JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

There are sometimes positive results from fires, though I think not so in this case of the devastating fire that burned much of the U.S. Patent Office building on 24 September 1877 that is the subject fire of the header of this post. Perhaps the writer of the piece (appearing in Scientific American on 1 October 1877) was desperate to find some ray of goodness in the great fire that destroyed half of the USPO building along with 136,000 patent models…which in the old days to that present was a requirement in some areas to obtain a patent in the U.S. About the fire-consumed models the writer states that “the loss is of no great importance” which is a bizarre statement, and that their places on the shelves come along at 20,000 new patents per year, so the new space generated by their loss would be occupied in seven years. The case is then made for the silver lining, which would be to do away with the physical model requirement for a patent.  It was no doubt an appropriate conversation to have, but to try to establish the efficacy of doing away with the models by establishing that it hardly mattered whether the models existed or not is a tough go. 

This was evidently the second great fire at the USPO (following the 1836 fire) and it consumed much of the building. It was designed by Robert Mills (architect, and designer of the Washington Monument, under construction 1848-1885) and was mostly fireproof, except for the roof and all of the stuff inside the building, so it was fireproof for all that was fireproof, and not for that that wasn’t. 

Anyway, this was a strange article, well outside my standard experience with SciAm.