The Proposed Court of Patent Appeals

Authors

Otto Raymond Barnett

Abstract

Experience has demonstrated that nowhere was the foresight and wisdom of the framers of the Federal Constitution more clearly shown than when they embodied in that instrument the provision that to encourage progress in science and the useful arts, Congress should have authority to secure to writers and inventors for limited times, exclusive rights to their productions. When the Federal Constitution was drafted, the manufacturing industries of this country were insignificant. Since then the industrial progress of the United States has been one of the marvels of the world's history and this progress and the supremacy of American manufacturers have been due in no small degree to the inducements held out by the Federal Patent system. The enactments of Congress under this clause of the Constitution have been for the most part wise and liberal, and nearly 900,000 patents for inventions have been granted. While a few of these inventions ·have been of a revolutionary character, by far the greater number have been for the relatively slight improvements, seemingly insignificant of themselves, but which in the aggregate have marked the advance from the first crude idea to the perfected marvel of modern mechanism. The evolution of the railway locomotive, from the De Witt Clinton of early days to the intricate powerful mechanism which annihilates space and carries the traveler between Chicago and New York in eighteen hours, has been marked by thousands of inventive ideas which have gradually solved the problems which confronted the earlier workers in the art and which have been embodied in thousands of patents granted to those whose ingenuity has made the modem locomotive a possibility.

Recommended Citation

Otto R. Barnett, The Proposed Court of Patent Appeals, 6 Mich. L. Rev. 441 (1908).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol6/iss6/1