Patents are the grease of American business greatness.

During my doctoral work, I had several opportunities to fly with professors and lab mates to the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The facility is massive, and the energy of its X-rays was enormous. An experiment that would have taken 6-8 hours to run in Madison could be completed in 10 seconds at Brookhaven or a similar facility. One of my professors and I took the night shift, as the beam technically is available 24 hours a day, and slots are in great demand. So labs work around the clock when they are given time on the machine. Several times a day, the beam goes down as the energy of the circulating electrons is too low. They add electrons, speed them up with powerful magnets, and then announce that the facility is back in business. During one of these breaks in the wee hours of the morning, I wandered around to see what they had in the huge building. In one lonely room, I saw an old Van der Graaf generator that produced electrons, which were added to the beam. The device was small, sat on an old wooden table, and looked pretty ancient. I then realized that the entire massive facility was dependent on this little unit (and maybe others like it) to provide the electrons we all needed. In some ways, patents are like the generator: they are the small thing on which the entire edifice of modern business depends.

Patents are as American as apple pie, baseball, and Tomahawk missiles. None other than Thomas Jefferson helped author the early patent laws of the country. Patents themselves give no positive benefit; rather, they allow the holder to prevent others from either manufacturing or selling the patented item for the duration of the patent (generally 20 years). The U.S. Patent Office is overwhelmed with applications. Someone........

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