April 10 · This Day in America
Only the third act of the new Congress, and George Washington signs it: the Patent Act of 1790. The idea is radical and almost absurdly hopeful — that an ordinary person with a good idea owns it, that a tinkerer in a barn can be granted, for a time, the sole right to the thing he dreamed up. The first review board is three men: Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state; Henry Knox, the secretary of war; and the attorney general. They read applications by candlelight. The first patent goes to a man for a better way to make potash. It sounds small. It is not. A young country with little money and less infrastructure has just bet its future on the inventiveness of its own people — and written that bet into law. The light bulb, the airplane, the assembly line, the microchip all begin on this page.
Source: prologue.blogs.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1866
Henry Bergh — a New York diplomat who had watched cart horses beaten bloody in the streets of St. Petersburg — wins a charter for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Within days, the country has its first effective anti-cruelty law, and Bergh himself walks the streets stopping drivers mid-whip. They called him the Great Meddler. He decided some creatures who could not speak still deserved a defender.
Source: www.aspca.org