l, but yet really serviceable, improvement on a
very widely used type of machine; or a little bit of apparatus which
in some small degree facilitates some well known process; or a
fashionable toy or puzzle likely to have a good run for a season or
two, and then a moderate sale for a few years longer; these are the
things to be recommended to an inventor whose main object is to make
money. Thus the most qualified experts in patent law and practice do
not fail to disclose this fact to those who seek their professional
advice in a money-making spirit, as the great majority of inventors
do.

The full term of fourteen years in the United Kingdom, or seventeen in
the United States, may be a ridiculously long period for which to
grant a monopoly to the inventor of some ephemeral toy, although
absolutely inadequate to secure the just reward for one who labours
for many years to perfect an epoch-making invention, and then to
introduce it to the public in the face of all the opposition from
vested interests which such inventions almost invariably meet.

Thus the fact that a man has made money out of one class of patents
may not be any safe guide at all to arriving at a due estimate of his
ideas on industrial improvements of greater "pith and moment," but, on
the contrary, it is generally exactly the reverse. The law offers an
immense premium for such inventions as are readily introduced, and the
inventor who has made it his business to take advantage of this fact
is usually one of the last men from whom to get a trustworthy opinion
on patents of a different class.

Of the patents taken out during the latter portion of the nineteenth
century, many undoubtedly contain the germs of great ideas, and,
nevertheless, have excited comparatively little attention from
business men or from the general public. It was so in the latter part
of the eighteenth century, and history is only repeating itself when
the seeds of twentieth century industrial movements are permitted to
germinate unseen.

For all practical purposes each invention must be referred to the age
in which it actually does useful work in the service of mankind. Thus,
Hero of Alexandria, in the third century B.C., devised a water
fountain worked by the expansive power of steam. From time to time
during the succeeding twenty centuries similar pieces of apparatus
excited the curiosity of the inquisitive and the interest of the
learned. The clever and eccentric Marquis of Worc