DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? I DO. THIS MAY SEEM A strange thing to say in a magazine like Invention & Technology , but I suspect that after you read this, you’ll find you believe in it too. The occasion of my conversion to faith in magic is the 200th anniversary of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the greatest repository of intellectual property in history. If you think magic has no place there, that’s only because it’s such a well-kept secret that that’s where the best magic is.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame has a long relationship with the patent office. The PTO played a crucial role in inventing the Hall of Fame, in 1973, as a way to honor the men and women behind history’s greatest patents. And being in the museum business, we run the museum and gift shop at the patent office’s headquarters, in Arlington, Virginia.

This explains why my colleagues and I took special notice of the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s actions in 1802 that established the patent office and gave Dr. William Thornton responsibility for examining the applications, previously dealt with by Jefferson himself. A 200th anniversary is a big one, so we decided to mark the bicentennial with an exhibit at the PTO’s museum.

How do you make a display on such a sprawling subject? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been a very busy place over the last two centuries. Trying to summarize so much history in this space would be like using the words really big hole to summarize the Grand Canyon. The only way to tackle a subject so vast is to find a viewpoint that reveals something new or novel about this old, familiar subject.

Thinking about this reminded me of a ceremony I attended on December 10, 1999. Officials in Washington staged a presentation that didn’t get much attention in the media but seemed important to me. On that day the patent office granted its six-millionth patent. It happened to go to two inventors, Michael Albanese and Jeff Hawkins, formerly of Palm Computing, for the data-transfer system the company calls HotSync. If you have a handheld device based on the Palm operating system, you use the invention protected by patent No. 6,000,000 every time you transfer data between the handheld and your computer.

Of course, the arrival of this big, round number has no more real significance than the moment when your odometer rolls from 99,999 to 100,000. Or hits 200,000. Or 300,000, if you are both frugal and lucky. Yet every time my odometer rolls over, I think back to the day I bought the car, the places I’ve driven since then, and the places I may go next. Therefore I think it makes sense to take America’s first six million patents, divide them into six equal piles in chronological order, and see what this perspective provides.

Here goes. The first million (plus about a thousand issued before they started getting numbers) weren’t done until the PTO granted a patent on August 8, 1911, to Francis Holton of Akron, Ohio, for his invention of a new type of vehicle tire. It took longer to get the first million patents than the next five million combined, which may help explain the astonishing quality of those first million. They include landmark inventions like Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, Samuel Colt’s revolver, and the telegraph code invented by Samuel F. B. Morse. The careers of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola Tesla spanned the middle of the period. Wilbur and Orville Wright were flying by the end.

The pace of change had quickened dramatically by the time the two-millionth patent was granted on April 30, 1935, for a wheel-fabrication method invented by Joseph Ledwinka of Philadelphia. It had taken just a bit under 24 years to grant as many patents as had been issued in the previous 109. The increased speed did no apparent harm to the quality of the inventions, however. The period encompassed Henry Ford’s transmission and Charles Kettering’s self-starter, Philo Farnsworth’s television, William Coolidge’s X-ray tube, and Edwin Armstrong’s FM radio. A new type of patent emerged as inventions like Luther Burbank’s new variety of peach persuaded Congress to pass legislation granting intellectual property protection to living organisms.

It might appear that the pace of change then slowed, since it took 26 years to reach the three million mark, on September 12, 1961. World War II explains most of the apparent delay, however, as U.S. inventors focused on winning battles instead of patents. In this segment of patent history, invention took on a decidedly modern appearance, starting with Wallace Carothers’s nylon, Semi Begun’s system of tape recording, Edmund Germer’s fluorescent light, the photocopying process Chester Carlson called xerography, and the laser and maser breakthroughs of Arthur Schawlow, Charles Townes, and Gordon Gould. Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby invented the modern integrated circuit, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard gave the world its first atomic reactor, and Carl Djerassi developed oral contraceptives.

The accelerated pace of change returned in time for the four-millionth patent to be granted, on December 28, 1976. The cardiac pacemaker of Wilson Greatbatch, the medical respirator of Forrest Bird, magnetic resonance imaging by Raymond Damadian, computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanning by Robert Ledley, and the production of synthetic penicillin by John Sheehan helped make this the most productive era to date for medical inventors. And whole new technologies were born with inventions like the microprocessor of Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor, and Federico Faggin. Donald Keck, Peter Schultz, and Robert Maurer realized one of Alexander Graham Bell’s dreams when they invented the first commercially practical fiber-optic cable.

Only 14 years were needed to reach the five-millionth patent, in 1991. Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen invented genetic engineering. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer opened a window on the atom with the scanning tunneling microscope. Bryan Molloy and Klaus Schmiegel created a powerful new medication—and changed society’s attitudes toward mental illness—with their invention of Prozac.

The gap between pioneering technology and public understanding of it widened to an unprecedented degree with Kary Mullis’s invention of PCR in 1983. You’ve got plenty of company if you don’t know that the polymerase chain reaction is the crucial innovation that makes it possible to multiply tiny strands of DNA into commercial quantities of new products and materials. It was important enough to win Mullis the Nobel Prize in 1993, to gross $300 million in the biggest patent sale ever, and to make PCR the youngest invention to gain its inventor a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

A mere eight years passed before the most recent milestone, six million, and this may be the period when the accelerating pace of change truly exceeded society’s ability to comprehend its significance. Not one inventor from between 1991 and 1999 has yet earned a place in the Hall of Fame, and that may not change by the time the seven-millionth patent is granted, around the midpoint of the current decade. Many first-rate inventions are certain to make the cut, but sorting out their significance may take years. Will we judge HIV protease inhibitors to be historic enough? Viagra? It’s too soon to tell.

That’s our data. The odometer’s seven wheels have shifted in unison exactly six times, and the next turn is coming faster than ever. What are we to make of this? We can’t help being reminded, forcefully, that the future is coming faster than ever before. It’s not your imagination if it seems you weren’t able to master your favorite computer software before a new, improved version arrived in the mail (e-mail, of course).

But what can you say about the future based on these data? One of the finest futurists ever, the writer Arthur C. Clarke, identified two special problems with prognostication. First, people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technology. Second, they tend to underestimate its long-term impact. This accounts for the predictions of the 1930s that looked forward a few decades and saw things like personal helicopters, robot servants, and commercial flights to the moon. Conversely, it also explains why that lifelong inventor Thomas Jefferson thought his Louisiana Purchase would give Americans a frontier to explore for at least 500 years.

If anyone can succeed Clarke as the world’s best-known futurist, it may be Ray Kurzweil, author of two best-selling works of prediction, The Age of Intelligent Machines (published in 1990) and The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). Kurzweil’s own impressive list of inventions includes the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind. As the titles of his books suggest, he believes the near future will witness the development of machines that master more and more skills long monopolized by humans until they finally become smarter (and more spiritually aware) than the people who invented them.

I met with Kurzweil in August in his office outside Boston. Most of our conversation involved his thoughts about the future in general and the future of inventing in particular. “Technology is evolution by other means,” he said. He added that things usually start out slowly, which explains why it took 109 years to generate as many patents as were granted from 1991 to 1999.

He said that he and his colleagues have taken the tools of mathematical modeling and applied them to the task of prognostication. His conclusion? “Technology changes at an exponential rate. The exponential growth of the first two decades of the twentieth century matched that of the entire nineteenth century.” He argued that Darwinian evolution follows an identical pattern and that it is a general condition of all types of change.

Kurzweil’s charts illustrating this have a familiar feature. There’s a place on each chart that he calls the knee, where the pace of change takes a sharp up- ward turn. That’s where we are poised today, he told me.

I must admit here that I’ve talked about Kurzweil’s predictions with several world-class inventors, and their reaction to his promise of intelligent, spiritual machines is, to put it politely, skeptical. But even his biggest skeptics feel that his conclusions about exponential change are accurate. They compare what he has projected to Moore’s Law, which predicts the doubling of the power of electronic circuits every 18 months or so. Gordon Moore, of Intel, formulated that dictum way back in 1965, and it has proved remarkably accurate since.

Six million patents. Power doubling, says Gordon Moore. Exponential change, says Ray Kurzweil. What can we conclude? For myself, I find the most compelling conclusion in the familiar work of Arthur C. Clarke, who set down what he called Clarke’s Laws four decades ago. His third and final law holds that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

There you have it. We can’t predict exactly what the future holds. But we know it will be magic.