Check this out: http://www.nytstore.com/ProdInterCode.aspx?prodcode=875&intercode=1172
The New York Times Store, which sells lots of cool, expensive, and often kind of useless decorator goods, is selling off a cache of U.S. patent models. The models are actual models submitted by inventors to the US Patent Office before the model requirement was lifted in 1890.
According to the Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum website, one of the reasons the USPTO stopped requiring models was because of space limitations, which is totally understandable and, to me at least, evokes a funny image of someone trying to squeeze another model of a gadget into a crowded garage somewhere in D.C.
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2 comments:
I'm an archivist, and am disturbed by this selling off of public goods through private agencies. Can someone please explain how the NYT came to own/broker these items? When did the patent office unload these, and how much did they get? There's no published back story on this that I can find, only a NYT story from 1911 (!) that describes the stopping of an effort to sell them then, the concern being their value in upholding patent claims.
Aha- just found this explanation, article from 2008:
"In 1925, the U.S. Patent Office auctioned off the models and Henry Wellcome bought the collection with an eye towards a future museum before the Great Depression sunk his museum budget. The collection was split and sold 37 different ways with a big chunk of the collection going to the U.S. Patent Model Foundation. They are now selling artifacts at the New York Times Store."
I still don't like to see such public property privatized.
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