America's First Patent, Issued 236 Years Ago Today, Was a Method for Boiling Wood Ash. What Made America an Inventing Nation Wasn't Genius — It Was a Four-Dollar Fee. — Woody Magazine, Jul. 31, 2026
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Jul. 31, 2026 (Fri.)
America's First Patent, Issued 236 Years Ago Today, Was a Method for Boiling Wood Ash. What Made America an Inventing Nation Wasn't Genius — It Was a Four-Dollar Fee.
In Britain at the same moment, a single patent cost a blacksmith a year's wages. That price was doing a job.
A patent, most of us assume, exists to shield the inventor. That is a fair thing to assume. The American Constitution says roughly that, and so does every classroom version of the story. But when the United States granted its first patent, 236 years ago today, the document did not cover anything a modern reader would call a breakthrough.
It covered a better way to boil wood ash.
Patent No. 1 Was a Recipe for Ashes
On July 31, 1790, a man named Samuel Hopkins received the first patent issued by the United States. The grant covered making potash and pearl ash by a new apparatus and process. Potash is the alkali left behind when you dissolve wood ash in water and boil it down in an iron kettle. The name is literally what it is: ash, from a pot.
It sounds like nothing. At the time, people called it black gold. Potash went into melting glass, making soap, compounding gunpowder, and bleaching wool. Before synthetic chemistry, there was almost no other route to industrial alkali. And the young republic had forests without end, plus mountains of ash left over from clearing land for farms. America sold that ash to the world. Patent No. 1 was a portrait of the economy that issued it.
Who examined it? There was no patent office. The Patent Act of 1790 handed the job to three men: the secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the attorney general. President George Washington signed Hopkins's grant along with Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson issued it. Jefferson, a compulsive tinkerer himself, read the applications personally. The United States granted three patents that year in total. The other two went to a candle-making process and to Oliver Evans's flour-milling machinery.
Who Hopkins actually was remains unsettled. The federal record lists him as a Vermont man, but archival work by the historian David Maxey in the 1990s pointed instead to a Philadelphia Quaker.
The Real Invention Was the Price Tag
So far this is the humble-origins story, and it makes a fine opening scene for the American innovation myth. Most accounts stop there. But the genuinely radical thing in the 1790 statute was neither the examining board nor the fourteen-year monopoly. It was the money.
Hopkins paid fifty cents up front, a per-word charge for copying out the grant, and a few small extras. The whole thing came to roughly four or five dollars. The 1793 revision replaced that with a flat thirty dollars, and when Congress finally built a real patent office with salaried examiners in 1836, it left the fee at thirty dollars anyway.
To see how strange those numbers are, you have to look across the Atlantic.
Ninety-Six Pounds, Seven Shillings, Eightpence
In 1850 Charles Dickens published a short piece called "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent." The narrator is John, a Birmingham smith. He is fifty-six, works twelve or fourteen hours a day, and has spent twenty years perfecting something, finishing it at ten o'clock on Christmas Eve. He calls his wife in, and the two of them stand over the model and cry.
John has one piece of capital. His wife's late brother left her £128 10s, untouched, set aside for the years when they would be too old to work. They decide to break into it.
John goes up to London and starts with a petition to Queen Victoria. A declaration before a Master in Chancery costs him eighteen pence. The Home Office takes £2 2s 6d, the attorney general's chambers £4 4s. That is the beginning. The queen signs a warrant and sends it back, the home secretary signs it again, and the copy alone costs £7 13s 6d. Then he goes through a near-identical round a second time.
John spends more than six weeks in London. He passes through thirty-five stages, beginning with the queen on her throne and ending with an official called the Deputy Chaff-wax. He notes at the end that he would rather like to see this Deputy Chaff-wax in person, and to determine whether it is a man or some other sort of thing entirely.
Three-quarters of everything he had. Wages make the scale clearer. In mid-1860s London, smiths, carpenters, and bricklayers earned six shillings and sixpence a day. Six days a week, every week, comes to a little over a hundred pounds a year — and wages in 1850, when John made his trip, were lower still. One patent swallowed a full year of a tradesman's earnings. Converted by retail prices, that is around £17,000 today; measured against the incomes of the time, closer to £160,000. Either way, it was not a blacksmith's money.
Britain Did Not Examine Inventions
You could read all this as simple graft, a chain of offices each taking its cut. Dickens read it that way, and he was not wrong. Look at the list John recites. The Patent Office, the engrossing clerk, the lord chancellor, the privy seal, the clerk of the patents. The lord chancellor's purse-bearer, the clerk of the Hanaper and his deputy, the deputy sealer, the Deputy Chaff-wax. No man in England could patent a rubber band without paying every one of them, some of them twice.
But that price had a second function. Britain did not examine inventions. No official assessed whether the thing was new. The fee did that work instead. Admit only the people who can produce a hundred pounds and the weak applications never reach the door. Britain was screening with money because it had chosen not to screen with examiners.
America inverted the arrangement. It stripped the entrance fee down to almost nothing and looked at the goods at the door instead. Three cabinet officers sat and judged whether an invention was sufficiently useful and important, and from 1836 salaried examiners took over the task.
So Who Became an Inventor?
What happens when you lower a threshold turns out to be measurable.
The economic historian B. Zorina Khan compared the patent regimes of the United States, Britain, and France from 1790 to 1920. Across most of those years, Americans patented more per head than the British or the French did. The rate climbed from about ten patents per million people annually in the 1790s to more than four hundred per million by the 1910s.
The more interesting finding is who those patentees were. Fewer than five percent of American patentees ever received ten or more patents in a lifetime. More than half received exactly one and never came back. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the share of patents going to merchants and professionals fell while the share going to artisans and manufacturers rose.
We learn the history of invention as a list of great individuals. American patenting was never dominated by the people on that list. It was dominated by people who filed once and were done. They got through the door not because talent had suddenly multiplied, but because admission cost four dollars.
Sixty Years Later, Britain Followed
At the Great Exhibition of 1851, Britain got to stand its own manufactures next to America's and compare. The following year, Parliament amended the patent law for the first time in two centuries.
The Lords debate of March 1852 survives in Hansard. A patent, the House was told, had formerly cost an applicant a hundred pounds. Under the new bill, the first three years would run to twenty pounds in fees plus five pounds of stamp duty. The bill added renewal fees in exchange: fifty pounds at year three, a hundred at year seven. Britain lowered the entrance and attached a running cost instead. The separate English, Scottish, and Irish systems were merged, and a single British Patent Office was created.
The effect showed up almost immediately. In 1851, the last full year before reform, England granted 455 patents. In 1853, the United Kingdom granted 2,187.
Britain copied the price, though, and stopped there. A clause introducing American-style examination was stripped out in the Commons. The door was opened; nobody was posted at it. Britain did not attach an examining function to its patent office until 1883, and even then the job was to check whether what the applicant had written was accurate.
And Today
Two hundred and thirty-six years on, the price is back at the center of the story.
In April the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reported that its inventory of unexamined applications had fallen to 776,995, down from a January 2025 peak of 837,928. For the first time in nearly a decade, the office said, its output within a fiscal year had overtaken new filings. That queue has a side entrance. Under a program called Track One, an applicant who pays a surcharge gets a target of a final decision within twelve months. On the fee schedule revised in June 2026, the surcharge runs $4,515 for a large entity, $1,806 for a small one, and $903 for a micro entity.
It is hard to call that simply wrong. Some inventions really do need an answer on a product or funding timetable. But other countries have solved the same problem differently.
Japan runs an accelerated examination track and charges nothing for it. In fiscal 2023 a standard application waited 9.4 months from examination request to first action; an accelerated one waited 2.1. Britain's Green Channel is free as well. South Korea charges 200,000 won.
What separates them is not the amount but the condition. Japan tests eligibility. Britain asks the applicant to show an environmental benefit. Korea refunds most of the fee if it decides an application does not qualify. All three ask why the hurry. Track One does not. Keep the claim count down, pay, and you move up.
Britain raised its patent fees this April, the first increase since 2018. Filing now costs £75, a search £200, examination £130 — £405 for the basic set. In today's money, John's £96 comes to roughly forty times that. Britain, in the end, opened the door very wide.
South Korea charges 46,000 won to file electronically and 143,000 won to request examination, with 44,000 won per claim on top. The base runs about 190,000 won, roughly $130, and individuals and small firms get up to seventy percent off. Entry costs 190,000 won. Cutting the line costs 200,000.
Last October the country's patent office ceased to exist under that name. A government reorganization turned it into an agency reporting directly to the prime minister, which grew from 57 divisions and 1,785 staff to 62 and 1,800. Where the America of 1790 had no patent office at all and made three cabinet secretaries do the work, Korea has gone to the opposite extreme.
The outcome is on record. In the World Intellectual Property Organization's indicators published last year, Korea led the world in resident patent filings per million population, at 3,783. Japan came second with 1,913, Switzerland third with 1,235. Korea files at twice the rate of the runner-up.
So what does the runner-up charge? Japan takes ¥14,000 to file and ¥138,000 to request examination, plus ¥4,000 per claim. The base alone clears ¥150,000, about $1,000 — roughly seven times the Korean figure.
Price does not explain all of it, and saying so would be overreach. Korea's numbers are inflated by a handful of conglomerates filing in bulk, and Japan discounts examination fees by half or two-thirds for small firms and individuals. But the direction of the relationship — cheaper entry, more filings — has not reversed in 236 years.
The American Constitution set down a promise to encourage invention. Britain, though, had been granting inventors monopolies long before the United States existed. What separated the two was not the statute but the number posted at the counter.
America lowered that number. Britain held out sixty years and then lowered it too. By the time a system sets its price, it has already chosen a side.
- Source ↗ U.S. Government Publishing Office, "Anniversary of the First Patent Issued in the United States"
- Source ↗ Smithsonian Lemelson Center, "Licensing the First US Patent"
- Source ↗ Houston Law Review, "Beyond the Progress of the Useful Arts" (1790 and 1793 fees)
- Source ↗ Charles Dickens, "A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent" (1850), full text
- Source ↗ The Victorian Web (Brown University), "Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian Era"
- Source ↗ B. Zorina Khan, The Democratization of Invention (NBER / Cambridge University Press)
- Source ↗ Journal of American History, review of the above by Peter Temin
- Source ↗ Hansard, Patent Law Amendment Bill, House of Lords, March 19, 1852
- Source ↗ USPTO press release, April 10, 2026
- Source ↗ USPTO fee schedule (current)
- Source ↗ GOV.UK, "New fees from 1 April 2026 for designs, trade marks and patents"
- Source ↗ Japan Patent Office, filing and examination request fees
- Source ↗ WIPO, "Expedited Examination Programs of IP Offices: Japan"
- Source ↗ GOV.UK, "Patents: accelerated processing" (Green Channel)
- Source ↗ Patent.go.kr, Korean fee schedule
- Source ↗ Korean IP authority, priority examination guide (in Korean)
- Source ↗ WIPO, World Intellectual Property Indicators 2025
- Source ↗ MeasuringWorth, "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound" (income measure)
- Retail-price conversions follow the UK Office for National Statistics composite price index. Dollar figures use approximate mid-2026 market rates and are rounded.
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