Benjamin Lawless retired as an assistant director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in 1981 and is now a consultant on exhibition design, author, and a film maker. He has written numerous articles for Smithsonian Magazine, Air and Space, Invention & Technology and Boating, and collaborated as writer and stylist on 20 films for which he has numerous awards, including an Emmy for Best Writer for "America’s Biggest Birthday Party."
Until 1880 a model had to accompany every U.S. patent application, and each had to be evaluated for “novelty, originality, and utility.” To see how this was done, our author put himself in the place of the patent examiners who were responsible. Read >>
