II.

History

In the United States, patent law dates to 1641, when the first patents for inventions were issued by the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the manufacture of salt. The Constitution of the United States, which became effective in 1789, gave the U.S. Congress the power to enact federal patent laws. Congress adopted the first patent law in 1790 as one of its first actions.

In 1790 the first U.S. patent was granted to Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia for a new method of processing potassium carbonate, also called potash or pearl ash, for use in making soap. A fire in December 1836 destroyed the approximately 10,000 patents that had been issued until then, and only 2,845 were eventually restored or reconstructed. Meanwhile, in July 1836 Congress passed the Patent Act, which created the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) as an agency within the Department of State. The PTO immediately began issuing patents as a new numbered series. (Patents issued previously had not been numbered, but those recovered from the fire were later given numbers preceded by the letter x.) U.S. patent number 1 was issued in July 1836 to John Ruggles, a U.S. senator from Maine who had authored the Patent Act, for his invention of traction wheels for the locomotive steam engine.

By 1935 the PTO had issued its first 2 million patents. By the end of 1999 the PTO had awarded a total of 6 million patents. In recent years, the volume of patent applications has increased dramatically. Many parties interested in the patent system have expressed concerns that the quality of the PTO’s work has suffered because of the increased application volume. They also worry that it will soon take the office many years to process patent applications. In 2003 the director of the PTO told Congress that the PTO was facing an impending crisis because of its increasingly large and complex workload.

In 2007 a lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation resulted in what was believed to be the largest damages ever awarded for patent infringement. A United States jury found that Microsoft had violated patents held by Alcatel-Lucent for technology relating to the MP3 music format and awarded the latter company $1.52 billion in damages.