Taking it for granted, now, that you have drawn out your invention on paper and have made cardboard models of the more difficult parts so that you can see about what your device or machine will look like and how it will work your next move is to look up the state of the art.

What is Meant by State of the Art.—The state of the art means everything that has been published either in books, papers, or in patents about anything that has been discovered or invented, which has a bearing on your invention.

As an instance the state of the art of the dynamo electric machine, or dynamo as it is called for short, goes clear back to 1833 when Faraday made the experiment of passing a wire across the pole of a magnet and found that a current of electricity was set up in it—that is in the wire. Since that time hundreds of patents have been taken out and thousands of articles have been written about dynamos.

All of this information, or data as it is called, goes to make up the state of the art in the class of dynamos and all of the patents can be had and many of the articles too if you know how to go about it to find them and one of the purposes of this chapter is to tell you how to do it.

Use of the State of the Art.—You can easily understand that with all the thought that has been given to, and the experimental work that has been put on, dynamos to the end of bettering them it is a pretty hard thing to make an improvement that has not been made before, though it is still quite possible to do so.

Suppose, then, you had thought of and worked out on paper some improvement on the dynamo which you believed to be new and original and of great value. Certainly since you know that inventors like Edison, Brush, Weston, Thompson, Tesla, and a hundred other men almost as big, had applied themselves with diligence to dynamo problems during the last 40 years you would not care to go very far in spending your time or your money working on it until you learned whether or not some one before you had thought of and used the same principle.

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.

And when you ask a patent attorney of this ilk to make a free search for you he will write back a letter in this tone of voice: I have very carefully considered your sketch, etc., etc. The first payment of fees necessary to start your case is $20 and upon receipt of this amount I will be very glad to carry the case forward, etc., etc.

All patent attorneys who advertise that they will make a search for you free of charge will also make what they call a special search for which they charge $5.00, and any other patent attorney will make one for the same price and which is, after all is said and done, only a preliminary search.

You can buy a copy of any patent that has been issued by sending 5 cents in coin—the government won’t take its own stamps—to the Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D. C., that is if you know the number and date of it and the name of the inventor to whom it was granted. The patent attorney who makes the preliminary search will send you several copies of the patents nearest like your drawing without extra charge as these are, or should be, included in your $5.00 fee.

When you get the copies of these patents go over each one carefully and see how nearly the pictures are like yours; then read the description of the invention, or specification as it is called, and compare it with your own statement, and, finally study the claims at the end of the specification and pick them to pieces for in these are to be found what has really been allowed to the inventor by the patent office.

The patents found by the patent attorney in making a preliminary search of the files and which are sent to you does not by any means represent the whole state of the art, but they serve a useful purpose as a starter. The reason it is not complete is because the patents are usually selected by patent attorneys in virtue of their similarity to the drawings you have submitted to him. Sometimes, to be sure, he reads what the specification says and if he is a real good patent attorney he will sift out a few of the claims, though this is usually due to his patent training rather than to any conscientious desire on his part to get at all the facts in the case.

But when you have applied for a patent on your alleged new and useful improvement and it is being scrutinized by the examiner in the patent office, he will look up the state of the art in all its devious ramifications for this is what he is paid to do by the people of the United States, though he thinks it is the officials in Washington who employ him. At any rate he has plenty of time to do it in and ample assistance to do it with.

Nor does he merely take a glance at the drawings, specifications and claims of your patent application and compare them casually with others that have been granted along the same line of endeavor, but, instead, when enough pressure is brought to bear, he will look up everything that has ever been published in all languages, including the barbaric ro,[1] since Adam was a boy.

At other times and for no reason at all, or so it seems, he will of a verity go to sleep on the job in his sub-cellar and let an application slip through his room in a few months, while he will spend years on another application of the same kind. Of course if you are the fortunate one you will be glad to get a patent granted so easily; your patent attorney is glad because he has your money in his pocket and the examiner is glad because he has made a friend of his glad.

To have everybody glad is a nice thing, you will allow, but don’t crow too soon for there is a hole in the average patent big enough to drive a horse and wagon through. If your patent is for an invention of genuine merit you will not be alone very long in the field and should you commence to make anything that looks like real money out of it you will find some other genius with an invention and a patent, as like yours as the other Siamese twin and if you don’t sue him he will sue you and then you can fight it out in the courts.

Even as right is always on the side of the army with the heaviest artillery, if there are enough shells, so, too, justice is always on the side of the inventor who has the smoothest patent attorney and the cleverest experts if they have enough ammunition in the way of some claims. While it requires skill to draw up good claims they can in any case be made better where the state of the art is known by yourself and your patent attorney.

How to Look It Up Yourself.—Whatever the nature of the invention you are working on you should read up its history from its earliest beginnings and in this age of papers, books and public libraries this is an easy, entertaining and profitable thing to do.

As an illustration take the art of flying and let’s suppose you are working on a new wing, or main-plane, for an aËroplane; if you will go over the list of books sold by book publishers, or consult the catalogue of a public library you will find books on flying, or aviation as it is called, that will give you a full account of the development of flying machines; and if you will get the right book it will picture and describe all the forms of wings that have been invented and patented up to the time the book went to press. Then there are weekly and monthly papers published which are devoted entirely to the theory and practice of flying and by reading these you will be able to keep right up to the entering edge of the art.

Now what I have said about flying is just as true of whatever else you may happen to be working on, for books and papers are printed and published about nearly every subject you can think of, from aviation to wireless telegraphy; by reading up on the subject of and allied to your invention you will soon have the history of it by heart and this makes up a large part of the state of the art.

Another and fortunate thing when you look up the state of the art a lot of other ideas will surge helter-skelter through your mind and if you are careful to write them down many of them will be of much value to you in the furtherance of your invention.

If you live in a large city it is an easy matter to look up the patents that have been granted for inventions in your class, for you will find an Index of the Patent Office in the public library which gives the number and date of the patent you want and the patentee’s name. The Index is published every year by the Unites States patent office and it gives the alphabetical list of the patentees and of the inventors to whom patents were granted for that year.

Having found the patent you want to look into, get the Official Gazette of the patent office for the same year and by looking up the number, or patentee, or invention, or all of them, you can easily locate an excerpt of the patent and then you can take a look at the drawing and read the principal claims.

The Official Gazette is published every week by the patent office and it contains a picture and a brief description of each patent issued for that week, together with the number and date of the patent, the name of the patentee and of the invention.

Should you require more information about a patent than is given in the Gazette you can look up a copy of the patent, or full specification as it is called, and these are bound in handsome volumes of 100 patents each, or at least, this is the practice of the New York Public Library.

In every library that has a patent section, that is a part devoted to patents, there is a librarian in charge who will either find any patent you want or who will show you how to use the Index, Official Gazette and the volumes of the full specifications.

The patent attorneys in Washington have things much easier as all of the patents are bound in books according to the class they are in and they only need to look over the volumes of a given class to choose those they want.

When you have learned everything you can from books, papers and copies of patents already granted about the subject you are interested in you will have a pretty clear idea of the state of the art and whether you are working in a virgin field or one that has been sown with the same kind of inventions by others.

But there is another and most important part of the state of the art which neither you nor your patent attorneys can find out about until after you have filed your application for a patent; this is the information contained in the applications for patents by other inventors before your application was filed.

Should another application disclose either in whole or in part an invention like, or nearly like, yours, or rather that your invention is like, or nearly like, some one’s else, the patent examiner declares what is called an interference, of which more will be said in another chapter, and this gives the patent attorneys on both sides another chance to rake in a few more fees.

What to Do When You Find There Are No Other Improvements Like Yours.—After you have looked up, or have had looked up, the state of the art as carefully as possible, and you are satisfied that your invention, or improvement, is different from everything else you have been able to find, you should by all means go ahead and make such experiments, or build a working model, as the case may be, in order that you may know that all you have thought about it is really true.

As soon as your experiments are completed or your model is finished so that you know exactly what you want to claim as being strictly new and novel and original with you, then you are in shape to hire a patent attorney to draw up your patent application and file it and don’t do the latter a moment before.

A patent application based largely on what you guess, is a patent when granted without value for it can no more cover the exact facts in the case when these are finally worked out than a description one might write about an imaginary trip to Europe would be likely to fit the true details of a real trip which he would make sometime thereafter.

When You Find There is a Resemblance.—Very often you will find after you have looked up the state of the art that some other inventor has patented a device that seems on the face of it quite like yours and yet when you examine them critically, compare them closely and bring thought to bear upon them you will be able to distinguish a difference and often in several respects.

Sometimes this difference, though it seems to be small, is a mighty one when it comes to producing results as for instance when Elias Howe used a needle with the eye near its point instead of in its head and so made the sewing machine a commercial success. And yet a patent examiner of to-day would not be likely to see any difference in a needle with an eye in its head and one with an eye near its point, that is, if he had never seen either one before.

If you have made a machine to do a certain thing and you find that another machine has been invented that does the same thing and in the same way you may be able to change the mechanical movements, or electrical devices, until you are able to get the same or a better result by other and better means. It is all very easy to tell you to do this but in practice it is often a mighty hard thing to accomplish.

The Bell telephone is an example of such difficulties, for while both transmitters and receivers can be made which work on principles quite different from those now in use the results are not nearly as good and hence the inventions have no practical value.

When Others Are Exactly Like Yours.—But when you find that your great idea has been thought of and worked out and patented by some other inventor ahead of you and that both the cause and effect which you and he arrived at are the same, then the best thing to do is to drop it like a hot potato and invent something else.

Note.—The Patent Office publishes a Manual of Classification, price $1, which lists all of the sub-divisions of each class. Take as an illustration Explosives, which is Class 53. This is subdivided into six such classes, namely: (1) Blasting Powder; (2) Fulminates; (3) Nitro Compounds; (4) Gun Powder; (5) Matches; (6) Pyrotechnic Compounds.