The Patent Office Burned in 1836 — A 1791 Device Survived and Turned Motion Into Electricity
On the fifteenth of December, 1836, the United States Patent Office in Washington caught fire. The blaze started on the ground floor near midnight, and by morning it had gutted the interior of Blodgett's Hotel, the converted building that had served as the nation's repository of invention since 1810. Seven thousand patents. One hundred and sixty-eight working models. Decades of technical drawings and registered descriptions of machines that no longer existed anywhere else. All of it turned to powder before sunrise. The official cause was a defective heating flue. The inquiry lasted fewer than two weeks, named no one responsible, and closed without recommendation. But the fire left behind a detail that the official record treats as a footnote, when it acknowledges it at all. In the weeks that followed, a clerk assigned to the salvage effort cataloged every object pulled from the wreckage. His inventory lists fragments of charred wood, melted metal, cracked glass, and soot-caked debris. Near the bottom of that list, entered without commentary, is a single intact device...
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