Now, there is no such loss of power through the crank as he imagined, nor is it likely that any other device for obtaining rotary from rectilinear motion will be found superior to that which Watt devised. But Peter Cooper assailed this fancied evil with undoubting confidence, both as to its existence and as to his ability to do away with it. The result was an invention for which he received, April 28, 1828, letters patent of the United States. At that early day patents were comparatively few,--so few that this one bears no number; and the duties of general administration did not prevent the highest officials from attending to details. This patent, issued to Peter Cooper, of New York, was personally signed by John Quincy Adams, President; countersigned by Henry Clay, Secretary of State; transmitted to William Wirt, Attorney-General; examined, approved, and signed by him, and returned to the Department of State for final delivery to the patentee. It grants for fourteen years to the said Peter Cooper, his heirs, administrators, and assignees the exclusive right to make, use, or license others to use, the described improvement in the method of effecting rotary motion directly from the alternate rectilinear motion of a steam piston. Evidently these distinguished statesmen--Adams, Clay, and Wirt--were not experts in mechanics, or at least did not undertake to hinder by technical criticism the experiments of American ambition; and there was no trained corps of patent-examiners to decide upon the novelty, practicability, and usefulness of any proposed improvement in the arts. Probably the government shared at that time the dominant American feeling of unconquerable youth, ready to attack all problems, especially those which previous experience had pronounced insoluble, and to determine the impossible by attempting it. This spirit has in fact more or less dominated the United States Patent Office down to the present time. With all its present equipment of examiners, trained in theory and versed in technical literature, it still concerns itself chiefly in the consideration of a proposed invention with the question of novelty, rather than that of feasibility or value; and the effect has been that, while thousands of patents are granted for absurd, unnecessary, or inoperative devices, the net result of the encouragement thus given to individual ingenuity and audacity is a catalogue of great inventions unmatched in the history of any other nation.