Advertisement, Ornament, Improvement: The Useful Arts of Patent Models

• In Event: Material Culture Caucus: Cultural Landscapes as Sites for Emergence and Activism

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S. Patent Office was, perhaps unusually, a major tourist destination in Washington, D.C. Described as “that great museum of curiosity,” the Patent Office featured a gallery of the model machines submitted by inventors as part of their applications for patents. The Patent Office occupied a distinctive space between national repository, bureaucratic office, and public museum, and its gallery similarly combined the use of objects as a reference collection and the display and dissemination of knowledge. Building on work by historians Alain Pottage, Brad Sherman, and Kara Swanson, my paper argues that the models demonstrate the blurred lines between the bureaucratic, legal, and public functions of the Patent Office gallery.

The patent models were designed to showcase an inventor’s new idea or improvement and to demonstrate that it worked. As examples of emergent technologies, the patent models also represented inventors’ hopes for the marketability of their ideas. Although they were officially collected for the reference and use of patent examiners in adjudicating competing patent claims, many inventors nonetheless included extraneous features, including ornaments and advertisements, that made their models more aesthetically appealing and eye-catching to viewers. By examining patent models of stoves, rocking chairs, and lightning rods, I show how their decorations and advertisements indicate inventors’ awareness of their dual audiences of patent clerks and Washington, D.C. tourists. In this way, the patent models also illuminate the gradual emergence of a public science museum from cabinets and collections assembled for reference and research.

Author

• Reed Gochberg, Harvard University