To Find Out More

A good book about how the U.S. patent system got started is B. W. Bugbee’s Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law (Public Affairs Press, 1967), while other aspects of its history are discussed by David F. Noble in America by Design (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) and Floyd L. Vaughan in The United States Patent System: Legal and Economic Conflicts in American Patent History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1956). The Selden patent case is ably described in William Greenleaf’s Monopoly on Wheels: Henry Ford and the Selden Automobile Patent (Wayne State University Press, 1951). For the Xerox story, see Sol Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man (Little, Brown, 1985).

—O.E.A.