Three U.S. presidents were surprisingly inventive.
January 8, 1790: During the very first State of the Union address, President George Washington urges the young nation to import “useful inventions from abroad” but encourage homegrown genius to flourish by offering patent protection for inventors. Washington was trained as a surveyor, and he attached great importance to the study of science and literature. He was looking to the country’s economic future and its military security.
In response to Washington’s request, Congress passed a patent act. Washington signed it into law on April 10, and on July 31, 1790, the United States granted its first patent to Samuel Hopkins for his process of making potassium carbonate (see here).
March 10, 1797: Thomas Jefferson presents a scientific paper that’s considered the first American contribution to vertebrate paleontology.
Jefferson, the new vice president of the United States, was president of the American Philosophical Society, a distinguished association founded by Ben Franklin and others in 1745. For his presidential address to the group, he read a paper, “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia.” The bones belonged to an extinct, ox-size clawed sloth of the genus Megalonyx. A French naturalist in 1822 assigned the sloth the name Megalonyx jeffersonii. The Sage of Monticello also invented a wheel-shaped mechanical cipher-decipher machine; automatic double doors; and improvements to plows, sundials, clocks, beds, bookstands, and several devices that copied writing.
Despite all this, and despite his position on the board that oversaw the first U.S. patent law, Jefferson held no patents himself. He was an open-source kind of guy; he believed it was necessary for inventors to be rewarded, but he distrusted a system that could be abused to keep needed innovations from reaching public use.
President John F. Kennedy paid tribute to Jefferson at a 1962 White House dinner honoring all forty-nine living American Nobel Prize recipients. He told the august assemblage, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
March 10, 1849: Abraham Lincoln files for a patent, starting a process that would make him the only U.S. president to patent an invention. Lincoln had worked on riverboats, and he once engineered a stranded flatboat off a dam by shifting cargo and drilling a temporary hole to let out bilge water. As a boat passenger on another occasion, he observed a captain use planks and empty barrels to lift his stranded vessel off a river sandbar.
Inspired, Lincoln set to work to design a system of inflatable, rubberized cloth bags that could, theoretically, be built into or added onto any boat. It was a complex arrangement of ropes, pulleys, spars, and sacks. His patent application called it “a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steamboat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says patent 6469 is the only patent held by an American president. Lincoln’s law partner observed, “The invention was never applied to any vessel, so far as I ever learned.”
But a dozen years later, inventor Lincoln would be steering the nation through treacherous shoals.—TL, RA