Inventing for Boys

by A. Frederick Collins

It is a strange thing but just as soon as you begin to work on an invention you will see in every weekly paper and magazine you pick up the advertisements of patent attorneys and usually they are located in Washington “in a building across the street from the patent office” or in a building up the street from which the patent office can be seen.

Their ads are very alluring as they often offer as an inducement to make a free search, as explained in Chapter III; to keep your signed evidence of conception in their fire-proof safes, and to refund your money if they do not get a patent for you. That these knights of the patent bar will do all they say there is not the slightest doubt and that is just where the rub comes in.

Any patent attorney can get a patent allowed on nearly anything if the claims are written narrow enough but when it is granted it won’t be worth the paper it is written on and the patent examiner knows it, the patent attorney who gets it knows it and you will know it too after you have spent your good money for it but then it is too late. A patent attorney of this kind is a good one to keep away from.

The safest way is to go to a patent attorney in your own city or get into communication with one who lives nearest to you and engage him to prepare your patent application and prosecute it in the patent office.

And whatever you do make him agree to a flat-rate, that is to name a fixed sum which you are to pay him for his services including the fee for filing the application in the patent office. The filing fee is $15 and the lowest fee I ever heard of any patent attorney taking to prepare a case and seeing it through the patent office was $30, which with the final government fee of $20 makes a total of $65; and from this his fee will go on up to whatever amount he thinks he will be able to get you to pay.

Should you happen to secure the services of a so-called really high-grade patent attorney you will not be likely to induce him to make a flat-rate for this is poor business on his part. Instead the way a better class patent attorney will deal with you, as a rule, is to induce you to start in by giving him a retainer of say $25 or $50; then from time to time he will send you statements and as you pay them the amounts he demands will grow larger and the statements more frequent until by the time the patent is granted, you will have paid in enough to buy him a fur-trimmed overcoat or a Ford automobile.

The amount thus spent is not of so much consequence but what does matter is that where you and your patent attorney have no definite arrangement as to fees he is tempted, and in many cases yields to the temptation, to string the patent application along over a period of months if not of years, when if it had been followed up right along it would have been granted to you in a much shorter time.

The moral of this un-fable is to hold your patent attorney down to a fixed price right in the beginning and have him write you a letter stating the amount he is to get and the work he intends to do for it, and this will serve as an agreement.

The above are only a few of the bubbles in the patent system and to warn you of them all would take a book as large as an unabridged dictionary. The best advice I can give you is to study your invention from every angle, look up the state of the art in all its phases and then with a full understanding of just what you are entitled to write down all the points you want your patent to cover.

Now catch your patent attorney, being sure he does not catch you first, and to parodize a caption[4] of the immortal Roosevelt, fear the patent office examiner and take your medicine.