The First Patent: America's Covenant with the Dreamer

A Nation Built to Reward Genius

The Founders were practical men, but they were also visionary men. When they wrote the Constitution, they included something that no governing document had ever thought to protect before — the rights of inventors and authors. Article I, Section 8 gave Congress the power to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”¹

Think about that language. Promote the progress. Useful arts. Exclusive right. The Founders did not treat invention as a luxury or an afterthought. They codified it into the foundation of the republic itself, right alongside the powers to declare war and coin money. They understood, with that peculiar genius of theirs, that a nation’s true wealth is not in its land or its gold, but in the fertile, restless minds of its free people.

In 1790, Congress passed the Patent Act — the very first, signed into law by President Washington on April 10th of that year.² The act was remarkably personal by modern standards. Patent applications did not go to a faceless bureaucracy. They were reviewed by a board of just three men: the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Attorney General. Those men, in 1790, were Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph. If you wanted a patent in the early republic, Thomas Jefferson himself might read your application.

Jefferson, himself a tireless inventor and tinkerer, took the review process seriously. He understood that what passed through his hands was not paperwork — it was the future.

The Man Who Was First

Samuel Hopkins was a Philadelphia-born inventor who had settled in Vermont. He was not a famous man. He was not wealthy or well-connected in the way that so many of history’s celebrated figures tend to be. He was a working man — a craftsman and a problem-solver — and he had spent years developing an improved method for making potash and pearl ash.³

Now, potash may not sound like the stuff of legend. But in 1790, it was as essential to the American economy as oil is today. Potash — a potassium-rich compound leached from wood ash — was used in making soap, glass, fertilizer, and gunpowder. American farmers and craftsmen produced enormous quantities of it. The ability to make it more efficiently, more reliably, was genuinely valuable. Hopkins had figured out a better way, and he was willing to stake his name on it.

He submitted his application. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues reviewed it. And on July 31, 1790, Patent No. 1 was issued — signed not just by Washington but also by Jefferson and Attorney General Randolph. The document itself did not survive the War of 1812 when the British burned Washington, D.C. — a tragic footnote to an otherwise triumphant story. But the act, and what it represented, endured.

America had declared: your idea has value. Your work of the mind has worth. We will protect it.

The Promise That Built a World

President Kennedy, in those early electric days of the Space Race, challenged a generation to reach for the impossible. He understood the same truth the Founders had understood: that Americans, when unleashed and given purpose, are unstoppable. He said that America chose to go to the moon and do the other things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” That spirit — the embrace of difficulty, the love of the challenge — did not begin with Apollo. It began in workshops and on farms, in the minds of men like Samuel Hopkins who stayed up past midnight, chasing a better answer.

In the 235 years since Hopkins received that first patent, Americans have filed more than 11 million of them.⁴ The telephone. The lightbulb. The airplane. The transistor. The internet. Every one of these transformations of human life traces its lineage back to that simple, profound promise embedded in the Constitution: your discovery is yours.

Other nations have tried to replicate this. None have matched it, because the patent system is not simply a legal mechanism — it is a cultural statement. It says that America trusts its people. That America believes the next great idea is just as likely to come from a farmer in Vermont as from a king’s court or a government ministry. That is an America First idea in the truest, deepest sense: put your faith in the American people, and they will astonish you every single time.

Reagan often marveled at this quality of the American people. He saw it in the entrepreneurs who built Silicon Valley from sand and sweat, in the small business owners who risked everything on an idea, in the scientists and engineers who pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible. He believed — and he was right — that the genius of America is not found in its government. It is found in its people, set free to invent, to build, to dream.

What We Owe the Dreamers

As we march toward America’s 250th birthday — that grand, golden jubilee of a republic that was never supposed to survive and has never stopped thriving — it is worth pausing on what Samuel Hopkins represents. He was not a general. He was not a statesman. He was not a philosopher whose name graces the textbooks. He was a man with a problem to solve and the freedom to solve it.

That freedom is the gift. It is the gift the Founders gave us, and it is the gift we are obligated to protect and pass on. Every time America has allowed its innovators to breathe — when it has cut the red tape, reduced the burden, trusted the citizen rather than the bureaucrat — the results have been spectacular. Every time it has done the opposite, the dreamer has gone quiet, or gone elsewhere.

Today, the United States still leads the world in patents filed and innovations produced, though the competition has grown fierce and the challenges to our intellectual property rights are real and serious.⁵ China files more patent applications by raw number, but American patents remain the gold standard of quality and commercial impact. The race is on, and it is not the time to let up.

The answer, as it has always been in America, is not to look to Washington for salvation. The answer is to look to the Samuels — the Hopkinses of our age, the young engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs who are right now, in some garage or dorm room or rented lab, working on something that will change everything. Our job — the job of free Americans who love this country — is to make sure the door is open when they come knocking.

America’s Unfinished Invention

Here is what I love most about the story of Samuel Hopkins and Patent No. 1: it was just the beginning. One man, one idea, one document — and from that acorn grew an oak that has shaded the world. The America that signed that patent in 1790 was a tiny, fragile, uncertain country of four million souls clinging to the Atlantic coast. The America that will celebrate its 250th birthday has put men on the moon, mapped the human genome, connected every corner of the earth with the internet, and still — still — attracts the most ambitious, the most talented, the most daring people from every nation under heaven.

They come here because this is where the dreamers come. They always have, and if we are wise — if we remember what we are and what we owe to those who came before us — they always will.

Samuel Hopkins did not know that he was making history on that summer day in 1790. He was just a man trying to make potash a little better. But that is the American way, isn’t it? We do not set out to change the world. We set out to solve the problem in front of us, to build the better thing, to find the answer that no one has found yet. And somewhere along the way, we end up changing everything.

That is the covenant. That is the promise. That is America.

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“Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.” — Ronald Reagan