Edgefield advertiser. [volume] (Edgefield, S.C.) 1836-current, 1893-05-18
PRIZES ON PATENTS.
How to Get $500 Dollars
for Nothing.
The Winner Has Clear Gift of
a Small Fortune, and the Losers
Have Patents that may Bring
Them in Still more.

Would you like to make twenty-five
hundred dollars? If you would, read
carefully what follows and you may
see way to do it.
The Press CLANS Company deyotes
much attention to patents. 1t has
handled thousands of applications for
inventions, but it would like to handle
thousands more. There is plenty OF
inventive talent at large in this coun
try, needing nothing but encourage
ment to produce pratical results. That
encouragement the Press Claims
Company proposes to give.
NOT so HARD AS 1T SEEMS.
A patent strikes most people as an
appallingly formidable thing. The idea
is that an inventor must be a natural
genius, like Edison or Bell; that he
must devote years to delving in
complicated mechanical problems and
that he must spend a fortune on
delicate experiments before he can
get a new device to patentable de-
gree of perfection. This delusion the
company desires to dispel. 1t desires to
get into the head, of the public clear
comprehension of the fact that it is
not the great, complex, and expensive
inventions that bring the best returns
to their authors, but the little, simple,
and cheap ones-the things that seem
so absurdly trivial that the average
citizen would feel somewhat ashamed
of bringing them to the attention of
'the Patent Office.
Edison says that the profits he has
received from the patents on all his
marvellous inventions have not been
sufficient to pay the cost of his ex-
periments But the man who conceived
the idea of fastening bit OF rubber
corBto child,s ball, so that it would
come back to the hand when thrown
made a fortune out of his scheme. The
modern sewing machine is a miracle
of ingenuity-the product of the toll
of hundreds of busy brains through
hundred and fifty years, but the whole
brilliant result rests upon the simple
device of putting the eye of the needle
at the point instead of at the other end.
THE LITTLE THINGS THE MOST vALU-
ABLE,
Comparatively rew people regard
themselves as inventors, but almost
everybody has been struck, at one
time or another, with ideas that seemed
calculated to,reduce some of the little
frictions of life. Usually such are ideas
dismissed without further thought.
"Why don't the railroad company
make its car windows so that they can
be slid up and down without breaking
the passengers backs?" eXclaims the
traveller. "If were running the road
would make them in such way"
what was the man that made this
saucepan thinking Off" grumbles the
cook. Gle never had to work over a
stove, or he would have known how it
ought to have been fixed"
"Hang such collar button" growls
the man who is late for breakfast-HIf /
were in the business I'd make buttons
that wouldn't slip out, or break off, or
gouge out the back of my neck"
And then the various sufferers for
get about their grievancet and begin
to think of something else. If they
would sit down at the next convenient
opportunity, put their ideas about car
windows, saucepana,a and collar buttons
into practical shape, and then apply
for patents, they might find themselves
as independently wealthy as the man.,
who invented the iron umbrella ring
or the one who patented the fifteen
puzzle.
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