ry of State; transmitted to William Wirt,
Attorney-General; examined, approved, and signed by him, and returned to
the Department of State for final delivery to the patentee. It grants
for fourteen years to the said Peter Cooper, his heirs, administrators,
and assignees the exclusive right to make, use, or license others to
use, the described improvement in the method of effecting rotary motion
directly from the alternate rectilinear motion of a steam piston.
Evidently these distinguished statesmen--Adams, Clay, and Wirt--were not
experts in mechanics, or at least did not undertake to hinder by
technical criticism the experiments of American ambition; and there was
no trained corps of patent-examiners to decide upon the novelty,
practicability, and usefulness of any proposed improvement in the arts.
Probably the government shared at that time the dominant American
feeling of unconquerable youth, ready to attack all problems, especially
those which previous experience had pronounced insoluble, and to
determine the impossible by attempting it. This spirit has in fact more
or less dominated the United States Patent Office down to the present
time. With all its present equipment of examiners, trained in theory and
versed in technical literature, it still concerns itself chiefly in the
consideration of a proposed invention with the question of novelty,
rather than that of feasibility or value; and the effect has been that,
while thousands of patents are granted for absurd, unnecessary, or
inoperative devices, the net result of the encouragement thus given to
individual ingenuity and audacity is a catalogue of great inventions
unmatched in the history of any other nation.

The patent of Peter Cooper, which now lies before me,--a time-stained
parchment bearing the great seal of the United States and the autographs
of the famous men named above,--is accompanied by no drawings; but it
contains a detailed specification which shows that the invention
consisted in an arrangement by which, at each forward movement, a
prolongation of the piston rod clawed into an endless chain, which was
pulled back by the return stroke. This chain passed around a wheel, to
which it consequently imparted a rotary motion.

Engineers do not need to be told that this cumbrous arrangement could
not successfully replace the crank, even if such a replacement were
desirable. Yet the inventor constructed a working-machine, and satisfied
himself, by a "duty