The Patent Office

The Patent Office was a bit of an exception to the other bureaucracies. It did not seek publicity. It knew that any change in society, any cultural trend, would bring forth a raft of inventions and patent applications. Some would be kooky, some significant. The patent examiners were so busy now trying to catch up with that great American flood of talent that they could only shudder at the thought of a Sex Tax.

The officials of the Patent Office, being a cut above the general bureaucrat, indeed well above in imagination, were quick to turn their minds to the effects of the Sex Tax. They didn't need anyone from HEW to research the amount of time that would be spent in bed after the tax was passed. But the patent examiners were a little in doubt as to whether that time would be profitably spent or not, from the Patent Office point of view.

No one doubted that, with the invention of the electric light, man spent less time in bed and the number of inventions had shot up. That seemed logical, more time to work on things.

And with the development of television one might have expected a decline in patent applications, but that didn't happen.

It took a while, but finally someone in the examiner's office came up with a theory that it was because television was so dull that there was a reverse effect that stimulated the patent business. True, there had been a decline in innovation, at least that is what the papers reported, but that wasn't the inventors' fault.

The patenting was still going on at a great rate, even in spite of the fact that industry was not using the new inventions. Industry, of course, pleaded that they couldn't advance as they had because of the government regulations and environmental red tape. This was only part of the story, however. There was the complicating factor that, with all this legal razzmatazz and Naderism, and with the acute financial problems faced, industry had, almost to a corporation, turned to business majors, MBAs, as they were called, to run things. The effect of this was to put research back into the closet, then gear up for bigness, increase the engineering staffs, and forget about serious innovation.

But the bottom line as far as the Patent Office was concerned was still uncertain. Business didn't control invention. True, they sometimes bought patent rights, they sometimes litigated each other, to the delight of their respective corporate legal eagles, but this apparently didn't stop the flow of invention. That "flash of genius" seemed nearly unquenchable now that the electric light had turned it on.

Ah, but what of the bedroom adventures? Would this pose a threat to America's inventors? Would the effects of a Sex Tax show up as an increase in the inventor's frequency, and what sort of frequency would increase?

Some reasoned that the twelve-to-eighteen-hour laboratory vigils of the Edisonians wouldn't be affected. Taxes mean little to them. Some thought that more time in bed would be a help to the creative forces, but there was no data on an increase in New York City inventions that correlated with the New York black-out as did the birthrate.

Others reasoned that, as it is well known "there is no sleep like the sleep of the just unless it be the sleep of the just after," invention would increase. These examiners were disappointed in the long run, for the creative urge is not apparently correlated with the sex urge; more likely it is inversely correlated. But, on the other hand, there was no drop, because, while other activities, such as business and labor, improved, as we shall see later, that little magic that drives the inventor wasn't affected in the least.