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Inventing Like An American
In the mid-1800s, a few dozen Americans patented devices for arithmetic. They submitted models of their devices to the U.S. Patent Office, as a matter of pride in expressing their individual ideas and to meet a need. Some of these models survive in Smithsonian collections. A Spanish-born American inventor, Ramón Verea, boasted that getting a U.S. patent showed he could "invent like an American."
Ramón Verea, 1890 |