THE USE OF PATENT RECORDS IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH: EXAMPLES FROM THE GLASS MARBLE INDUSTRY ABSTRACT GUIDES TO PATENT RECORDS

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1 THE USE OF PATENT RECORDS IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH: EXAMPLES FROM THE GLASS MARBLE INDUSTRY Mark E. Randall Dallas, Texas ABSTRACT Various publications of the u. s. Patent Office can be of significant value to researchers seeking "horizon markers" delineating change in technology that manifest themselves in artifacts. These sources are discussed and examples from research on children's toy marbles are used as illustrations. GUIDES TO PATENT RECORDS There are three United States Patent Office publications that can be of great help to researchers in physical artifacts. These publications should be available in any United States Patent Depository. Although the term "U. s. Patent Depository" sounds ominous, it simply designates public libraries where patent records are available for reference. There are 58 Patent Depository libraries in the United States, located in major cities and at universities. The Patent-related publications are: 1) the Index of Official Gazette; and 3) the Specifications and Drawings. with which you begin dictates which source to consult first. Patents; 2) the The information Index of Patents. The Index is ordered by year, consists of one volume per year, and has been published since at least Although the name of this source has changed through the years, and it has consistently been called the Index since Prior to that, the index of patents was included in volumes titled the U. s. Patent Office Annual Report, Executive Documents, Reports of Committees, etc., but all of these are generally filed together. The Index contains an alphabetical list of patentees for that period, a few words of description of the invention, the patent number, and the date of the patent grant. Also in the Index is an alphabetical listing of patents by subject, with the same information as above. This subject index, while it sounds like a cure-all for researchers, has its limitations. Keep in mind that it was probably compiled by a clerk who was looking at a list of patent titles. Many titles are worded very ambiguously for various reasons, so that many times it was hard to determine the category into which a particular invention would fall. For instance, in a recent research project, it was learned that many machines designed to make glass marbles were not listed under either "glass" or "marbles". Official Gazette. The Official Gazette is ordered by year, one volume per month. Within each month it is ordered by patent number, and gives the inventor's name, a description up to about a half page, and an illustration of the invention. Since patent numbers are issued sequentially when gcanted, the Gazette is also in chronological order. 159

2 An important point to remember when dealing with patent records is that there are two dates associated with each patent: the earlier is the date of application, and the latter the date of grant. At different times in the history of the Patent Office, the s pan between the date an inventor applied for a patent and the d a te when it was finally granted varied from several months to many years. For historical researchers, the significance of this difference in dates should be obvious. The device or design was fully "invented" at the time of the application, even if it had not yet been granted a patent. In practice, the device could have been in general use for quite some time before the date of patent. How many times have you seen "Patent Pending" on something you use? The date of application appears with the other information about the patent in both the Gazette and the Specifications and Drawings. Specifications and Drawings. Published in chronological order and appearing in two volumes per year, individual Specifications are ordered by patent number, as are the complete text of the grantee's description, claims, and illustrations. The "claims" are the most significant item here, since they describe what this process or machine does or produces. Other, similar patents are referred to at times in the Specifications and Drawings, thereby furnishing more leads for researchers. PATENTS AND TRADE SECRETS: RESEARCHING MARBLE PRODUCTION To illustrate the problems and prospects of the use of patent records in historical archaeology and related disciplines, let us briefly examine the experiences of my co-author, Mr. Dennis Webb, while conducting research for our forthcoming book on children's toy marbles (Randall and Webb 1987). While interviewing people who worked in that industry in the 1940s and 1950s, he learned the names of various individuals who developed the machines that made glass marbles from the 1920s-1940s. None of the informants knew specifics about any patents, although they knew that certain machines and processes had been patented and that others had not. It was surprising to us that they knew as much as they did about which machines had been patented. It turned out that this distinction was quite significant in the history of the U. s. marble industry and involved not only civil suits charging patent infringement, but at least one case of attempted industrial espionage that ended in arrest and conviction. Having obtained several persons' names, we consulted the Index for the period concerned. Beginning with the earliest possible year of activity for the individuals involved, which we believed to be about 1920, we simply searched the alphabetical index for references to the named individuals. When any was found, the patent number was noted. The next step was to check the Gazette for those patent numbers. Since several of these individuals were involved in other business endeavors, not all of their patents were of interest to us, and it is not always possible to determine such facts from the title in the Index. The Gazette, however, furnished enough information to indicate which patents were of interest. When further detail was needed, we consulted the Specifications and Drawings. 160

3 The "claims" mentioned above are sometimes labeled as such in the body of the patents, and sometimes are not, but in any case the claims are recognized as a significant legal part of the patent. For a patent to be valid, the applicant must not only describe the physical appearance and makeup of the device, but must also make his "claims". That is, what does this thing do that is different from any prior patented device or process, and which makes it deserving of a patent? The claims, or description of processes, often describe the manipulation of raw material into a finished product. In our case, the processes most often carried glass from a raw molten state to a finished sphere, commonly called a marble (Figure 1). It is interesting to note that many of the patents describing machines that were to be used to produce marbles avoided the term "marbles". They instead used terms like "machine for rolling balls", or "machine for forming spherical bodies" (Figure 2). Perhaps the applicants had learned that it was safest to be as non-specific as possible for their own protection, and to allow application of the machine to other uses as well. FIGURE 1. FIGURE 2. G. J. COOK PATENT 1,226,313 MARBLE MACHINE (SJHPLlrIED lllustrathjh> PATENTED HAY 1'5, 1917 <APPLICATIOtt rtled HAR. I~ 1917> H. M. JENKINS PATENT L488,817 MACHINE FOR FORMING SPHERICAL BODIES <SIMPLIFIED ILLUSlRATION) PATENTED APRIL 1, 1924 <APPLICATION FILED NOV. 11, 1922) 161

4 Sometimes a patent would be issued to more than one person, or "assigned" to another person or company. Such instances furnished new leads to follow, and in connection with other interviews, we eventually extended our patent searches back into the late 1890s. Comparing the known descriptions of hand-made marble processing with the technology described in these earliest patents, we could see that we had reached the earliest marble making machinery. While the development of a typology as a goal went out of vogue decades ago, it is very difficult to arrive at a comprehensive description of a body of similar artifacts without resorting to a typology scheme of some sort. Granting that necessity in historical research, we can discover and specifically date certain horizon markers in marbles, from the relevant patent records. For instance, any marble collector knows that hand-made marbles display pontil marks, which are the scars left when the glass blob was cut off from the mother body of glass. The absence of such scars defines a machine-made marble. The obvious conclusion might be that machine-made marbles are not cut off. But this is not the case. The difference lies in the treatment of the marble after the cutting. Both hand-made and machine-made marbles are cut off at one point from a larger body of glass. In the case of hand-mades, however, this was almost the last step in the process. There was a little polishing of the cut-off scar and perhaps a brief reheating to round the marble a bit more. But in machine-made marbles, the cutting off was just the beginning of a long journey down semi-circular troughs on revolving rollers or disks that completely obliterated the marks left by the cutting. The same journey rounded the marbles so that practically any machine-made marble is more round that any hand-made marble (For additional information on the history of marble production, the interested reader is referred to: Carskadden ~ al. 1985; Randall 1971; 1979). So, if you find a marble that is very round and has no cutoff marks, you know it is machine-made. Conversely, as a manufacturer, if you have a machine that has semi-circular rollers for manipulating the glass blobs, you will get a scar-free round marble. If you have patent information on the first such machine, you can presume that the application date for that patent roughly coincides with the earliest possible appearance of such marbles. Applying this conclusion to the real world, consider the case of Martin F. Christensen, of Akron, Ohio, who invented a semi-automated machine for producing glass marbles (Pat. 802,495; granted Oct. 24, 1905; applied for Dec. 19, 1902). Mr. Christensen formed his own company, the M. F. Christensen Glass Company, which was the first company to manufacture glass marbles using semi-automated machinery. Whereas the date of 1905 (date of grant of his patent) was recognized as the probable date by which the first production of quantities of machine-made glass marbles occurred, and 1902 (the date of application) is seen as the earliest date by which any such production in even small amounts was probable. While it is certain that some marbles were produced while Mr. Christensen was 162

5 developing his machine, the quantities would have been small and the marbles would not have reached general public use. While some technological changes (some patented and some not patented) occurred over the next two decades, none affected the final products in a way that could be discerned by an archaeologist. It was not until 1926 that John F. Early, working on improvements to earlier machine designs, came up with a new idea that changed the end product in a visible way. Mr. Early's invention involved a cut off mechanism which not only removed the last direct human input from the process, but also promised a uniform blob of material every time. At the same time it added a twisting movement which produced a spiral pattern in the glass. This mechanism was never patented, due to a desire for secrecy. This period was the height of cutthroat competition among marble makers and patent protection meant little in many cases. More than once an inventor developed and used his creation without patent, relying on secrecy rather than legal protection. We learned of this non-patented invention while speaking with Mr. Early's son, who at the same time referred to another device which was used in conjunction with his father's machine. He knew this only as the "Freese patent". Searching the index for this unusual name, we found two consecutive patents, applied for in 1922 and granted in They were a method and apparatus for making "variegated [mixed, multicolored] glass". These were developed by a Mr. Ira H. Freese, of Clarksburg, West Virginia; he originally applied for patent in 1910, but died before it was granted. For whatever reasons, the patent process stopped until 1922, when the application was again filed on his behalf by the executor of his estate. Mr. Early's 1926 invention, when used in combination with the Freese patents for glass melting and mixing, could produce a marble with a spiral pattern of two or more colors. The significance of the Freese patents is that, while they were not originally designed to be used in the manufacture of marbles, they radically changed the world of children's marbles. For the first time, machines could produce a marble with more than two colors. So, from the patent records we know that three or four-colored marbles, quite common by the 1930s and 1940s, were not possible much prior to 1926, which was the time that Mr. Early's invention could have been used with the patented Freese apparatus. As mentioned earlier, there were law suits concerning patent infringement. Two separate suits were brought against different parties by the Akra Agate Company in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In both cases, Akra charged that the defendants had infringed on patents held by Akro. In the second case, Akra also charged the defendants, all of whom were former Akra employees, with conspiracy against Akro as well as patent infringement. Both cases were eventually decided in favor of the defendants. Not only were Akro's charges found to be without basis, but some of Akro's earlier patents were declared void. This was the most significant outcome of the trial -- when the patents were declared void, that freed the machinery design for use by anyone. Since the patent records and illustrations, which were public record, gave full descriptions of these devices, it was not long until several other marble makers were using machinery designs previously reserved 163

6 to Akro. This illustrates the sometimes appropriate wisdom of not patenting certain inventions. In our t ours of marble plants operating in the U. S. today, we have learned of pieces of equipment whose design and operating characteristics are not patented. While these machines and processes are not guarded by patent protection, they are physically guarded by their owners, and in some cases we were not allowed to even see them. Needle ss to say, while we have copies of patent illustrations, and even photos of existing patented equipment, we have neither for these non-patented machi nes. In these cases, we have only the marbles they produce, and can only guess how each lump of glass became a speckled marble. REFERENCES CITED Carskadden, Jeff, Richard Gartley, and Elizabeth Reeb 1985 Marble Making and Playing in Eastern Ohio: The Significance of Ceramic, Stone, and Glass Marbles in Historic Archaeology. Proceedings of the Symposium on Ohio Valley Urban and Historic Archaeology 3:86-96, Louisville, Kentucky. Randa 11, Mark E Early Marbles. Historical Archaeology 5: Marbles as Historic Artifacts. Marble Collectors Society of America, Trumbul I, Connecticut. Randall, Mark E. and Dennis Webb 1987 Greenberg's Guide to Marbles. Gr eenberg Publishing Company, Sykesville, Maryland [In Press I. 164