My first application for a patent was an adjustable track wrench that met complete failure after a year’s pendency. I thought I had a good, practical, economical, and convenient wrench, but after the said period of time elapsed my attorney informed me it was rejected by the chief examiner on account of prior similar claims already patented. Of course you must not get confused and wonder why he didn’t tell me this before I filed the application. If he had the self-explanatory portion of the scheme loses its self respect and puts the attorney in a bad financial light, which I would dislike to do. However, the discouraging news was so cool and saddening at this first attempt that it froze my ingenuity a decade and a quarter, and then hope rose again and I called once more on the dormant faculty and changed attorneys. After due diligence had persevered and I had stood the condemnation of my wife, who said I was getting absent-minded and hard of hearing, I sent in my application duly witnessed and sworn to, along with the necessary stipend that makes the wheels buzz in the attorney’s head and swells that seven millions of profit accrued in the patent office from a good many fellows like myself. Nice to help swell this big profit for some day when this accumulation becomes large enough our wise custodians of this fund may transfer it like ordinary Town Council men do when one fund gets too far ahead and pay off the national debt. My second application was an improved index and a device of meritable convenience over present ones, so I thought. It has been pending two years after failing ten times before the chief examiner, who doesn’t seem to have the courtesy to allow it. While the invention was safe and secure in the government vault, I was rash enough to go into another irrational period and get out a computing device for the busy coal man to aid him in rapid accurate calculations and do away with the old time method of having coal swell so sixteen hundred pounds was a ton; not really a long ton but a short ton. This wonderful invention hatched in the brain of an ordinary man, lingered in Washington one year and a half, and was then rejected. I wouldn’t care for having it rejected, but I’d like to have the rejectors use a milder word, one that doesn’t rankle so much and stir up the mean things in you. Well, here are two great inventions for the betterment of the race denied, and from the way the attorney wrote in his last tribute of love to me, the third is hanging over the precipice and is ready to fall among its ancestors.