The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. It lets one person invent something and another one own the patent. Inventors can sell patents. Survivors can inherit them.
Employers can own their employees' inventions.
Then, too, one person often files a patent when others have provided key ideas. An event from 1857 puts all that in a particularly ugly perspective. That year, a plantation owner named Oscar Stewart wrote the secretary of the interior. His slave, Ned, had invented a new, and very effective, cotton scraper. Stewart wanted to patent it.