Swanson, 2017

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Paraphrased from the abstract: In the United States Patent Office of the 1850s, scientific men worked as patent examiners. For a period, female clerks were hired to work alongside male clerks. This article examines the controversies surrounding these workers through the lens of manners and deportment.

  • USPO "Commissioner Charles Mason hired Clara Barton, future founder of the American National Red Cross, and other women to work in the same spaces, at the same tasks, for the same salaries, as male clerks."
  • "The patent office at this period was also occupied by another new group of office workers, patent examiners. These workers, all male, were engaged in their own failing experiment: to claim the patent office as a space of science"
  • Quoting:
the [U.S.] patent system had been ... revamped in 1836, when Congress created for the first time a patent office with dedicated employees, including the new position of patent examiner. Examiners became the heart of the patent system. Their job was to scrutinize each application to determine whether an invention was sufficiently new and useful to be worthy of a patent.10
The new office called for a new building, also authorized in 1836. The grandiose Patent Office Building first opened for business in 1840, although it continued to be built in sections until 1867.11 At a time when much of Washington, D.C., remained a raw backwater of muddy streets and clapboard houses, the building was a striking manifestation of federal grandeur, an ornate structure in the classical style, built of Virginia sandstone painted a gleaming white. In 1852, two German visitors found it “a most magnificent, indeed palatial edifice,” more imposing than the White House. The Germans, like other tourists, not only admired the building from without but went inside.12
The Patent Office Building contained what was reportedly the largest room in the United States. This grand hall on the top floor was a display space. It functioned as a national museum, providing a visual tour of the ingenuity of the new nation. In addition to patent models, at various times the items on display included the Declaration of Independence, military memorabilia from the Revolutionary War, and specimens from Western explorations.13 Here Americans learned that the courage of the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary Army, coupled with the resources of a vast continent, could be harnessed by the inventiveness of a democratic people enthusiastic about using patents to build their new nation. This hall made the Patent Office Building a must-visit tourist site for both foreigners and Americans.14 Men and women strolled the hall to view the displays, making this portion of the building a space where the emerging middle class could engage in mixed-gender public leisure. As visitors gazed and were gazed upon, their clothes and deportment as much on display as the models and other exhibits, they enacted class and gender.
The lower floors of the Patent Office Building were devoted to work. Despite the building’s name, after the patent office became part of the Interior Department in 1849 other agencies shared the building, and the patent office workers found themselves perennially short of space.15 In the cluttered rooms, patent models were viewed instrumentally, as part of the evidence proving that an invention was patentable. All the patent office employees were involved in a struggle to classify and organize the inventive output of the public, a struggle that was both intellectual and spatial. To recognize an invention as new, the examiners needed to compare it to previous inventions and knowledge, as represented by earlier patents and other publications, from the United States and abroad. Creating knowledge hierarchies as they divided inventions into classes by subject, the office staff developed systems of drawers and files to allow both employees and the public to access past applications.16 Clerks were in charge of writing each patent by hand, making copies for the inventor and copies for the office, as well as assisting with other correspondence. These tasks, both intellectual and clerical, were made more difficult by the cramped quarters.
By 1853, each examining office was the workspace for one principal examiner and two assistant examiners, and within this room the examiners had to store the models for the classes they worked on, maneuver files and drawings, and meet with inventors and their agents. Examiners and clerks alike worked amidst piles of models and an unceasing flow of paper, as space constraints forced the clerks to work “crowded into the apartments of other officers, whose rooms are too full without them,” while mail was sorted in the hallway and reference books were scattered among the offices, the designated library insufficient to hold the volumes.17
. . . Before the hiring of female clerks by the United States Treasury Department in 1862, there were virtually no women in the [U.S.] civil service.
Charles Mason arrived in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1853 as the newly appointed commissioner of patents. He came from Iowa, where he had a successful legal and political career, serving as chief justice of the territorial supreme court and then of the state supreme court.22 By 1854 he had begun his unprecedented experiment, hiring several female clerks. The new clerks included Barton, whose tenure was the longest of the women clerks, lasting until 1857.23
Barton was also new to Washington, D.C. An experienced schoolteacher, she had recently resigned her job in New Jersey, disappointed when her successful efforts to found a free public school led to the hiring of a man to supervise it rather than Barton herself. She was thirty-two years old and unmarried, and she had supported herself for more than a decade. Although unconventional in her decision to live away from her parents, who remained in her native Massachusetts, Barton relied on and sought to maintain her status as a “lady,” marked not just by her sex but also by her status as an educated, white, native-born woman whose male relatives were landholders and independent businessmen. Her father, always called Captain Barton in recognition of his three years of service in the Indian wars of the Northwest Territory, was a farmer and a town leader.24 As a lady, she had connections. Alexander DeWitt, a member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation and a distant cousin, soon introduced her to Mason, who was evidently much impressed. His initial offer to hire her as a governess for his young daughter was transformed, through DeWitt’s suggestion, into an offer of a clerkship in July 1854. Barton had a formal interview in the patent office and, according to her account, was hired on the spot. “I went before the Commissioner of Patents, and was seated at my desk before removing my hat or coat.” Barton was initially employed as a temporary clerk, paid by the word for copying work, a status and compensation arrangement shared by about twenty male clerks.25 Within a year Mason had hired at least two other women, who may have joined Barton in a former basement storage room as the patent office repurposed the lowest story in a quest for space.26
. . . .
By the time Mason had been commissioner for six months, the office had about fifty employees.52 Six of this number were primary examiners and an additional six were assistant examiners. The Patent Act of 1836 had provided for only one examiner, a job immediately filled by one of the clerks of the former system most knowledgeable about patents, Charles Keller. Congress rapidly authorized a second examiner in 1837, then two assistant examiners. In 1848 it doubled the number of examiners and assistants. Mason’s predecessor had managed to get the numbers increased to six of each. By the time Mason resigned for the last time, in 1857, the numbers had doubled again, to twelve of each, plus another dozen men working in a new job category Mason had created, second assistant examiner.53 Between 1848 and 1857, as the number of primary and assistant examinerships increased from four to twenty-four, scientific men battled to gain these positions and to claim them as a means not only of earning a respectable salary but also of performing science.
. . To establish patent examination as scientific, the scientific men in the office sought to foster the perception, among both the public and other aspiring scientific men, that their work drew on scientific expertise and created scientific knowledge. This task was aided by the hiring practices in the patent office from 1836 into the 1850s. Senator John Ruggles, sponsor of the Patent Act of 1836 that created the examiner role, articulated the notion that “an efficient and just discharge of the duties [of an examiner] … requires extensive scientific attainments.”60 A supporter of the bill to add examinerships in 1848 agreed, suggesting that those “qualified for one of the learned professorships in our institutions of learning” were appropriate candidates.61
Even Keller, the first examiner and a holdover from the previous patent regime, joined the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a short-lived organization that before the AAAS had sought to create a national scientific community. The second examiner hired, Thomas Jones, was well connected to the emerging scientific elite as editor of the prominent Philadelphia-based Journal of the Franklin Institute, a scientific and technical publication, as well as a former professor of natural philosophy and chemistry.62 When Jones left the office his replacement, Thomas Donovan, and the first two assistant examiners, Henry Stone and W. P. N. Fitzgerald, also signaled their interest in participating in the scientific community by joining the National Institute. In 1842 Donovan was replaced by Charles Grafton Page. Page had all the indicia of the scientific man—a medical degree, an extensive publication record, and his own natural history collection. He was a correspondent of Joseph Henry and became a prominent member of the AAAS after it formed. Page hoped that his new job would further cement his scientific position.63
The expansion of examinerships in 1848 brought a further influx of scientific men. Henry Renwick, a college graduate with postgraduate training in engineering, and Leonard Gale, a former chemistry professor who also became prominent in the AAAS, became primary examiners. The new assistants included Titian Peale, a well-known naturalist who would become a principal examiner by 1853 and remained in the patent office through the 1860s; Samuel Cooper, another National Institute member; and Jonathan Lane. Lane, like Page and Peale, was closely associated with Henry and the nascent scientific community and later a charter member of the Philosophical Society of Washington and a member of the National Academy. He had worked at Bache’s Coast Survey, another government office claimed as a site of science. He evidently decided to move to the patent office because of the opportunity to work with Page, whom he considered “a scientific man of high order.”64
. . . Commissioner Mason, though a political appointee, had graduated at the top of his class from West Point, which provided a technical education. Like his predecessor as commissioner, Thomas Ewbank, he was sufficiently interested in science to join the AAAS.69 He disagreed with McClelland not only with respect to the propriety of female clerks but also on the requisite expertise of examiners, an issue that contributed to his ongoing feud with the secretary. As scientific men worked side by side, for equal pay, with nonscientific men as examiners, their claims to be performing scientific work were undermined.
. . . Professionalization of science involved separating the true “scientific man,” with his appropriate credentials and conduct, from the broader group of persons who sought patents. Individuals of this sort were variously termed the “scientific mechanic” or the “mechanically minded man.”72 The men of the “scientific desks,” selected for their “attainments,” were distinguished in education and socioeconomic status from the mass of inventors in ways that would have been apparent as inventors stepped into the patent offices. In the cramped offices, inventors rubbed elbows with examiners who both showed a command of scientific knowledge inaccessible to most Americans (in part because scientific publications were often written in French or German) and embodied different ways of speech, dress, and behavior.73 Scientific men, on average, were better educated than inventors. They were more likely to be from urban centers and to be children of men who earned their living by mental, rather than manual, labor. In these ways, scientific men were separated by birth and experience from the majority of Americans, who lived in rural areas and were engaged in agricultural pursuits. The family backgrounds of inventors, on the other hand, were much closer to those of the country at large; a much smaller percentage were from professional, educated families.74 The differences that scientific men were painstakingly creating and maintaining as part of the professionalization of American science and enacting at the “scientific desks” made the patent office a place where inventors might feel unable to fit within the social skin, assigned an inferior rank in a hierarchy based on expertise that prized disembodied over embodied knowledge. In their embodiment of class, education, and urbanity, the scientific men could make the office space unwelcoming to the inventor and, worse yet, demonstrate that their elite knowledge trumped the inventor’s expertise with regard to his own invention by denying his application.
More than the discomfort of inventors was at stake. Rejections were bad for patent agents, whose business it was to obtain patents for inventors. Scientific American, serving its patent agency owners, stated with increasing stridency that the patent office should not be a site of the enactment of science. Performing science, it argued, was incompatible with performing technology, and the solution was the expulsion of scientific men, in favor of “practical” men or “thorough bred mechanics.”75
. . . describing his job for Congress and the public in 1852, [Gale] emphasized his mental labor and use of the scientific method to generate knowledge, stating that he had read “more than a hundred foreign patents to decide a single application, and in other cases … continue[d a] series of experiments for several weeks in succession to decide a single point.”
. . . Page, Langdon, and other examiners struggled unsuccessfully to use the patent office as a platform from which to build and maintain a scientific reputation. Page, perhaps the preeminent scientific man in the examining corps, saw his reputation slip during his years in the patent system. Langdon, the promising former professor, after leaving the office in 1856, also left the scientific community, working briefly as a patent agent and then becoming an Episcopalian priest.79
. . . [P]olitical and merit-based attacks had an impact [on] the office. The secretary of interior was only too happy to satisfy the clamor of Scientific American to get rid of scientific men while pursuing his own goal of using examiner appointments for political patronage. After President James Buchanan’s election and the departure of Mason in 1857, not only did Barton leave; nearly half of the patent examiners were replaced and by 1858 the “conclave of scientific talent” no longer existed. Mason’s successor as commissioner, Joseph Holt, described the ideal examiner in terms that emphasized the equivalence of examiner and inventor, rather than the examiner’s elite qualifications. According to Holt, examiners no longer “receive[d] the inventor as a stranger” but “welcome[d] the inventor as a friend and patron.”80
  • There are vast sources on Clara Barton. And these sources on the early USPO are cited: :See Kenneth W. Dobyns, The Patent Office Pony: A History of the Early Patent Office (1997; Boston: Docent, 2016) (hereafter cited as Dobyns, Patent Office Pony), pp. 191–192; Stacy V. Jones, The Patent Office (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 15; Harry Kursh, Inside the U.S. Patent Office: The Story of the Men, the Laws, and the Procedures of the American Patent System (New York: Norton, 1959), pp. 31–32; and Leila Sellers, “Commissioner Mason and Clara Barton,” Journal of the Patent Office Society, 1940, 22:803–827 (hereafter cited as Sellers, “Commissioner Mason and Clara Barton”)." . . . and . . . Dobyns, Patent Office Pony, p. 137 (authorization of new building). For the architecture of the Patent Office Building and its piecemeal construction between 1840 and 1867 see Douglas E. Evelyn, “Exhibiting America: The Patent Office as Cultural Artifact,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 1989, 3:24–37, esp. p. 26; Levin H. Campbell, The Patent System of the United States: A History (Washington, D.C., 1891), pp. 39, 42–46; Dobyns, Patent Office Pony, pp. 137–139, 152; and “Homes of the Patent Office,” J. Patent Office Soc., 1936, 18:123–144, esp. pp. 130–134. Note that the July 1936 issue of the Journal of the Patent Office Society, devoted to the history of the patent system, was republished as P. J. Federico, ed., Outline of the History of the United States Patent Office (Washington, D.C.: Patent Office Society, 1936). . . .No African Americans are known to have been employed as white-collar workers in the patent office before the Civil War, but a few free men of color did succeed in obtaining patents (see sources in article).
. . . This article focuses on Barton because her papers have been preserved. I have found little information about the other women in the office in the 1850s
. . . My account of Barton’s early days in Washington and of her hiring is derived from a review of her papers from 1854 to 1857 in the Clara Barton Papers, 1805–1968 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., microfilm collection), which are not conclusive on the exact details of her patent office employment. I have supplemented this review with the following secondary sources, which are not consistent on all points and rely in part on Barton’s statements made decades later: Sellers, “Commissioner Mason and Clara Barton”; Pryor, Clara Barton, pp. 55–57; Williams, Clara Barton, pp. 54–55; and Oates, Woman of Valor, pp. 11–12. For example, although some biographers report Barton’s hiring as a $1,400/year clerk (e.g., Pryor, Clara Barton, p. 56), a review of patent office payrolls has suggested that she was first hired on a per-word basis (Sellers, “Commissioner Mason and Clara Barton,” p. 814). While Sellers indicates that Barton worked in the basement of the Patent Office Building with other female copyists (ibid., pp. 813, 816), an official civil service history states that a Mrs. Thompson and a Mrs. Cook were also temporary clerks in 1854 but that they worked from home: United States Civil Service Commission, Biography of an Ideal: A History of the Federal Civil Service, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 161. For the basement layout see “History and Description of the U.S. Patent Office Buildings,” Scientific American, 1 Feb. 1851, 6:156.
. . . Epler, Life of Clara Barton (cit. n. 4), p. 25; and Barton, Life of Clara Barton (cit. n. 4), Vol. 1, p. 90. For the limited support in patent office records for this story see Sellers, “Commissioner Mason and Clara Barton,” pp. 820–822. For an example of Barton’s revisionist history regarding her employment in the patent office see ibid., pp. 826–827.
. . . Fales was second assistant examiner in 1859 (Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States, on the Thirtieth September, 1859 [Washington, D.C., 1859], p. 88) and principal examiner by 1869 (Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of theUnited States, on the Thirtieth September, 1869 [Washington, D.C., 1870], p. 161). For the friendship among Fales, his wife, Almira, and Barton see Pryor, Clara Barton, p. 58. Almira Fales was the first woman to engage in army relief work: ibid., p. 82.
. . . For the postwar experience of female patent office clerks see “Washington,” New York Times, 13 May 1869 (fifty-three female clerks were authorized to begin on 1 July 1869); and Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service, pp. 72–73. . . “Rascally Oppression of Women in the Patent Office,” Daily Evening Bulletin(San Francisco), 9 Mar. 1871.
For the 1837–1857 increases see “Improvements in the Patent Office,” Sci. Amer., 30 July 1853, 8:365; Post, “ ‘Liberalizers’ versus ‘Scientific Men,’ ” pp. 29, 47; and Sellers, “Commissioner Mason and Clara Barton,” pp. 807, 809.
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