Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 24.pdf/378

 The Proposed Patent Law Amendments your future business at a profit as uni versally high quality, and it only takes a few cases that are spread abroad by your competitors as to the improper working of an article to have a very serious effect upon your business." V When a man invents and patents something, it generally requires more inventive ability to build up a market for it than it does to make the inven tion. The experience of all the ages and the ingenuity of the most advanced salesmanship is available to the man who has anything to sell. But when a patented article is to be marketed, some thing essentially new and unfamiliar, which the patent owner can control only during the seventeen years that the patent endures, all the resources of past experi ence and advanced salesmanship are together none too adequate to accom plish this purpose. "It takes fully seventeen years," says a leading inventor, "to develop a lead ing invention. I am talking now about the typesetting industry, the linotype, the typewriter and the typewriter add ing machine industry." With the neces sity of reaping his reward before the statutory period of the patent has elapsed, the patent owner has the addi tional burden and expense of "educating the manufacturer up to the manufac ture of any new article, and educating the public to use any new process or to use any new machines." "Thomas Edison told me about nine months ago," declared a leading au thority in scientific salesmanship, "that he thought it was time in this country that the same brains and genius must be applied to selling and distribution that have been applied to invention." In the opinion of this expert, "the mere invention of merchandise is almost a

343

minor consideration when put up against the selling and marketing of merchan dise. There are thousands of inven tions in this country which are very valuable indeed, but which can never be commercial possibilities, or are not now commercial possibilities because of the selling problems involved. There are big and serious selling problems in volved in merchandise, especially pat ented merchandise. If you are selling shoes, there is a ready and accepted market for shoes before you manufac ture, but when you take a patented article, think what you are up against! You have got to persuade the other man whom you hope to sell that this is a good thing, something that he has never used before. It may be a revolu tion of his habits, or it may be a revolu tion of something else, and you have got to overcome that resistance." The initial expense involved in the outright purchase of a novel and untried patented article has always presented an exceedingly serious obstacle to its introduction. To avoid this obstacle and to relieve this initial expense, vari ous plans have been devised, primarily for the benefit of the user, under which the recompense that the patent owner receives in consideration of giving to the customer the right to use the pat ented article depends entirely on the amount of benefit which the customer derives from exercising this right of use. "Suppose," says one of the witnesses before the House Committee on Patents, "a machine is invented for which a man ufacturer can not afford to pay an ade quate price outright, but the inventor lets him use it and agrees that he shall pay the inventor so many cents per hundred articles manufactured on it. That is no burden to the manufacturer, and the inventor, in the long run, has his return, and if the machine is success