Patents for inventions

[staffs_vic]

Hi,

One of the people in my family tree took out a patent for a piece of farm machinery that he had invented. I have a scanned copy of the patent - the British Library has records for patents from 1617 to 1899:

https://www.bl.uk/help/find-early-british-patents

I was just wondering whether anyone knew how I might go about finding out whether the invention went into production and made him any money. He left his wife quite a lot of money so it would be interesting to know whether his invention contributed to that or not.

[Romilly]

You might find something in a Newspaper Article.

I found several Articles about an Invention of my late Grandfather.

Romilly.

[Bookbox]

Hi, and welcome to RootsChat 

You might try Grace's Guide ...
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Main_Page

[staffs_vic]

Thank you Bookbox and Romilly for the suggestions. Unfortunately I haven't found any mention of the device in local papers or Grace's Guide so far but I haven't quite given up on this topic yet.

[Andy J2022]

Patents were and are frequently issued for ideas which merely improve an existing product or process. So depending on the detail contained in your relative's patent, it may be that he sold a licence to exploit the patent to a company which was already making the machine or process on which his improvement was based.  However if it was a fairly small and easy to manufacture item he might well have gone into partnership with someone like a blacksmith to produce and sell the item as a stand-alone product. He would need to advertise his product so search the old local newspapers for adverts and reports of agricultural shows where new products would be demonstrated to the farming community.
If he did licence the idea to someone else to manufacture this would have been done via written document which might have survived, and you might find it in a county record office, for instance, if the company's papers were archived there.
If the patent was exploited by the inventor himself (perhaps with a partner such as a blacksmith suggested above) then unless sales ledgers come to light, or some advertising for the product, it is less likely that you will find out if he made any money from his idea. The protection provided by a patent only lasts for 20 years and so you only need to concentrate your research on that fairly limited period.   

[Andy J2022]

Just to add to my previous comments, if the patent was applied for after September 1852 then it will have been subject to the revised rules contained in the Patent Law Amendment Act 1852. This allowed for a maximum term of 14 years (not 20 as I previously said - that came much later), subject to renewal fees having been paid after 3 years and 7 years had elapsed. The whole process was not cheap. Just to apply and receive the Letters Patent cost £30 including stamp duty, and the renewal fees (also including stamp duty) were £50 after 3 years and £100 after 7 years.
If your relative did licence someone else to manufacture his invention, there might be a record of that fact in the Register of Proprietors  Here's what section 35 of the 1852 Act says on the subject:

Patent Law Amendment Act 1852
XXXV.  There shall be kept at the Office appointed for filing Specifications in Chancery under this Act a Book or Books, entitled "The Register of Proprietors,” wherein shall be entered, in such Manner as the Commissioners shall direct, the Assignment of any Letters Patent, or of any Share or Interest therein, any Licence under Letters Patent, and the District to which such Licence relates, with the Name or Names of any Person having any Share or Interest in such Letters Patent or Licence, the Date of his or their acquiring such Letters Patent, Share, and Interest, and any other Matter or Thing relating to or affecting the Proprietorship in such Letters Patent or Licence; [...]

I don't know is how punctiliously this registration prcoess was followed in practice, as it relied on the patentee informing the Patent Commissioners, and involved an additional fee of 5 shillings. I believe the Register of Proprietors can be found at TNA in the BT 44 series but you would need to confirm this.

[staffs_vic]

Thank you Andy J2022, that's very interesting indeed.

It sounds as if, given the expense of applying for a patent, it was only something that you would consider doing if you thought you would make some money out of it rather than thinking "I've had a clever idea so I'd better patent it just on the off-chance". This does suggest that filing the patent would have been part of some kind of definite business plan rather than something speculative.

The family in question was not poor - my relative, Edwin Phillips, describes himself as "gentleman" in the patent application, which suggests they had some money to spare - but I don't imagine that they'd want to throw money at something without any obvious money-making potential in it. According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, £30 in 1896 would be equivalent to £2700 today. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

Edwin was still living with his parents and was only around 26 at the time he filed the patent application, then got married the following year to a widow 10 years his senior (my 2xgreat grandmother). I have no idea whether these two events were connected in any way.

I've looked (but not exhaustively) in local papers and trade publications for any evidence of the invention being sold under Edwin's own name. I think there's probably some more mileage in this, particularly if he decided to sell it under something other than his name. As I'm sure you can imagine, more generlal searching for anything to do with "Phillips" in a manufacturing and engineering field just turns up references to the big engineering conglomerate.

Anyway, it sounds as if the next step is to look for the Register of Proprietors and see if I can find anything there - thanks very much for mentioning this!

[RobertHauteville]

What did he list his occupation as in censuses/BMDs? If someone took out a patent and made money from it they would often be referred to as a "patent xxxxmaker" instead of the more usual "xxxxmaker".

[staffs_vic]

He always described himself as a farmer (sometimes with some additional information about how many acres or how many men he employed) so I think the patented machine would have been, at most, a sideline.

The machine he patented was a piece of agricultural machinery which he invented while he was still unmarried and working on his father's farm. Presumably he must have hit on an idea to make the work more efficient.

It's possible that he sold the patent to someone else and used the money from it to set himself up on his own farm. He first applied for the patent in 1896, filed the full specification in 1897, got married in the same year, but was still living at his new wife's house the following year when their daughter was born. By 1901 he had moved with his family to a farm of his own which he appears to have owned. So this might be consistent with him having sold the patent and used the money to buy the farm, rather than going into business producing the invention himself.

The patent appears on Espacenet, which is the Europe-wide database of patents accessible from the British Library, but there's no information about what happened to it after 1897.

I did have a look at the Register of Proprietors as suggested by an earlier poster but could only find information about registered designs rather than patents.