most nearly like your invention.

He will get copies of these patents, send them to your patent attorney who will in turn hand them to you with your original drawings and you can then go over them and compare them and judge for yourself whether you have a really new invention or if it burned in the brain of some other inventor before you ever dreamed of it.

From the above you might infer that it would be a good scheme to employ a patent attorney who lives in Washington; but on the contrary it is better to have a patent attorney in your own city transact this business for you, if one is to be had, for then you can talk with him and you will learn many things you couldn’t begin to find out through correspondence.

Many advertising patent attorneys agree to make what they are pleased to call a free search for you—and do it while you wait, so to speak. A free search, or desk search, as it is dubbed by those who don’t make them, is of no value whatever for it is the snap-shot opinion, or rather a notion, of a patent attorney who is drumming up business by un-business like methods.

To show how absurd an opinion of this kind is just consider that there are 43 divisions of inventions in the patent office; each division, is split up into anywhere from a dozen to nearly 200 classes and that in some of these classes as many as 12,000 patents have been granted as in the case of the sewing machine.