The Newtown bee., 1896-07-31

When we are told that nearly G00, U0o
 patents have been issued by the United
 States since ls3G We wonder what there.
 is left uninvented. 1t seems as though
 every possible field has been thorough . y worked; yet every year nearly ffty
 thousand new applications are filed in
 the Patent Office, and half of these ma
 ture into patents. One-haIf of the pat
 enCs granted by the Government have
 been issued within the past fifteen years,
 and the Goddess of Invention still
 numbers her devoted followers by the ] legion.
 The publication of an important
 scientific discovery, the passage of all act of Congress requiring street cars to employ lenders, >or steam cars to use automatic brakes or safety coupling de- vices, or a sudden fad of fashion, will
 flood the Patent Office with hundreds of applications by Yankee geniuses who are seeking sudden wealth.
 4 few examples of this furor may be 1 given :--Somc thirteen or fourteen years ago the country was full of rinks for l roller skating. The young people went wild in their zeal for this newly dis 1 covered amusement. Kinks sprang uD i like mushrooms in every city and large town in the country. Improvements l were made in roller skates and applied lions for patents poured into the office in delnge. The examiner who had 1 charge of "Games and Toys, as one of many classes, had to set one-third of his examining force at work onroller skates, and to get the use of an extra room to hold the drawings and flies. After few months of activity the craze died out and the applications suddenly dropped off. Now all this is ancient history and roller skating is Host art"
 A few years later on account of the great number of railroad accidents in which the car stoves set fire to the wrecked cars and burned to death un- fortunate victims who might otherwise have been saved, the New York Iegis- lature passed an act requiring all cars, after certain date, to be provided with j heating means other than open stoves. The inventors responded right Loyalty l and rushed to the Patent Office with all sorts of heaters, using hot air, hot water, steam and chemicals-
 Five years ago so many thousand pat ents had been granted for bicycles, that it seemed as though ingenuity could produce no further Improvement. Then the pneumatic tire was introduced and a new field was opened. At the present time this is the most active line in the whole realm of invention, and the di- vision of the Patent Office: which han lies bicycles and attachments is almost . swamped with work, reporting each < week from thousand to twelve hundred applications awaiting action. !"
 Some time ago Mir Maxim published : n one of our leading magazines an account of the results he has obtained in experimenting with his air ship, and at tbont the same time the daily press pub ished glowing accounts of what Prof Langley, of the Smithsonian Institute lad done or could do in the same line. f This was enough to fire the imagina- ( ions of scores of inventors, and the t. leuaI result followed. Uo
 The most active field, after bicycles, ri t present is probably the horseless o carriage. The experimenting in France, ls nd the offers of magnificent cash prizes tl y leading Chicago paper and a lead u ng New York magazine, have created 8 Ii cry great activity among professional nventors, and it looks as if between the pneumatic and the horseless carriage, u