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THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. EDITED B T- C. EEPWORTE, F.E_S_ Vol. XXXV. No. 1719.—August 14, 1891. CONTENTS. PAGE Patent Office Fees 569 Perspective Drawing and Vision. By W. E. 570 Idlers on the Broads. By E. J. H 571 The Progress of Photography. By Arthur H. Elliott 574 Notes 576 Photographers* and Artists’Perspective. By Anton M. Has ch ek 577 Long Distance Telephoning. By Luke Sharp 579 Convention of the Photographers’ Association of America 580 Photographic Society of Great Britain 581 Have Negatives any Value ? 582 Patent Intelligence 582 Correspondence 583 Proceedings of Societies 584 Answers to Correspondents 584 PATENT OFFICE FEES. We have more than once had occasion to remark upon the tax on ingenuity which the fees payable by in ventors at the Patent Office undoubtedly represent. That the evil is one which is attracting notice from all quarters is well known, and, in some measure, that fact is an assurance that it will be remedied. No clearer indictment against the system which prevails has ever been formulated than was contained the other day in the speech of Mr. Leng, M.P. for Dundee. This gentleman took the opportunity of moving in the House of Commons the reduction of the vote for the Patent Office by the sum of £100, in order that he might plead the case for the inventors. In the first place, it appears that the Board of Trade, with which branch of the Civil Service the reduction of the patent fees rests, can afford to relinquish part of the income derived from patentees, for, according to the last annual report, an excess of income over expendi ture of no less than £108,000 is recorded. This sum, instead of being spent in some way for the benefit of inventors—by reduction of fees or otherwise—is sent to the Treasury, where it is absorbed into the general revenue of the country. We next find that the cost of a British patent is greater than in any other country in the world, with the sole exception of Germany. The British inventor is charged £154 for patenting an inven tion for fourteen years, while in America the charge is £7 10s. for seventeen years. But the American Patent Office does far more for this small sum that the establish ment in Chancery Lane does for its unfortunate client. It undertakes a search through previous specifications in order to find out whether the would-be patentee has not already been forestalled in what he believes to be an original idea. Does the English Patent Office do nothing of this kind to take care of the interests of the blossoming inventor ? Nothing whatever. If Brown, Jones, and Smith were severally to go to the Office to-morrow, and each apply for a patent for, say, bro mide paper, or gelatine plates for photographic pur poses, the Office would blandly take their fees and comply with their requests, and the entire farce of giving protection, which was not worth the paper upon which it was described, would be carried out, without a hint to the poor inventor that he was throw ing his money into the gutter. The case we have cited will seem an impossible one, but anyone who will take the trouble to search through the volumes devoted to abridgments of specifications will find the same ideas patented again and again by different persons. The heaviness of the fee charged at the English Patent Office can be better appreciated when the fees charged by different countries are computed for the number of years during which the patent rights exist. Measured in this way, we find that the United States charge 8s. lOd, per annum for 17 years; Erance and Italy, £4 per annum for 15 years ; Belgium and Spain, £4 4s. per annum for 20 years; Russia, £5 10s. per annum for 10 years; while Great Britain, poverty- stricken Britain, is obliged to tax those to whom she owes so much of her greatness no less than £ 11 per annum for 14 years, or more than 100 per cent, more than the fees payable in Russia, and more than 2,500 per cent, than those of the United States. This policy of taxing inventors up to the hilt is as foolish as it is morally indefensible, for it cheeks inventive enterprise. If we refer to the number of applications made in this country in one year, and compare them with the num ber made in the United States, we find an extraordinary difference, namely, eighteen thousand in Britain against thirty-five thousand in America. Indeed, everyone in America is encouraged to exert his or her inventive faculties, and, as a result, we find that in ventors, both male and female, arise on all sides. They flood our own markets with various clever no tions, which we eagerly buy, and in doing so we say admiringly, “ How clever the Americans are to invent such useful little things! ” whereas it would be truer to say, “ How silly our home authorities are to prevent these paying little things being invented here.” But perhaps the most telling argument against the