Patent laws were first invented in 1790. These laws allowed people to claim their inventions so that other people could not steal them. Before patent laws when people came up with ideas there would be problems with people stealing their them. Say a poor homeless man were to come up with a brilliant idea for a new way to build houses that made them a lot more stable and affordable. Before patents this man with the idea would gain nothing for coming up with the idea, because the man is homeless and has no resources so he could not do anything with this idea. Someone who did have enough resources would come along and make a lot of money off this idea and claim it was there. Since the homeless man did not get anything from coming up with his idea, he does not care about coming up with new ways to improving things, because they will just get stolen.
Pantent laws started to give people incentives to improve the world. Even if you were a homeless and came up with an idea then you would be rewarded for it. Once the idea was patented you would be able to sell the patent to someone who wanted to use your idea.
News papers loved talking about patents. They would first give credit to who ever came up with the idea, then they would say what was patented. After saying what was patented and by who, they would then give a short description of the new invention. For example while describing the patent for the fire engine, the Salem Register talked about how the new engine made by Mr. Elijah Ormsee was better than the English Pump engine because it is made of a simple infrastructure, it has no the machinery other than a crank and a screw making it a whole lot more reliable and affordable. Like in this disruption of the fire engine, the description would often say how the new invention was better than the idea it was supposed to replace. In the Salem Register it talked about a new improved saw mill. The news paper talked about how the saw mill would reduce the amount of labor needed and the cost of the saw mills. It also talked about how it would saw in a fraction of the time the old saw mills would take. Some of the articles would just say it fixes these problems in the old invention, and others would just flat out say that the new invention is better in all ways than the old one. Most of these descriptions were basically an advertisement for the new invention.
The news papers led to rise in the number of patents because it helped spread other peoples new ideas and got many people thinking about ways to improve the world. Some of the patents were very simple. Mr. Jefferson patented the art of carrying fish on ice to market. The first patent was in 1790. Samuel found a better way to produce pot and pearl ashes. Both of these patents show that it is possible to patent pretty much anything.
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