Samuel Hopkins, The Holder of the First U.S. Patent: A Study of Failure
AMONG THE POWERS OF CONGRESS specifically enumerated in the United States Constitution is the power "to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."1 If, as appears to have been the case, the convention sitting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 adopted this provision without significant hesitancy or debate,2 that did not prevent Thomas Jefferson, absent abroad as this country's minister to France, from engaging in some second-guessing. Given the role he would presently assume in the new government, it is an ironic twist that in his correspondence with James Madison one of the reasons Jefferson advanced as requiring the addition of