![]() ![]() He wrote: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” The closest anyone came to the idea of future stagnation came in patent office commissioner Henry Ellsworth’s 1843 report to Congress. ![]() In 1899 Duell actually recommended that the patent system be improved because so many people were trying to register their new inventions and the office was struggling to keep up. There’s a famous story that in 1899 Charles H Duell resigned from the US patent office and recommended that it be closed on the basis that “everything has already been invented”. Sam Jordison writes for The Guardian’s Book Blog and will be featuring interesting books that you may not have read because they have been shelved in the part of the store you don’t look at. ![]()
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