The Overnight Destruction of Key Paper Artifacts of American Innovation
In the early hours of December 15, 1836—in the basement of Blodgett’s Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Patent Office was temporarily housed—workers carried the ashes from the stove to put them in the metal box, where they were deposited at the end of each day.
The ashes continued to smolder after they closed up shop, and eventually ignited, sending the large pile of firewood stored nearby into flames. The fire spread quickly, and soon the entire building was engulfed in flames, sending the history of U.S. patents up in smoke.
The firehouse next door was no use: no volunteers were present, and its leather firehose was found cracked and unusable the morning of the fire. A bucket-line was formed, but to no avail. No matter how many hundreds of gallons of water were thrown onto the hotel, the fire raged on.
It is perhaps worth noting the cruel irony of the office’s fate: when the British burned most of Washington in 1812, the U.S. Patent office was the only government building left untouched by the devastation. The fire took with it a fascinating record of American innovation from a period during which a vast amount of intellectual property for technological inventions was created.
Included in this group was the first patent held by a woman: Mary Kies, inventor of a method of weaving silk with straw to make lightweight, affordable hats. There was also the first patent by an African American: Thomas Jennings, for a method of dry-cleaning clothing. The patent for the combustion engine as it is used today was also lost in this fire.
The tragic loss of records resulted in increased record-keeping diligence. The department began numbering all patents, and a retrospective effort was made to reconstruct the records that had burned. Through this effort, the office managed to identify the names of 9,000 patents, but only around 200 of the original documents have been obtained.
One such document is inventor Giuseppe Pinutelli’s copy of the application he sent for a patent for an “improvement in the machine of making paper” in 1819.
“It doesn’t really hit us how important producing paper really was back then,”
says David Bloom, former senior specialist at Freeman’s.
“It was extremely expensive, since it had to be made out of textile, and the production was limited because it had to be produced on molds light enough for two workmen to actually hold.”
This limited how much paper could be made at once. One of the motifs of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions was the struggle over papermaking technology. This application represents a move away from using molds to using a machine that would spit out the paper in a continuous roll, a significant advance toward mass production.