Stoves & Patents
[working title only]
One of the many interesting things about the stove industry – and
something I’m only just beginning to work out – is how important patents
were in the course of its development, how large they bulked in its
history, and also how significant a role the stove industry played in the
American patent system from the 1830s on. (The only novel about the
industry of which I know, Robert R. Updegraff’s Captains in Conflict
[1927], uses patent disputes and skulduggery as plot-devices in a way
that informed readers would have found quite credible.)
The reason I’m surprised is that, on the face of it, solid-fuel cooking and
heating stoves, and the industry making them, don’t seem to be likely
candidates for having been a key focus of Americans’ inventive activities,
despite the obvious importance of these key domestic technologies. No
new or fundamental scientific discoveries were embodied in them. There
were no great breakthroughs. Progress was incremental, from the 1830s
until at least the 1870s, by which time the products were ‘mature’ and the
rates of change and improvement declined. And the industry itself
included no very large firms to direct and exploit the inventive process.
Whatever their makers may have said to the contrary, stoves were also
actually remarkably like one another, as manufacturers settled on a few
key principles of workable design in the 1830s after an early phase of
experimentation while makers (and consumers) were finding out what
constituted a serviceable product.
One might, perhaps, therefore have expected the industry to be an
example of what the economic historian Robert Allen has called “collective
invention” – the development of techniques and products as a result of a
series of ‘micro-inventions’ freely shared with one another by members of
entrepreneurial communities more impressed by the advantages of
playing cooperative positive-sum games among themselves than by
resorting to the questionable and costly attractions of the patent system.1
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Collective invention there
certainly was, among a community of stove-manufacturers who were
intensely aware of what their fellows (competitors, neighbours) were
doing, and paid the inventors of useful or marketable improvements the
dubious honour of plagiarism, piracy, or near-imitation that came as close
to copying as the law might permit.
The resulting stove patent
infringement cases were very confusing, because outsiders (e.g. lawyers
and judges) sometimes could not understand what all the fuss was about,
or what the key patentable features of a disputed product or design really
were. Were they at all useful? Were they even novel?2
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.
1
1
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 Office’s 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 industry’s development – one
where the rate of significant innovation declined (this was certainly the
opinion of the industry’s 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
2
natural, and electricity – powered the appliances in which inventive
activity continued apace.
3
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
16%
80
Stoves%All
14%
70
Stoves
12%
60
10%
50
8%
40
6%
30
4%
20
2%
10
0%
0
1805
1810
1815
1820
1825
1830
1835
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 York’s famous
‘saddlebag’ design of 1815 (patent X2296) and Christopher Hoxie of
Hudson, New York’s, 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 (James’s sunken hearth of 1824, number X3854), and
licensing manufacture to small furnace-operators in the Hudson Valley
region. But their impact was strictly limited: Hoxie’s 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
4
embryonic Hudson Valley stove industry of the 1820s, they might have
remained forgotten. (Neither James’s nor Hoxie’s patents survived the
1836 fire. James ‘saddlebag’ stoves survive in museum collections to this
day, but even by the 1850s no Hoxie stoves were thought to exist – their
owners had all replaced them with more modern equipment, and sold
them for scrap. Hoxie was a frequent patentee, but generally for farmingrelated inventions – his stove was a one-off.)
There is just one crucial but partial exception to the above account of the
lack of professional invention in the stove industry before the 1830s: Dr
Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College, Schenectady, political operator,
speculator, and the man usually credited with developing an effective way
of burning America’s new wonder fuel of the 1820s – Pennsylvania
anthracite, the answer to the East Coast’s emerging fuel crisis; though in
fact there were numerous other investigators working at the same time.
Nott, with 29 patents and renewals to his credit, 1819-1839 (one, in
1819, for a fireplace, X3064; four in 1826-1828 on the evolution and
management of heat, X4477, X4622, X4772, and X5048; and then for a
succession of anthracite-fuelled heating and cooking appliances, 18321839 applying his research findings, which were produced and sold in
large numbers in an Albany foundry formally operated by his son, as well
as by other makers who paid him royalties), certainly fits the picture of a
professional inventor, though even his most creative period falls in the
early 1830s, not the 1820s. He was scientifically literate, empirical,
experimental, entrepreneurial, and an effective self-promoter, all at the
same time.
He was not the only repeat patentee in this early or
transitional period, but he was certainly the best known, the most focused
and prolific, and probably the most influential, not least for his example –
he made big money from his inventions; and where he led, many other
Hudson Valley stovemakers soon followed.
The big change in the time series is clear to see: the early 1830s, when
Nott and others were developing serviceable anthracite-burning
appliances, and ‘practical stovemakers’ like Jordan Mott of New York –
himself a repeat patentee, losing his stove virginity with X4589 in 1826,
but following that with a dozen more, 1832-1838 – and Joel Rathbone of
Albany transformed the way they were made and sold.
There is no space to go into this in detail now, but the key changes were
(1) the introduction of the cupola furnace, itself anthracite-fuelled,
permitting the movement of stoveplate manufacture from the rural,
mostly charcoal iron, furnace, to any urban centre with good
transportation for fuel, flux (limestone), and raw material (pig iron and
scrap), and advantageous market access; (2) the progressive
abandonment of open-sand floor moulding for flask moulding, permitting
thinner, lighter plates, more elaborate decoration, and rounded rather
than near-flat shapes; and (3) the redesign of products, and the
development of manufacturing techniques, enabling stove manufacture to
make the transition from custom or very small batch-production to largebatch, repetition production. The incentive for all of these innovations, of
course, depended on the availability of a large and growing market for
5
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, Vermont’s circular-hearth stove of 1832, X7333, improved by
X9282 in 1835, 91 [new series] 1836, and 4,238 in 1845; Darius Buck of
Albany’s large-oven, downdraft-flue range of 1839, reinventing Hoxie’s
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 Désirée; Philo Penfield
Stewart of Oberlin and then Troy’s X8275 (1834) and 915 (1838), the
foundation patents for a string of improvements, reissues, and extensions
through 1865 on which Fuller & Warren, Troy’s largest stovemaker’s
product line would come to depend – these were the key innovations,
licensed to other makers, imitated, pirated, and improved on over the
following decades.
6
Chart Two:
Stove Industry Patents, 1830-1873
12%
500
450
10%
400
STO
350
8%
Paratext
6%
300
250
Total
200
4%
150
100
2%
50
0%
0
1830
1835
1840
1845
1850
1855
1860
1865
1870
Explanation: I have two not-quite-compatible databases of stove patents,
one compiled from Paratext™’s digitized version of the 1873 Patent Office
index, the other from Source Translation and Optimization™’s guide to all
US patents for invention, 1836-1995. STO’s data is in some ways more
useful than Paratext™’s – it distinguishes clearly between original patents
and extensions/reissues, and it classifies patents according to current PTO
standards; the information underlying the dotted blue time-series is thus
“all original patents in Class 126, Heating & Cooking Apparatus” whereas
the Paratext™ database used 1873’s crude, confusing, and outdated
classification system, so stove-industry patents had to be identified by
keyword searching rather than relying on it. It is clear, however, that the
two processes have produced essentially the same result. Both of these
time-series are charted against the LH axis, and show stove-industry
patents as a proportion of the annual national total. The other time
series, “Total,” charted against the RH axis, shows the number of stove
patents per year according to the Paratext™ series -- not especially
revealing, though it’s typically pro-cyclical (i.e. inventive activity peaks in
years of intense economic boom) and demonstrates very graphically the
furious competition for diminishing returns in intellectual property rights
during the post-Civil War decade. Note, too, the way in which patents for
invention diminish in number, as design patents (see below) become
available, 1843-, as an alternative or complementary way of establishing
product differentiation and a non-price competitive position.
What the chart shows is the great surge in inventive activity (as recorded
by patenting) in the stove industry from the mid-1830s through the mid1850s, by which time the industry’s key products – solid-fuel cooking
stoves and ranges, room heaters (including those working on the “baseburning” principle perfected in the 1850s), and hot-air furnaces – all
existed in recognizably the same form as they would continue to have
until their large-scale production ceased almost a century later. The STO-
7
derived database allows one to see where all of this inventive activity was
focused:
Table 1: Classification of Stove Industry patents, 1836-1873
[Source: STO Database – Original Patents Only]
Percentage Cumulative Total
STOVES, COOKING
29.1%
STOVE LIDS & TOPS
3.2%
32.3%
OVENS
1.8%
34.1%
STOVE DOORS & WINDOWS
2.0%
36.1%
STOVES, HEATING
17.3%
53.4%
HOT-AIR FURNACES
11.9%
65.3%
FIRE POTS
4.9%
70.2%
DAMPERS
5.6%
75.8%
GRATES
10.4%
86.2%
FIREPLACES
6.4%
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
8
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 District’s 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 Cumulative
New York
2,559
39.5%
Pennsylvania
963
14.8%
54.3%
Massachusetts
645
9.9%
64.3%
Ohio
547
8.4%
72.7%
Illinois
233
3.6%
76.3%
Connecticut
164
2.5%
78.8%
Maryland
149
2.3%
81.1%
New Jersey
132
2.0%
83.1%
Wisconsin
117
1.8%
84.9%
Missouri
110
1.7%
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
Patents Percent. Cumulative
663
10.2%
615
9.5%
19.7%
509
7.8%
27.6%
505
7.8%
35.3%
297
4.6%
39.9%
265
4.1%
44.0%
124
1.9%
45.9%
121
1.9%
47.8%
95
1.5%
49.3%
95
1.5%
50.7%
9
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 States’s 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 District’s
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)
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
1800
1805
1810
1815
1820
1825
1830
1835
1840
1845
1850
1855
1860
1865
1870
1875
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 district’s national pre-eminence, and particularly Troy’s 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
10
manufacture was just one industry among many [See Table 4]; in Albany,
and even more particularly Troy, it was the main focus of entrepreneurial
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
ANTHRACITE
STEEL
TELEGRAPH
Totals
447
178
382
74
274
164
132
177
132
137
70
65
214
135
150
79
58
7
54
23
8,486
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%
0.6%
0.3%
1
5
2
14
3
7
11
6
12
9
15
16
4
10
8
13
17
20
18
19
CAPITAL
DISTRICT
1,153
440
87
79
75
75
73
63
53
51
48
37
33
31
29
26
26
18
8
8
3,546
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%
0.2%
0.2%
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Diff
3
-1
10
-2
1
4
-2
3
-1
4
4
-9
-4
-7
-3
2
-1
-1
Explanation: What I’ve done is simply to do a keyword count on all
Philadelphia (8,486) and Capital District (3,546) patent records, which
produces suggestive results about the relative prominence of stove
inventors and inventions in the industry’s largest centres. (New York City
is a bit too much to chew yet.) As one can see, “stove” is the most
frequently-occurring keyword in both places, but in the Capital District it,
and the words most closely associated with it (cook, heat, and particularly
coal), rank much higher.
In Philadelphia, a diverse manufacturing
metropolis, the stove industry was one among many; in the Capital
11
District, it was overwhelmingly dominant, defining the landscape for the
entrepreneurial inventive community. It’s worth, in passing, looking at
the keywords where there’s the largest rank difference in Philadelphia’s
favour. “Gas” is the outstanding difference. At this stage, gas – for
illuminating and cooking – was an exclusively urban fuel. Apparatus for
making, transforming, metering, and using it preoccupied a significant
number of Philadelphia inventors and companies; the Capital District was
wedded to solid-fuel, hence the fact that “coal” (usually “coal stove”)
ranks 10 places higher than in Philadelphia, the ruler of Anthracite
District.
***
But there is another reason too. It relates to the stove industry’s very
distinctive encounter with the US Patent System, which is connected in
turn to the peculiarities of the stove as a product and the means of its
manufacture.
There was more than one kind of patent that mid-19th century
entrepreneurs could seek, giving them a theoretically exclusive right to
use, sell, or licence their intellectual property for a period of years. There
were patents for inventions, and from 1842 there were patents for designs
too. Stoves – particularly cooking and heating stoves – appealed to
consumers because of what they did, and how well they performed, but
also because of how they looked. They were items of domestic furniture
as well as objects of utility. The beauty, if I can use that word, of the way
in which they were manufactured (the material from which they were
made, the processes employed) is that it permitted manufacturers to deal
to some extent separately with the stove’s internal working arrangements
and its external appearance, and to attempt to distinguish their products
from other manufacturers’ in both key respects.
The patent system always allowed protection for (and therefore provided
an incentive to) innovation in functional design, but from 1842 onwards it
also gave a limited protection to what stove makers termed a stove’s
“dress.” And pattern-makers and moulders had by this time become
expert in exploiting to the full the potential that wood carving and iron
moulding provided for turning stoves into extraordinarily decorated as well
as decorative objects.
The stove industry, already booming in the late 1830s, then meeting hard
times in the mid 1840s, turned quickly to the possibilities of the designpatent system as a way of continuing to carry on their furiously
competitive elaboration of the stove’s external appearance, their
cultivation of what they and their customers thought of as its aesthetic
value – and at the same time gaining a limited property right in the
resulting designs. This meant that, just as with innovations in functional
design, stove makers who devised something giving their products an
edge in the market would be protected against their competitors, or would
be able to add to the profits in making and selling stoves with the trade in
intellectual property rights in designs, by sale or lease.
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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 one’s 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
100
100%
90
90%
80
80%
70
70%
60
60%
50
50%
40
40%
30
30%
Stove Design Patents
Stove % Design Patents
20
20%
10
10%
0
0%
1843
1848
1853
1858
1863
1868
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 District’s
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 Troy’s 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 Design %
Albany & Troy
568
509
53%
Others
915
4,286
18%
A&T/All
38%
11%
Close examination shows that the introduction of design patents created
an almost entirely new group of multiple patent-applicants, who were
barely engaged in seeking patents for invention, if at all. Albany and Troy
pattern-makers and stove makers including Ransom, Vose, Gibbs, and
particularly Ezra Ripley and Joel Rathbone all took out multiple design
patents before 1850, whereas they had previously had little involvement
with the system. Where they led, Dr Eliphalet Nott’s former chief patternmaker followed in the 1850s through 1870s. Nicholas Schwarz Vedder
was the scion of an old local Dutch family, and active in the business since
1831, initially as a junior partner to Ripley, then on his own account.
Vedder, “the prince of pattern-makers,” became the chief industrial
designer to the entire industry.
Unlike most of his immediate
predecessors, he did not mix pattern-making with stove manufacture.
Instead, he specialized, concentrating on design innovation and the
creation of the wood and particularly the iron patterns on which batchproduction depended. The design patent system allowed and encouraged
him to develop a trust relationship with the stove-manufacturers who
depended on his abilities: he could sell them, not just attractive designs
and the patterns needed in their manufacture, but the promise of
exclusivity (at least a qualified exclusivity). They received an imperfect
guarantee that, if they bought a good and expensive Vedder pattern, he
would not sell it to their competitors too; and that, if the competitors
rushed to imitate, there was some prospect of a recourse to law. Vedder
turned into the most prolific repeat patentee in the entire industry, with
164 patents in his own name, 1851-1873, all but 11 of them for designs
rather than inventions.
So great was the commitment of Capital District pattern-makers and stove
designers to the design patent system that, as the next chart in this
research note indicates, by 1849 they were responsible for, not just 55
percent of stove industry patents, but 49 percent of ALL design patents in
the entire U.S. They would never again have this share of the overall
national total, but their industry dominance was sustained remarkably well
– great year-to-year volatility masking a trend of only very gradual
decline in their share of stove industry design patenting, even as the
industry grew rapidly in the 1850s, more than doubled its output again in
the 1860s, and the decisive move of production towards the mid-west
began.
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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)
60%
% Total
% Industry
Trend
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1843
1848
1853
1858
1863
1868
1873
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
11%
350
All Stove Patents
325
All Stoves as % All Patents
10%
300
9%
275
8%
250
225
7%
200
6%
175
5%
150
Solid-Fuel Stove, Heater
& Furnace Patents
4%
125
100
Liquid- & Gas-Fuelled
Stoves & Heaters &
Electric Stoves
3%
2%
75
50
1%
25
0%
0
1830
1840
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
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
industry’s 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 industry’s 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
There may be an institutional explanation for the end of significant
innovation, too – as well as the fact that the appliances had been
essentially perfected, so that there was less room for improvement.
Some contemporaries certainly believed this. Here’s the story: in the
mid-1870s, seeking competitive advantage and, he argued, stability
within the industry, one of its leading players, John Strong Perry, of
Albany – co-founder and first president of the National Association of
Stove Manufacturers, 1872 – surreptitiously bought up all controlling
patents on one of the last major general-purpose innovations, the anticlinker grate. He then attempted to turn other manufacturers – his fellow
members of NASM, and also his competitors – into his licensees. This
would have been a source of both profit and influence for him, a way of
underpinning his other moves to stabilize the industry and encourage
cooperative behaviour. But his peers did not see things that way: they
counter-organized to fight him in the courts, setting up the Anti-Clinker,
later Equity Protective, Association to pool the costs of defensive test
cases to break his patents.
It outlived this crisis, and became
institutionalized.
A generation later, a subsequent NASM president,
Lazard Kahn of Cincinnati, would complain that the EPA had done its work
too well: in its determination to limit the ability of any manufacturer to
establish a competitive edge over his peers either by establishing a
monopoly on any particular patent, or by charging them excessive license
fees, they had removed much of the incentive to innovate, and locked the
industry into a pattern of imitative stagnation from which there would be
no escape.
[That’s enough to chew on for now. It’s obvious to me that I’m going to
need to refine the databases, and do more discriminating searches and
subtotalling operations – e.g. not just dealing with the entire 1836-73
period as one bloc, and not rolling all different kinds of patent record in
together. I will also need to get deeper into individual patent records;
gain more knowledge/understanding of the assignment system; etc. But
it’s a start.]
HJH, 2007
Sample Stove Patent Documents from Online Patent Libraries
[When I compiled this list, in August 2006, there were two ways of
accessing patent documents online – via the US Patent & Trademark
Office, and via the European Patent Office. The former contains more
data – notably useful, for my purposes, are the surviving pre-1836
patents and design patents – but is very clunky to use, requiring for
example a particular plug-in TIFF reader; the latter is much easier, and
delivers documents as standard PDFs; but both are limited by the lack of
a search facility except for patent numbers, i.e. you have to know what
you’re looking for from other sources, e.g. my Paratext and STO-derived
databases, in order to find it. But now (2007) Google has solved this
problem, giving rapid and direct access to all the records in the PTO
17
database, and adding a powerful word-search facility. There are some
limitations in its service: the order in which results are displayed follows
Google logic, not anything more ‘rational’ e.g. date.
But speed,
convenience, and searchability more than compensate.]
Charles Postley of New York City’s Reservoir Cooking Stove, 26 Apr. 1815,
no. X002297, is the earliest stove patent of which the US Patent &
Trademarks Office appears to have an online copy. (To view USPTO files,
follow onscreen instructions—click the Images button. You will also need
a TIFF reader plugin – freely obtainable from suppliers listed here).
Eliphalet Nott’s rotary grate patent X004368, 23 March 1826, is one of his
great series of innovations in anthracite-burning technology in the 1820s.
The text is missing – only the illustration survives. X007636, 29 June
1833, is another grate patent [sic] in a better state of preservation.
Jordan L. Mott (New York City)’s first surviving stove patent, for an
anthracite ‘magazine’ (self-feeding) stove, X007096, was dated 30 May
1832. Mott was one of the first stove foundrymen to melt his own iron
from the pig using a cupola furnace, and pour his own stoveplate, thus
revolutionizing the industry. He was also a prolific patentee, emphasizing
the importance of designing products for economy of manufacture.
Joel Rathbone of Albany’s Flat Cook Stove, patent X008677 of 6 Mar.
1835, is for a fairly typical elevated oven (step) stove, an obvious
derivation or development from the original James ‘saddlebag’ patent;
included here not because of any particular importance, but just as the
first surviving Albany patent by one of the founders of the local industry,
doing in Albany what Mott was doing in New York at the same time. Like
Mott, he too went on to become a repeat patentee.
X-type (pre-1836 Fire) patents only seem to be available from the US
Patent & Trademarks Office website. About 40 percent of them seem to
have survived, or to have been reconstructed after the fire – patentees
were invited to resubmit copies of their work, something which was
obviously in their interests. Main sequence (post-1836) invention patents
are also obtainable from the European Patent Office, which is handier as
they are supplied in PDF rather than TIFF form, requiring no special
browser plugin.
Henry Stanley of Poultney [sic], Vermont’s revolving-hearth cooking stove
enjoyed passing importance in the 1830s. As with the plans of a number
of early stove inventors, it is obvious that the principle underlying his
patent was to make the stove analogous to the hearth it replaced.
Inventors aimed to control cooking heat by moving the fire nearer to or
further from the cooking pot. Some did this by raising and lowering the
fire; Stanley and a few imitators or co-inventors moved the pot towards or
away from the heat source by setting it into an offset turntable. Rotary
stoves were heavy, had more moving parts to break down than regular
stoves, and did not solve the problem of oven heat control and
distribution. Stanley’s 28 November 1836 supplementary patent 91 does
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not include a drawing; for which see the original of 17 Dec. 1832,
X007333.
Darius Buck’s 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.
Buck’s 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 Troy’s 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, it’s also Ezra’s first of what would become
a profitable sequence. (Design patents, unfortunately, don’t 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 Troy’s 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 system’s 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
I’ve 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 Troy’s “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 Vedder’s 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 industry’s 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 it’s 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 Keep’s
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 Nott’s institution (where the
original manuscript is stored); he began his career at Fuller & Warren, as
Philo Stewart’s 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