Centennial 1876

Models of American Ingenuity

The American Patent Act of 1790 initially required inventors to submit a model of their device, along with a written description and a drawing of their invention, to the Patent Board before a patent could be granted. Around 1802, the board officially became the United States Patent Office, and in 1810 it was located in Washington's Blodgett's Hotel. The patent models were placed on public display there until 1836, when the hotel and all the models were destroyed by fire. Four years later, the doors to a magnificent new Patent Office Building opened, and its halls quickly filled with models, establishing not only a monument to American genius and ingenuity but a major tourist attraction as well.

For the 1890 centennial celebration of the Patent Act, the Patent Office loaned part of its collection to the Smithsonian to be displayed at the U.S. National Museum. At this point, the Patent Office Building was drowning in models, and, by 1908, rising maintenance costs and dwindling exhibition space prompted Congress to begin dispersing the collection. The Institution selected 1,061 models that were associated with famous inventors, and those remaining were either auctioned off or placed in storage. Several years later, a Congressional commission developed a plan to donate models that were considered to be historically important to the Smithsonian and other institutions.

According to Douglas E. Evelyn, former Deputy Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, "The Smithsonian Institution played a key role in making certain that a significant proportion of them [the models] would remain in the public domain, as immediate and tangible evidence of American ingenuity in the 19th century." Of the hundreds of thousands of patent models that once existed, approximately 10,000 can be found today at the American History Museum. The Institution also came into possession of the former Patent Office Building itself, which, in 1968, became home to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and its National Collection of Fine Arts (renamed the National Museum of American Art in 1980).

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