Abraham Lincoln: The Most Inventive President

US Patent No. 6,469 is an interesting patent to say the least. It is very rare that you find a patent with less than six digits, let alone only four. In fact, there are more rarities that surround this patent, one of which being that the entire process from filing to issuance was merely 72 days. That’s right, two months and twelve days. But that isn’t all. The most unique aspect about this patent, a device for buoying vessels over shoals, is its inventor, Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States.

Drawings of U.S. Patent 6,649

Lincoln was a strong supporter of the U.S. patent system even saying that the laws “secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things."

Of the many accomplishments that Lincoln had, including the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and his role in the American Civil War, his patent is the least known, and is lacking in many biographic works of his.

Upon looking at Lincoln’s Patent, No. 6,469, it is clear to see that the format is drastically different from that of more recent patents. Although not terribly complex, the drawings and specification are simple in comparison to some other drawings and specifications that we see today. For example, the number of annotations for this invention, spanning the entirety of a ship, has the same number of annotations as Michael Jackson’s “Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion,” or more recognizably as the shoes that allow Michael and his co-performers to lean forward at an unhuman angle.

Drawings of US Patent 5,255,452

Additionally, the claim is in the form of one paragraph, making it a sole independent claim – if it can even be said to be as such seeing that there are not dependent claims following. With that being said, the claim formatting is unusual for today’s standards as the modern claim rules did not apply, nor exist, in 1849. Also, the entirety of the application, or at least what is publicly available, is a whopping three pages.

It is interesting to see the changes in the ways that patents have been written over time as the laws and procedures have changed and it will be even more fascinating to see how the law and strategies change as philosophy, technology, and the state of the world changes.