At other times and for no reason at all, or so it seems, he will of a verity go to sleep on the job in his sub-cellar and let an application slip through his room in a few months, while he will spend years on another application of the same kind. Of course if you are the fortunate one you will be glad to get a patent granted so easily; your patent attorney is glad because he has your money in his pocket and the examiner is glad because he has made a friend of his glad.
To have everybody glad is a nice thing, you will allow, but don’t crow too soon for there is a hole in the average patent big enough to drive a horse and wagon through. If your patent is for an invention of genuine merit you will not be alone very long in the field and should you commence to make anything that looks like real money out of it you will find some other genius with an invention and a patent, as like yours as the other Siamese twin and if you don’t sue him he will sue you and then you can fight it out in the courts.
Even as right is always on the side of the army with the heaviest artillery, if there are enough shells, so, too, justice is always on the side of the inventor who has the smoothest patent attorney and the cleverest experts if they have enough ammunition in the way of some claims. While it requires skill to draw up good claims they can in any case be made better where the state of the art is known by yourself and your patent attorney.
~How to Look It Up Yourself.--~Whatever the nature of the invention you are working on you should read up its history from its earliest beginnings and in this age of papers, books and public libraries this is an easy, entertaining and profitable thing to do.
As an illustration take the art of flying and let’s suppose you are working on a new _wing_, or _main-plane_, for an aëroplane; if you will go over the list of books sold by book publishers, or consult the catalogue of a public library you will find books on flying, or _aviation_ as it is called, that will give you a full account of the development of flying machines; and if you will get the right book it will picture and describe all the forms of wings that have been invented and patented up to the time the book went to press. Then there are weekly and monthly papers published which are devoted entirely to the theory and practice of flying and by reading these you will be able to keep right up to the _entering edge_ of the art.