NOTES OF A PATENT ATTORNEY

It was one of those bleak winter days when Nature’s howling winds and blizzards have shut everything down - the growth of grass - the migration of beasts - the creativity of the human spirit.  I sat restless in my Connecticut office, half way up General Business, Inc.’s Corporate Tower, no patents to file, nothing to do with myself.  Like every year, I’d circulated memos to Corporate technical people saying for gosh sakes invent something to help me fill this slow time.  Like every year, they were hibernating, and sent me nothing.  Outside, it was already getting dark.  I was tempted to go home early, get out my telescope, the mirror of which I had ground myself, and see if a spell of stargazing couldn’t improve my mood.  But then I looked out at the smothering gray clouds hanging over the world like the roof of a tomb, and knew that idea was a washout.

What I should have done to get through the null winter months was grind another, bigger mirror and build a better telescope.  Idiot, I told myself.  You haven’t even acquired the necessary materials.

Ms. Lee came in and apologized for interrupting my important meditations. “Some very late mail has just arrived.  I thought you would like to see it.”

My well-beloved secretary is of Chinese extraction, but she is not inscrutable.  Clearly, something had pleased her.  She beamed down at me as she plunked a thin bundle of papers into my in-tray, telling me, as though a miracle had just happened, “An invention disclosure has come in.  It is from someone called Kyle McAilsh, of Montague Plating.  I’ve put it on top.”  Then she practically danced out of the office.

Not expecting much, I picked up the disclosure.  Kyle McAilsh.  Someone I’d never heard of.   Montague Plating.  In the four or five years since they had become a wholly owned subsidiary of ours (acquired to supplement GBI’s electroplating capacity) I’d heard nothing from them.   Hadn’t expected to.  Electroplating is too old a technology to generate interesting business for a Patent Attorney.  Probably I’d get no more out of this than a few minutes’ unproductive eyestrain to round out an unproductive day.

I glanced through the summary on the first page of the disclosure, and, although I tried, could no longer hold on to my depression.  Kyle McAilsh proposed, with a new technology of his own devising, to make the whole art of electroplating obsolete.  If his invention was real, it would be one of those break-throughs that fall on a patent lawyer’s desk only once or twice in his working life.  This disclosure offered me a chance to write broad patent claims of such beauty that they would be the envy of my peers.  It could also generate a whole cascade of dependent inventions, enough to keep my Department busy all winter long.  Things electroplated marched before my eyes - can openers and a host of other domestic gadgets - car bumpers - little gold-plated goodies waiting to be assembled into computers and telephones.  As well as the basic process patents, there would be product patents galore.  More work than we could handle this fiscal year, and maybe for years to come.