Word: patent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Americans are an inventive people, a fact that is both the pride and despair of the U.S. Patent Office, the hard-pressed clearinghouse for some 85,000 new patent applications each year. Last week the office announced that it will hike its fees to applicants (from $60 to $125, plus a new $50 maintenance fee) so that it can better afford to improve and automate its service. And it needs improving...
Before granting a new patent, 1,000 examiners now have to dig laboriously through more than 10 million U.S. and foreign patents that fill the agency's grey granite building in Washington...
...system has become so complex and overburdened that the backlog of applications has risen to 200,000, and the average patent now takes at least 3½ years to struggle through the maze...
This week the Senate is expected to confirm the newly appointed commissioner of patents, the 39th since the days when Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson personally handled the 200 applications made by Americans each year. He is Edward J. Brenner, 40, a reserved, rugged patent attorney and engineer for Esso, who will need all his own inventiveness to keep from foundering in a morass of words, charts and pictures...
...Rube Goldbergs. In the patent field, the day of an Eli Whitney, a Cyrus McCormick-or even a Rube Goldberg at work alone in a basement workshop-is largely over. Today, big corporations and the Government account for 70% of all patents issued...