Inventing for Boys

by A. Frederick Collins

Applying for a Patent Yourself.—To get even a small part of what you are legally entitled to in a patent you should write to the Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D. C., for a copy of the Rules of Practice in the United States Patent Office, see Fig. 77, which will be sent to you free of charge. Read this booklet through not once, but many times, or at least until you understand everything in it for it will help you mightily in the preparation of your patent application and the prosecution of it.

Fig. 77. Rules of practice of the patent office

You will learn from the Rules of Practice that you as an inventor may apply for your own patent and act as your own patent attorney in prosecuting it. And after you have learned the rules by heart you may feel that since you know more about your invention than any one else you can make the drawings and write the specification and claims as well or better than the average patent attorney.

But you should think twice and count ten with your eyes shut before you conclude to do this rash thing. Why? Because the patent office will not accept your drawings unless they conform exactly to certain rules; your specification, which means the description of your invention, must be written in a certain way, and the claims, which are the very vitals of the whole patent, must be drawn with exceeding care for while nothing of value must be left out it is even worse to write in too much as this limits your claims.

Besides these reasons it grieves a patent office examiner whenever a mere inventor comes forth and files his own patent application and conducts his own case even if he has the ability to do so and when it comes to amending his claims he will find the hurdles are rather higher to jump over than he at first supposed.

Applying for a Patent through a Patent Attorney.—Taking all these things into consideration my advice to you is to retain a patent attorney to prepare your case and see it through the patent office, and then you want to be prepared to watch every move he makes—that is to say when he has drafted your application, get a copy of it and go all over it yourself taking plenty of time to do it in; and then go over it with him covering every detail.

In due time after your application has been filed the patent examiner will send a letter to your patent attorney in which he notifies you that some, if not all of your claims, have been rejected and citing references to other patents chiefly to show that your claims lack newness and novelty.

The next step is taken by your patent attorney who amends the specification and claims to meet the objections raised by the patent examiner. Here again you should know how and where your claims are affected and you should aid your patent attorney to determine whether or not you should insist on your claim being allowed to stand as it is written or to so change it that it will satisfy the patent examiner.

It must be clear now that if your patent attorney is permitted to keep on changing your claims to meet every rejection of the patent examiner instead of fighting them out by the time the patent is granted it will have degenerated into merely a scrap of paper. Hence if you leave the whole case to the ability and judgment of your patent attorney you can be reasonably sure that your $65 or $250 or whatever sum you have paid him for obtaining your patent is as good as thrown away.