When did the US Patent Office Burn Down?

As a lover of trivia and knowledge, maybe you’ve heard the fun fact that the original patent for the fire hydrant was destroyed in a fire. That’s true—but it was just one of thousands of patents that went up in smoke during an accident in 1836.

The United States Patent Office was located in a building formerly known as Blodgett’s Hotel, which the government purchased in 1810. The large building also housed the post office, and, amazingly, the fire department. The various tenants shared certain parts of the building, including the fuel room in the basement. Unfortunately, the post office stored smoldering ashes in an ember box in the fuel room, not far from where patent office employees stored firewood. On December 15, 1836 at 3 a.m., the smoldering ashes mingled with the firewood, and the building went up in flames.

Though the fire department’s close proximity should have helped, their only hose was more than 15 years old and hadn’t been well-maintained, rendering it almost useless. The whole building collapsed in less than 20 minutes, taking an estimated 9000 drawings and 7000 models with it, including Robert Fulton's model for the steamboat.

It wasn’t the first time the office had faced the threat of fire. When the British burned Washington in 1814, Patent Office Superintendent William Thornton managed to convince soldiers to spare his building; it was the only government office in D.C. that didn’t get torched. Sadly, everything he worked to save was destroyed 22 years later in the 1836 fire. Though Congress used private records and models to restore as many patents as possible, only 2845 of the roughly 10,000 patents in existence were reinstated. The remaining 7000+ patents and pending patents were voided.

The inferno changed the way the U.S. Patent Office did business, leading it to introduce a numbering system for better record-keeping and a policy of keeping copies of the patents elsewhere, among other things. The changes came in handy in 1877 when the office caught fire again, even though its new headquarters was specifically designed to be fireproof.

Wikimedia Commons, Library of Congress // Public Domain

Though more than 87,000 models were destroyed in the second fire, it’s said that no inventor lost a patent, due largely to the documentation measures implemented after the first fire.

Today, the headquarters of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is located in Alexandria, Virginia—and the office assures the public that its patents are much safer these days: “Duplicate copies, electronic databases, cross-references, and off-site storage of patent documents, now guarantee that an important part of America's history will never be lost again.”

09/19/2017     News and Film

In the early hours of December 15, 1836, in the basement of the Blodgett Hotel in Washington, where the U.S. Patent Office was temporarily being housed, workers carried the ashes from the stove down to put them in the metal box where they were deposited at the end of every day. The ashes continued to smolder after they closed up shop and eventually ignited, sending the large pile of firewood stored nearby up in flames. The fire spread quickly, and soon the entire building was engulfed, sending the history of U.S. patents up in smoke. The firehouse next door was no use—no volunteers were present, and its leather fire hose 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 in all of the city.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 light-weight affordable hats.  The first patent by an African American, Thomas Jennings, for a way to dry clean clothing, and the patent for the combustion engine as it is used today were also lost in this fire.The tragic loss of records resulted in an increased diligence of record keeping. The department began numbering all patents, and a retrospective effort was made to reconstruct the records that had burned. Through this effort they managed to identify the names of 9,000 patents, but only around 200 of the original documents have been obtained.This particular item 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,” Freeman 's senior specialist David Bloom explained. “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 that had to be light enough for two workmen to actually hold.“This limited how much paper could be made at once. One of the motifs in a novel by Balzac, Lost illusions, was all about the struggle over paper making technology. This application represents a move away from using molds to using a machine that would kind of spit out the paper in a continuous roll—that was a real advance towards mass production.”Freeman 's Books & Manuscripts department head, Ben Truesdale, stressed how different manuscripts are from books, which are complete copies and as such can be compared to other known copies.“Manuscripts can be much more challenging, each manuscript is a friend, is unique, there isn 't another one. This may not be a perfect piece, but it has so much that is special about it. It 's a little understated but exciting – especially when you consider the contextual backstory.”See more from the Sept. 28 Books & Manuscripts Sale. 

What patent was burned in a fire?

Did the British burn the patent office?

Was the patent for the fire hydrant burned in a fire?

Did the US Patent Office ever close?