File:U. S. Patent Office - Daily Independent (Elko, NV) - 1891-07-10, p. 2.jpg

Summary
PERPETUAL MOTION PATENTS. Why the Government Stopped Taking the Fees of the Cranks.

The patent office has recently ceased to be a party to the fraud of perpetual motion. Until three years ago it was customary to take "first fees" (fifteen dollars) from the perpetual motion cranks as well as from all other would-be inventors. Then, in course of time, a letter was sent to the perpetual motion applicant telling him that his claim was based upon an irrational principle, and that he must furnish a working model. Of course, that was the end of the application. The model never came, and the fee remained in the treasury.

About three years ago, says the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Principal Examiner William L. Aughinbaugh went to the commissioner and suggested that as rejection of the perpetual motion claim was inevitable, it would be fairer to refuse the first fees of such claimants and to send them a circular immediately upon the filing of their applications telling them that no consideration would be given their papers until a working model was filed. This course has been pursued ever since. But repeatedly the discoverer of perpetual motion has been very indignant at the rejection of his tendered fee. One way that has been adopted by the cranks to get around the new rule intended for their benefit is to drop the claim of perpetual motion and put in the drawings for a "motor." Notwithstanding the policy of the patent office to discourage the perpetual motion craze and to save time and money for people, at least two or three claims of this character are put in every month.

Not long ago a Kansas man claimed to have set-up the perpetual motion machine, and to have it in operation at his home. He wrote to the patent office to know if the affidavit of Senator Plumb would be accepted instead of the working model as the basis for a patent. The examiner felt obliged to refuse. Sometimes. the perpetual motion inventor appears with a pocket full of bearings and connections which he asks the examiner to accept as evidence that he has solved the problem. But the examiner insists that he must see the perpetual motion before he grants the patent.

Last summer a New York lawyer named Todd came all the way to Washington with parts of a machine, and had quite a controversy with the office because the patent was refused. He insisted that he had seen the machine in operation, that it was running day after day, and keeping a cider press going to boot. There was no deviating from the rule. The lawyer went back to New York, saying that he would produce the machine. He was not seen again until the centennial celebration, when he reminded the examiner of the case and told how he had been fooled. At the time of making application the lawyer really believed that his client had discovered the long-sought principle. But when he got back to New York and told that the patent had been refused the client confessed. The perpetual motion was no motion at all. Power was concealed in the cider press. It ran the press and the press made the perpetual motion machine go too. The inventor had been charging ten cents admission to see perpetual motion. He had fooled the public and his lawyer, and he hoped to slip through a claim.