EXAMPLES FROM THE GLASS MARBLE INDUSTRY

THE USE OF PATENT RECORDS IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH:
EXAMPLES FROM THE GLASS MARBLE INDUSTRY
Mark E. Randall
Dallas, Texas
ABSTRACT
Various publications of the u. s. Patent Office can be of
significant value
to
researchers
seeking "horizon markers"
delineating change in technology that manifest themselves in
artifacts. These sources are discussed and examples from research
on children's toy marbles are used as illustrations.
GUIDES TO PATENT RECORDS
There are three United States Patent Office publications that can be of
great help to researchers in physical artifacts. These publications should be
available in any United States Patent Depository.
Although the term "U. s.
Patent Depository" sounds ominous, it simply designates public libraries where
patent records are available for reference.
There are 58 Patent Depository
libraries in the United States, located in major cities and at universities.
The Patent-related publications are:
1) the Index of Patents; 2) the
Official Gazette; and 3) the Specifications and Drawings.
The information
with which you begin dictates which source to consult first.
Index of Patents.
The Index is ordered by year, consists of one volume per
year, and has been published since at least 1790.
Although the name of this
source has changed through the years, and it has consistently been called the
Index since 1913. Prior to that, the index of patents was included in volumes
titled the U. s. Patent Office Annual Report, Executive Documents, Reports of
Committees, etc., but all of these are generally filed together.
The Index contains an alphabetical list of patentees for that period, a
few words of description of the invention, the patent number, and the date of
the patent grant. Also in the Index is an alphabetical listing of patents by
subject, with the same information as above.
This subject index, while it sounds like a cure-all for researchers, has
its limitations.
Keep in mind that it was probably compiled by a clerk who
was looking at a list of patent titles.
Many titles are worded very
ambiguously for various reasons, so that many times it was hard to determine
the category into which a particular invention would fall. For instance, in a
recent research project, it was learned that many machines designed to make
glass marbles were not listed under either "glass" or "marbles".
Official Gazette.
The Official Gazette is ordered by year, one volume per
month.
Within each month it is ordered by patent number, and gives the
inventor's name, a description up to about a half page, and an illustration of
the invention. Since patent numbers are issued sequentially when gcanted, the
Gazette is also in chronological order.
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An important point to remember when dealing with patent records is that
there are two dates associated with each patent:
the earlier is the date of
application, and the latter the date of grant.
At different times in the
history of the Patent Office, the s pan between the date an inventor applied
for a patent and the d a te when it was finally granted varied from several
months to many years.
For historical researchers, the significance of this
difference in dates should be obvious.
The device or design was fully
"invented" at the time of the application, even if it had not yet been granted
a patent.
In practice, the device could have been in general use for quite
some time before the date of patent.
How many times have you seen "Patent
Pending" on something you use? The date of application appears with the other
information about the patent in both the Gazette and the Specifications and
Drawings.
Specifications and Drawings.
Published in chronological order and appearing
in two volumes per year, individual Specifications are ordered by patent
number, as are the complete text of the grantee's description, claims, and
illustrations.
The "claims" are the most significant item here, since they
describe what this process or machine does or produces.
Other, similar
patents are referred to at times in the Specifications and Drawings, thereby
furnishing more leads for researchers.
PATENTS AND TRADE SECRETS:
RESEARCHING MARBLE PRODUCTION
To illustrate the problems and prospects of the use of patent records in
historical archaeology and related disciplines, let us briefly examine the
experiences of my co-author, Mr. Dennis Webb, while conducting research for
our forthcoming book on children's toy marbles (Randall and Webb 1987). While
interviewing people who worked in that industry in the 1940s and 1950s, he
learned the names of various individuals who developed the machines that made
glass marbles from the 1920s-1940s.
None of the informants knew specifics about any patents, although they
knew that certain machines and processes had been patented and that others had
not.
It was surprising to us that they knew as much as they did about which
machines had been patented.
It turned out that this distinction was quite
significant in the history of the U. s. marble industry and involved not only
civil suits charging patent infringement, but at least one case of attempted
industrial espionage that ended in arrest and conviction.
Having obtained several persons' names, we consulted the Index for the
period concerned.
Beginning with the earliest possible year of activity for
the individuals involved, which we believed to be about 1920, we simply
searched the alphabetical index for references to the named individuals. When
any was found, the patent number was noted.
The next step was to check the Gazette for those patent numbers.
Since
several of these individuals were involved in other business endeavors, not
all of their patents were of interest to us, and it is not always possible to
determine such facts from the title in the Index.
The Gazette, however,
furnished enough information to indicate which patents were of interest. When
further detail was needed, we consulted the Specifications and Drawings.
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The "claims" mentioned above are sometimes labeled as such in the body of
the patents, and sometimes are not, but in any case the claims are recognized
as a significant legal part of the patent.
For a patent to be valid, the
applicant must not only describe the physical appearance and makeup of the
device, but must also make his "claims". That is, what does this thing do
that is different from any prior patented device or process, and which makes
it deserving of a patent?
The claims, or description of
processes, often describe the manipulation
of raw material into a finished product.
In our case, the processes most often
carried glass from a raw molten state to a
finished sphere, commonly called a marble
(Figure 1).
I t is interesting to note
that many of the patents describing
machines that were to be used to produce
marbles avoided the term "marbles". They
instead used terms like "machine for
rolling balls", or "machine for forming
spherical bodies" (Figure 2). Perhaps the
applicants had learned that it was safest
to be as non-specific as possible for
their own protection, and to allow
application of the machine to other uses
as well.
FIGURE 1.
G. J. COOK
PATENT 1,226,313
MARBLE MACHINE
(SJHPLlrIED lllUSTRATHJH>
PATENTED HAY 1'5, 1917
FIGURE 2.
H. M. JENKINS
<APPLICATIOtt rtLED HAR.
PATENT L488,817
MACHINE FOR FORMING SPHERICAL BODIES
<SIMPLIFIED ILLUSlRATION)
PATENTED APRIL 1, 1924
<APPLICATION FILED NOV. 11, 1922)
161
I~
1917>
Sometimes a patent would be issued to more than one person, or "assigned"
to another person or company.
Such instances furnished new leads to follow,
and in connection with other interviews, we eventually extended our patent
searches back into the late 1890s.
Comparing the known descriptions of
hand-made marble processing with the technology described in these earliest
patents, we could see that we had reached the earliest marble making
machinery.
While the development of a typology as a goal went out of vogue decades
ago, it is very difficult to arrive at a comprehensive description of a body
of similar artifacts without resorting to a typology scheme of some sort.
Granting that necessity in historical research, we can discover and
specifically date certain horizon markers in marbles, from the relevant patent
records.
For instance, any marble collector knows that hand-made marbles display
pontil marks, which are the scars left when the glass blob was cut off from
the mother body of glass.
The absence of such scars defines a machine-made
marble. The obvious conclusion might be that machine-made marbles are not cut
off.
But this is not the case.
The difference lies in the treatment of the
marble after the cutting.
Both hand-made and machine-made marbles are cut off at one point from a
larger body of glass. In the case of hand-mades, however, this was almost the
last step in the process.
There was a little polishing of the cut-off scar
and perhaps a brief reheating to round the marble a bit more.
But in
machine-made marbles, the cutting off was just the beginning of a long journey
down semi-circular troughs on revolving rollers or disks that completely
obliterated the marks left by the cutting.
The same journey rounded the
marbles so that practically any machine-made marble is more round that any
hand-made marble (For additional information on the history of marble
production, the interested reader is referred to:
Carskadden ~ al. 1985;
Randall 1971; 1979).
So, if you find a marble that is very round and has no cutoff marks, you
know it is machine-made. Conversely, as a manufacturer, if you have a machine
that has semi-circular rollers for manipulating the glass blobs, you will get
a scar-free round marble.
If you have patent information on the first such
machine, you can presume that the application date for that patent roughly
coincides with the earliest possible appearance of such marbles.
Applying this conclusion to the real world, consider the case of Martin
F. Christensen, of Akron, Ohio, who invented a semi-automated machine for
producing glass marbles (Pat. 802,495; granted Oct. 24, 1905; applied for Dec.
19, 1902).
Mr. Christensen formed his own company, the M. F. Christensen
Glass Company, which was the first company to manufacture glass marbles using
semi-automated machinery.
Whereas the date of 1905 (date of grant of his patent) was recognized as
the probable date by which the first production of quantities of machine-made
glass marbles occurred, and 1902 (the date of application) is seen as the
earliest date by which any such production in even small amounts was probable.
While it is certain that some marbles were produced while Mr. Christensen was
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developing his machine, the quantities would have been small and the marbles
would not have reached general public use.
While some technological changes (some patented and some not patented)
occurred over the next two decades, none affected the final products in a way
that could be discerned by an archaeologist.
It was not until 1926 that John
F. Early, working on improvements to earlier machine designs, came up with a
new idea that changed the end product in a visible way.
Mr. Early's invention involved a cut off mechanism which not only removed
the last direct human input from the process, but also promised a uniform blob
of material every time.
At the same time it added a twisting movement which
produced a spiral pattern in the glass.
This mechanism was never patented,
due to a desire for secrecy.
This period was the height of cutthroat
competition among marble makers and patent protection meant little in many
cases.
More than once an inventor developed and used his creation without
patent, relying on secrecy rather than legal protection.
We learned of this non-patented invention while speaking with Mr. Early's
son, who at the same time referred to another device which was used in
conjunction with his father's machine.
He knew this only as the "Freese
patent". Searching the index for this unusual name, we found two consecutive
patents, applied for in 1922 and granted in 1925.
They were a method and
apparatus for making "variegated [mixed, multicolored] glass".
These were
developed by a Mr. Ira H. Freese, of Clarksburg, West Virginia; he originally
applied for patent in 1910, but died before it was granted.
For whatever
reasons, the patent process stopped until 1922, when the application was again
filed on his behalf by the executor of his estate.
Mr. Early's 1926 invention, when used in combination with the Freese
patents for glass melting and mixing, could produce a marble with a spiral
pattern of two or more colors.
The significance of the Freese patents is
that, while they were not originally designed to be used in the manufacture of
marbles, they radically changed the world of children's marbles.
For the
first time, machines could produce a marble with more than two colors.
So,
from the patent records we know that three or four-colored marbles, quite
common by the 1930s and 1940s, were not possible much prior to 1926, which was
the time that Mr. Early's invention could have been used with the patented
Freese apparatus.
As mentioned earlier, there were law suits concerning patent
infringement.
Two separate suits were brought against different parties by
the Akra Agate Company in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In both cases, Akra
charged that the defendants had infringed on patents held by Akro.
In the
second case, Akra also charged the defendants, all of whom were former Akra
employees, with conspiracy against Akro as well as patent infringement.
Both cases were eventually decided in favor of the defendants. Not only
were Akro's charges found to be without basis, but some of Akro's earlier
patents were declared void.
This was the most significant outcome of the
trial -- when the patents were declared void, that freed the machinery design
for use by anyone.
Since the patent records and illustrations, which were
public record, gave full descriptions of these devices, it was not long until
several other marble makers were using machinery designs previously reserved
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to Akro.
This illustrates the sometimes appropriate wisdom of not patenting
certain inventions.
In our t our s o f marble pl a nts operating in the U. S. today, we have
learned of pieces of equipment whose de sign and operating characteristics are
not patented.
While these machines and processes are not guarded by patent
protection, they are physically guarded by their owners, and in some cases we
were not allowed to even see them.
Needl e ss to say, while we have copies of
patent illustrations, and even photos of e x isting patented equipment, we have
neither for these non-patented machi nes.
In these cases, we have only the
marbles they produc e , and can only guess how each lump of glass became a
speckled marble.
REFERENCES CITED
Carskadden, Jeff, Richard Gartley, and Elizabeth Reeb
1985
Marble Making and Playing in Eastern Ohio: The Significance of Ceramic, Stone,
and Glass Marbles in Historic Archaeology. Proceedings of the Symposium on Ohio
Valley Urban and Historic Archaeology 3:86-96, Louisville , Kentucky.
Randa 11, Mark E.
1971
Early Marbles.
1979
Historical Archaeology 5:102-105.
Marbles as Historic Artifacts.
Connecticut.
Randall, Mark E. and Dennis Webb
1987
Greenberg's Guide to Marbles.
[In Press I.
Marble Collectors Society of America, Trumbul I,
Gr eenberg Publishing Company, Sykesville, Maryland
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