Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Robert C. Allen, Collective Invention, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 4 (1983): 124.
2
See e.g. Howard et al. v. Detroit Stove Works, 150 US 64 (1893) the one stove patent case that made
it to the Supreme Court, pitting two great Michigan firms, the Round Oak Stove Co. of Dowagiac and
Detroit Stove, against one another.
But stove patent cases were also numerous, costly, and bitterly-fought.
This was because the industry, from its very beginnings, was addicted to
the patent system.
Stove inventors, entrepreneurs, designers, and
makers overlapping categories were confident enough that they could
use it in order to capture the added value they claimed that their
discoveries made possible, or in order to give themselves and their
products an edge, some distinctiveness, in a crowded, competitive
marketplace, that they struggled with one another to establish and defend
their intellectual property rights in stove features, designs, and methods
of manufacture. There were, it seemed, at least two ways of making
money in the stove industry: by making and selling stoves; and by
devising, patenting, assigning, and litigating over inventions and designs.
In a very competitive marketplace, it was not clear which route would pay
off best, so both were explored energetically.
***
First, the facts: comparatively speaking, how active and prominent was
the stove industry in seeking legal defences for its inventions and designs?
It makes sense to answer this question in three stages, the first running
through 1836, the second overlapping slightly, and running from 1830
through 1873, the third running from the 1870s through (for the moment)
1920.
Why 1836 as a first cut-off point? Because the U.S. Patent Office burnt
down in that year, leading to mass destruction of the historical record
which was only partly (about 40 percent) salvaged or reconstituted
thereafter. As a result, the record is a lot thinner for the pre-1836 period
and, as a practical matter, there was a new legal regime after 1836, and
two discontinuous sequences of patent records.
Why 1873 as a second cut-off? The main reason is again practical that
was the end-date of the U.S. Patent Offices Index of Patents Issued from
the United States Patent Office from 1790 to 1873, Inclusive whose digital
publication by Paratext as part of their 19th Century Masterfile has done
so much to facilitate this research. But one could also argue that the
1870s was a crucial period in the stove industrys development one
where the rate of significant innovation declined (this was certainly the
opinion of the industrys best-informed historian, William J. Keep, a stove
inventor himself), and manufacturers turned away from the law of patents
to other techniques (collusion, brand-name development, the trade-mark
system, advertising, product diversification, and other forms of non-price
competition) in order to try to protect themselves from some of the
consequences of producing a commodity product in a competitive national
market.
Why 1920 as a final cutoff? Because, though the solid-fuel cooking and
heating appliance industry continued into the interwar period, it was by
then marginal and moribund.
Inventive activity was negligible, had
indeed been in sharp decline even before the First World War. New fuels
or heat sources gasoline and kerosene, gas, both manufactured and
Chart 1:
Stove-industry patents (a) as a percentage of all patents (solid
blue line, LH axis) and (b) annual totals (dotted red line, RH axis),
1805-1836
What can we see from the above summary chart? That there was a
steady trickle of patents relating to improved cooking and heating
apparatus, and means of making it, from 1805 onwards (before then,
such patents were few and very occasional), but through the end of the
1820s the numbers are small, the proportions modest, and the
significance limited. Americans in the New England and Mid-Atlantic
states were beginning to get used to making and using stoves, and were
experimenting with their improvement; but there were no centres of
production and invention, very few repeat patentees (i.e. specialized
inventor-entrepreneurs key figures in C19th economic development),
and the process of turning practical knowledge into intellectual property
was quite underdeveloped. There was no community of stove inventors,
little communication among them (and thus much unconscious imitation,
as well as the exploration of what would turn out to be wackily alternative,
rapidly abandoned paths towards the design of a serviceable stove), and
little capacity for inventors to turn ideas into profit because the making of
stoves was small-scale and thoroughly decentralized, and markets were
narrow.
Prototypes of functional cooking stoves were developed William T. James
of Union Village (later Lansingburgh), New Yorks famous saddlebag
design of 1815 (patent X2296) and Christopher Hoxie of Hudson, New
Yorks, large oven with downdraft flues of 1816 (patent X2586). These
stoves were made and sold in comparatively large numbers for the next
decade and more, their inventors adding small improvements (Jamess
sunken hearth of 1824, number X3854), and licensing manufacture to
small furnace-operators in the Hudson Valley region. But their impact was
strictly limited: Hoxies innovations, in particular, would have to be
independently rediscovered in the 1830s by a subsequent generation, and
if it had not been for a bitter patent dispute in the 1850s, which resulted
in the gathering of wonderful testimony on the embryonic Hudson Valley
stoves, so that one could argue that the key date, underlying all others, is
1827 -- the completion of the Erie Canal which, together with the Hudson
River, the Champlain canal, and the Delaware & Hudson canal, opened up
access to fuel and raw material sources and western markets alike,
permitting the establishment of the Hudson-Mohawk stove making district
which would turn into the key national centre of innovation thereafter.
As Chart 2 shows, American stove-inventors went patent-crazy in the
1830s, just at the time when the young industry was booming, and key
innovations underlying the subsequent development of serviceable
products to satisfy a hungry market were being made. Henry Stanley of
Poultney, Vermonts circular-hearth stove of 1832, X7333, improved by
X9282 in 1835, 91 [new series] 1836, and 4,238 in 1845; Darius Buck of
Albanys large-oven, downdraft-flue range of 1839, reinventing Hoxies
principles, number 1,157, improved by number 5,967 in 1848, renewed
and reissued in the early 1850s, and defended in vigorous litigation for
years after his death by his determined widow Dsire; Philo Penfield
Stewart of Oberlin and then Troys X8275 (1834) and 915 (1838), the
foundation patents for a string of improvements, reissues, and extensions
through 1865 on which Fuller & Warren, Troys largest stovemakers
product line would come to depend these were the key innovations,
licensed to other makers, imitated, pirated, and improved on over the
following decades.
Chart Two:
Stove Industry Patents, 1830-1873
STOVES, COOKING
STOVE LIDS & TOPS
OVENS
STOVE DOORS & WINDOWS
STOVES, HEATING
HOT-AIR FURNACES
FIRE POTS
DAMPERS
GRATES
FIREPLACES
Percentage
29.1%
3.2%
1.8%
2.0%
17.3%
11.9%
4.9%
5.6%
10.4%
6.4%
Cumulative Total
32.3%
34.1%
36.1%
53.4%
65.3%
70.2%
75.8%
86.2%
92.6%
As we can see, more than a third of patents focused on the key appliance
itself (the cooking stove) or significant features of it the cooking surface,
ovens, doors and windows, which allowed bright firelight into the gloom of
the pre-gas, even pre-kerosene-lit household. The latter small category
of improvements also affected the next major appliance-group, heating
stoves, where it was even more important than in the kitchen that the
stove should make the parlour light as well as warm on winter evenings.
Hot-air furnaces were comparatively expensive, only suitable for houses or
public and commercial buildings with basements, and required costly
internal structural modifications to make them work (installation of hot-air
ducts, register-plates, etc.) But they were powerful, economical, and
efficient, and there was a strong urban and middle-class demand for
them. Fire pots and grates are the crucial and problematic heart of any
solid-fuelled appliance: innovation there focused on making them durable,
convenient (minimizing the need for manual poking and ash- and cindersifting, maximizing the length of time for which a stove could burn if
occasionally refuelled), safe, and economical. Dampers received plenty of
attention, because they were the means by which stoves were regulated.
Maximizing controllability and economy, and minimizing smoke and fumes
in the room, depended on getting them right. Fireplaces received a
limited amount of inventors attention, even though they had become
marginal to the tasks of keeping most American homes warm. There was
a continuing middle-class, particularly urban demand for their cosy and
nostalgic presence (one could afford the waste of an open fire, if one
already had furnace or boiler heat), so inventors attempted to make
them, too, more efficient, more economical, and more convenient
aspects of heating appliances American consumers had learned to expect.
Inventive activity in the stove industry was not simply focused on the
three main appliance-groups (stoves and ranges, heaters, and furnaces)
and features common to all of them (fire-pots, dampers, grates); it was
also geographically concentrated, just as the industry itself became as it
grew. In the late 1820s and early 1830s there were few repeat inventors
or professional patentees closely attached to the industry itself; by the
1840s there were legions, by the 1850s armies, by the 1860s hordes.
And the largest number of them lived in the two small industrial cities of
Albany and Troy, New York, together with their surrounding and
dependent villages and towns (particularly Green Island, Cohoes,
Lansingburgh, and Watervliet). Other working documents on this site
illustrate the New York Capital Districts importance to the stove industry
in terms of production; but there is a similar, indeed a bigger, story to tell
in terms of innovation.
Table 2:
Geographical Concentration of Stove-Industry Patents, 17901873, by State
[Source: at the moment very crude all of the patent records for
invention, design, reissues, disclaimers, etc., in the Paratext digitized
version of the 1873 Patent Office index. Non-US patents have been
omitted only the Canadian are British are in double figures.]
State
Patents Percent
New York
2,559
39.5%
Pennsylvania
963
14.8%
Massachusetts
645
9.9%
Ohio
547
8.4%
Illinois
233
3.6%
Connecticut
164
2.5%
Maryland
149
2.3%
New Jersey
132
2.0%
Wisconsin
117
1.8%
Missouri
110
1.7%
Cumulative
54.3%
64.3%
72.7%
76.3%
78.8%
81.1%
83.1%
84.9%
86.6%
Table 3:
Geographical Concentration of Stove-Industry Patents, 17901873, by City
Troy
Philadelphia
Albany
New York
Cincinnati
Boston
Brooklyn
Baltimore
Chicago
Rochester
NY
PA
NY
NY
OH
MA
NY
MD
IL
NY
As we can see, these ten towns and cities between them were responsible
for fractionally above half of all stove patents in this whole period, with
Troy, the smallest among them, leading the way. The New York Capital
District as a whole, with 1,315 patents, outpunched Philadelphia and
NewYork-Brooklyn, the United Statess two largest and most diversified
manufacturing metropolises, rolled together; at least in terms of inventive
activity. This is a much larger measure of the Capital Districts importance
(roughly double) than the 1874 production figures might have led one to
expect.
When did the Capital District come to focus so obsessively, and
productively, on stove patenting?
Chart 3:
Inventive Activity in the New York Capital District: Stove Patents
(Black) and All Others (Gray)
The answer is clear enough: despite Eliphalet Nott, Darius Buck, Philo
Stewart, and others early contributions in the 1830s, the real stovepatent craze only begins in the mid-1840s. Stove patents made up more
than half of the area total in 1832 (60 percent) and again in 1835 (53
percent), but the numbers themselves are unimpressive 3 of 5, 9 of 17.
From the mid-1840s, on the other hand, both the numbers of patents and
the proportions of stove patents grow markedly, so that for the entire
decade, 1845-1854, more than half of all patents filed in the district were
for stoves in one shape or form stoves, ranges, heaters, and furnaces
themselves, ancillary appliances to make them more effective, and ways
of batch-producing them more efficiently.
How are we to explain this not just the timing of the stove boom, but
also the districts national pre-eminence, and particularly Troys within it?
There must be many reasons, some of them having to do with the normal
agglomeration economies of an industrial district. In other towns and
cities across the United States, including New York and Philadelphia, stove
manufacture was just one industry among many [See Table 4]; in Albany,
and even more particularly Troy, it was the main focus of entrepreneurial
10
effort for a two-generation period. This meant that Albany and Troy were
places where ambitious iron moulders, foremen, pattern makers,
superintendents, manufacturers, and just plain people with a good idea
for improving a stove, were most likely to encounter like-minded fellows
(and potential customers or business opportunities), and to be familiar
with how to go through the process from idea to prototype to patent to
exploitation. They would find experienced model-builders, patent agents
and attorneys to assist them, counsel and expert witnesses to stand by
them in litigation. To apply a rather desperate analogy, the New York
Capital District was the Cast-Iron Valley of the solid-fuel heating
revolution of the mid-19th century.
Table 4:
Keyword Count:
Philadelphia and New York Capital District Patent Records
Compared, 1790-1873
KEYWORD
PHILADELPHIA
Phil%
Rank
STOVE
COOK
STEAM
COAL
RAIL
IRON
HEAT
WATER
FURNACE
FIRE
CAST
MOLD
GAS
BOILER
SEWING
WASH
RANGE
ANTHRACIT
E
STEEL
TELEGRAPH
Totals
447
178
382
74
274
164
132
177
132
137
70
65
214
135
150
79
58
7
5.3%
2.1%
4.5%
0.9%
3.2%
1.9%
1.6%
2.1%
1.6%
1.6%
0.8%
0.8%
2.5%
1.6%
1.8%
0.9%
0.7%
0.1%
1
5
2
14
3
7
11
6
12
9
15
16
4
10
8
13
17
20
54
23
8,486
0.6%
0.3%
18
19
CAPITAL
DISTRICT
1,153
440
87
79
75
75
73
63
53
51
48
37
33
31
29
26
26
18
AST%
Rank
32.5%
12.4%
2.5%
2.2%
2.1%
2.1%
2.1%
1.8%
1.5%
1.4%
1.4%
1.0%
0.9%
0.9%
0.8%
0.7%
0.7%
0.5%
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
8
8
3,546
0.2%
0.2%
19
20
Diff
3
-1
10
-2
1
4
-2
3
-1
4
4
-9
-4
-7
-3
2
-1
-1
11
12
Stove manufacturers made the design patent system very much their
own. The promise of the invention patent system for conveying secure
intellectual property rights and competitive advantage to stove makers
had already begun to prove disappointing by the late 1840s because it
was so hard and costly to prove priority and to manage IPR against
determined opponents who were prepared to stretch or break the law, and
to pay for the consequences as the price of doing a profitable business.
Design patents provided a substitute and/or a complementary means to
secure a temporarily protected market position or to squeeze revenue
from ones competitors as the price of permitting them lawfully to imitate
a winning design.
Chart 4:
Stove Industry Design Patents (LH axis) and
Share of ALL Design Patents (RH axis), 1843-1873
As we can see, stove manufacturers took to the design patent system like
ducks to water; it might almost have been designed (sic) to meet their
needs. Producers of other domestic goods were slow to jump on the
bandwagon, so that through the 1850s more than half of all design
patents taken out in the United States were for stoves in the late 1840searly 1850s, well over two-thirds. Patents for design, like those for
invention, were strongly pro-cyclical: when the market was depressed,
entrepreneurs did not invest in bringing out new products, concentrating
instead on cutting costs, maintaining collections if possible, and expanding
sales.
It turns out that one of the key reasons for the New York Capital Districts
pre-eminence in the stove manufacturing industry, with a record for
innovative activity far in excess of its share of production, is that it served
as the national centre for design innovation, rather than for functional
improvements. Fifty-three percent of Albany and Troys stove-industry
patents were for designs rather than improvements, as against a figure
13
of just 18 percent for the rest of the U.S; together, they contributed 38
percent of the national total of stove-industry design patents, as against
just 11 percent for improvements.
Designs Improvements
568
509
915
4,286
38%
11%
Design %
53%
18%
14
Chart 5:
Capital District Stove Industry Share of (a) ALL US Design Patents
(red column series) and (b) Stove Industry Design Patents (black
line series, and trend)
Finally, what about my Third Period, through the 1920s? This is as yet
much less well-developed than any of the analysis of the pre-1873 records
all I have from STO are invention patent numbers, dates, and classes.
It will be necessary to add to these by locating design patents (something
now possible thanks to Google Patents), and by sampling original patent
documents in order to add in the detail about patentees and locations,
and also to do. But, even so, the data are quite suggestive.
15
Chart 6:
Stove-Industry Invention Patents, 1830-1920:
Absolute Stagnation, 1870-; Relative Decline; and the Collapse of
Innovation in the Solid-Fuel Sector
The above chart is perhaps too busy -- in Excel, the text labels were the
same colour as the series they described, but I hope viewers can read this
anyway. It extends the data presented in Chart 2 and demonstrates very
graphically that the depression of the 1870s marked a turning-point in the
industrys history of involvement with the patenting process. As the chart
title indicates, what we can see is (a) the continued relative decline in the
cooking and heating appliance industrys share of all US patents (black),
from about 2 percent from 1850 through the mid-1870s, to a figure less
than half that; (b) the absolute stagnation the lack of any trend, but
rather simply pro-cyclical variation in the numbers of such patents
(red); and (c) the challenge of new fuels. Year on year, from 1870 on, the
numbers of solid-fuel patents (blue) in successive boom years are lower
than in those preceding them, and recessional troughs are lower still; and
there is a steady, inexorable rise in the number of patents applied for in
order to exploit the new heat sources of petroleum, manufactured and
natural gas, and finally electricity (green). Data as yet incomplete on
production levels would help explain this: the numbers of solid-fuel
appliances made and sold stagnated after the early 1870s too; the
industry became afflicted with overcapacity, inadequate demand, and (or
so manufacturers complained), a distressing lack of profits. This mature
phase of the industry was hardly one to encourage continued investment
in innovation, especially as market share slipped away towards new fuels
or new heating systems (by steam and hot-water via radiators) even if the
heat source remained coal-fired.
16
17
18
not include a drawing; for which see the original of 17 Dec. 1832,
X007333.
Darius Bucks 20 May 1839 Albany patent for a cooking stove, 0001157, is
one of the most important in the development of the device, because
what he (or Crowell, the man whose ideas he stole) had done had been to
reinvent or ?independently rediscover or recover the lost Hoxie patent of
1816, X2586, which pointed towards the larger, more controllable heatdistributing oven that lay at the heart of the mature C19th product.
Bucks patent 0005967 of 12 December 1848, his last before his death,
extended the breadth of his claims, which would in the mid-1850s force
Giles Filley of the Excelsior Manufacturing Co., St Louis to challenge his
executrix and her licensees, who were using them to attempt to secure a
profitable monopoly.
The first of Philo P. Stewart (co-founder of Oberlin College)s many cooking
stove patents, for the Oberlin of 1834 (X8275), does not seem to
survive. In any case, his 915 of 12 Sept. 1838 (by which time he
described himself as a stove maker, and had moved to New York)
represents the first in his sequence of inventions improving stoves fuel
economy and controllability.
Ezra Ripley of Troys Design Patent No. 5, 15 July 1843, for the dolphinshaped column for a kind of parlor stove then fashionable, is not just one
of the very first design patents, its also Ezras first of what would become
a profitable sequence. (Design patents, unfortunately, dont seem to be
obtainable from the EPO, just the PTO). He had patented nothing since
his stove pipe of 1836, X9341 (destroyed in the Great Fire); between
1843 and 1855 he would go on to obtain 26 more patents, all of them for
design patents, assigned to the stove makers who had commissioned or
bought them of him. Ripley was thus the pioneer in what became a
considerable business in mid 19th-century Troy and, to a lesser extent,
Albany.
Samuel Pierce, also of Troys 1850 Union of the States cook stove
design, No. 338, is interesting not simply because of what its patriotic
name and sunburst motif suggests about upstate New York political
opinion during the post-Mexican War crisis over the Wilmott Proviso, but
also because it includes on the drawing the graphic consequence of the
patent systems legal requirement for stoves appearance the patent
date and owner (or, in this case, assignee the local firm of Johnson, Cox,
and Fuller)s name was cast into the object. Planned obsolescence could
trace its roots back to this: by the early 1870s, cast-in patent details had
gone beyond being a legal requirement and a convenience for the
customer in ordering replacement parts. Instead, by emphasizing that a
stove otherwise functionally indistinguishable from its predecessors
was an 1872 rather than an 1870 design, makers could hope to stimulate
buyers to pick theirs in preference to an older model, and to discard a
stove with an embarrassingly antique patent date, even if its performance
was quite satisfactory.
19
Ive also selected this example because the beautiful hand-drawn original
is one of those in the collections of the Rensselaer County Historical
Society, from which I have also chosen James Savage of Troys New York
& Erie Cook, No. 451, of 13 April 1852. The side of the stove is
decorated with charming pictures of the railroad, whose tracks had
recently been completed. The fireplace heater version of the same
decorative scheme was still in the Marcus Filley pattern stock 23 years
later; it had been assigned to his predecessor in business at the Green
Island Foundry, Morrison & Tibbets.
Design No. 404 of 29 July 1851, for a cook stove (the Fashion of Troy)
with a variant of the sunburst design motif, is important simply because it
was Nicholas Vedders first recorded design patent though he had
already been in the pattern-making business for twenty years by then.
There would go on to be another 153 such design patents over the next
twenty years, making Vedder the industrys most prolific and influential
designer.
Finally, I include 90,756 of 1 June 1869, by William J. Keep, of Troy,
improved flues for a cooking stove, not because its especially attractive in
appearance, or important (there is no assignment data with the patent, so
I cannot know yet whether Keep managed to sell his idea to somebody, or
whether it entered into production), but simply because it was Bill Keeps
very first.
Keep, by then an old man, and retired from his
superintendency of the Michigan Stove Co. (to which he had moved, from
Troy, in the 1880s, after a bruising patent dispute with his employer),
wrote a wonderful manuscript history of the American stove in 1915, in
which he recorded that he was the one surviving personal link to the great
Capital District stove inventors of the heroic period. He was educated at
Union College in Schenectady, Eliphalet Notts institution (where the
original manuscript is stored); he began his career at Fuller & Warren, as
Philo Stewarts assistant it must have helped that his father, the Rev.
John Keep, was a stalwart of Oberlin College, which Stewart had helped
found -- and took over responsibility for development of the P.P. Stewart
product line when Philo died, having already turned into one of the earliest
brand names in his own lifetime.
20