In the early morning of December 15, 1836, an improbable and yet entirely foreseeable fire broke out in one of the most important record keeping centers in the country: the U.S. Patent Office. A cornerstone of the capitalist economic system, the granting and tracking of patents was and continues to be one of the most important functions of our civil government. The very first American patent, in an indication of just how high a stature these documents were meant to hold in the new nation, was signed by President George Washington himself, and was granted to one Samuel Hopkins for a new process for making Pot Ash. This was the first of nearly ten thousand patents granted to ingenious American inventors between the years 1790 and 1836, when almost all were lost to fire.
The U.S. patent office was housed at the time in a building named Blodgett’s Hotel, which had never actually been a hotel, and also housed the headquarters of the U.S. Postal Service and the Fire Department. Earlier that year, the patent process had been overhauled by Congress, who had installed a new commissioner of the department and granted him the authority and funds to build a new, specifically fireproof home for these immensely important documents. Fire was of real concern to Congress, who had ensured that the documents were stored near a firehouse; one sat just down the street from Blodgett’s Hotel in case the building should spark to flame. And while their plan for responding to a fire was well thought out, it would seem they should have focused more on prevention.
The fire began in the basement of Blodgett’s Hotel. This was where the firewood used to heat the building was housed. Across the room sat the hot ashes cleaned out daily from the fireplaces. In an event that could have been predicted even by men lacking the gift of clairvoyance, the hot ashes somehow came into contact with the vast stores of firewood, and within a reported twenty minutes the lower floors of the building were fully ablaze. These also happened to be the floors where the nearly ten thousand patent documents and seven thousand patent models were stored. Alarms blared and men responded to the catastrophe, but the specially funded firehouse down the street lacked professional firefighters and the volunteers found themselves unable to use the equipment within due to lack of training and its derelict state. The desperate bucket brigade they formed was far too little and much too late to prevent disastrous damage to the documents inside Blodgett’s Hotel.
The first thought was arson. There had been an ongoing postal scandal and it was presumed that the fire had been set intentionally by postal employees to destroy evidence. When it was discovered that these very same employees had saved every postal document in the building, that theory was readily discarded. Beyond that, it doesn’t take a man with great imagination to arrive at the conclusion that the commingling of firewood and hot ashes could result in accidental combustion. Ultimately, this became just one of a number of major fires to strike the patent office, including one that destroyed numerousrous documents in the supposedly fireproof successor to Blodgett’s Hotel. The patents that were lost in 1836 are now known as the X-patents, owing to the lack of numbering in the early patent system. While attempts were made to gather the inventors’ copies of the destroyed patents, less than a third of the total were recovered and well over seven thousand of the records of our nation’s earliest inventions are lost forever to the ages.