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Rebekah Oakes: My name is Rebekah Oakes, and I’m a historian at the United States Patent and Trademark office.

At the USPTO, I’m an agency historian, which means my main responsibilities include research, writing, public speaking, and maintaining both a digital archive and a small physical archive. The origins of the USPTO actually go all the way back to the United States Constitution. So in the Constitution there’s a clause called the Intellectual Property Clause that charges Congress with promoting the advancement of creative works and inventions and allowing protection for the creators of those works. And that really kind set off the foundational aspects of what we now know as the USPTO. It goes all the way back to the Constitution, the founding of the country, and then the Patent office has kind of expanded in both scope and breadth in the 200 plus years since then.

Is there a particular patent holder or inventor that you find inspiring?

Lyda Newman was a woman living in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, and she invented a hairbrush with synthetic bristles that had an inner chamber that could be cleaned easily. So something that you could pop off the top of the brush, clean the inner chamber easily and pop it back on. She was a hairdresser in New York City. If you can kind of put yourself in the mindset of New York City in around 1900, there’s horses on the street, there’s a lot of dust, there’s a lot of kind of detritus in the air. Things got dirty. There’s smog from coal burning fireplaces. So this ability to clean a hairbrush very easily helped keep with sanitation, and it helped her be more competitive in a competitive market of hairdressers at the time. But what she’s most famous for is actually her work during the suffrage movement.

So fighting for women’s right to vote. Lyda Newman was put in charge of the effort to get African-American women involved in the suffrage movement in New York City. And she identified one barrier to access and figured out a way to solve that problem. She realized that mothers, especially working mothers, had to make a choice between child care and participating in the suffrage movement. So she established at Suffragist headquarters, a daycare, and this was kind of seen as revolutionary at the time, but other Suffragist headquarters across the country started adopting Newman’s idea. So it shows that she’s a person that’s not only thinking innovatively in terms of creating something new and receiving a patent, but also creating a new way of increasing civic participation within her community.

What time period of invention is most fascinating to you?

I would say one of the most fascinating periods in innovation, not necessarily because of the patents being produced, but because of the way that patents and inventions are being used, was the fight for civil and human rights in the late 19th and early 20th century. So we have one example within our agency history itself, a patent examiner named Henry Baker. And what made Henry Baker outstanding, aside from his 30 plus year career with the Patent Office, was that he took the time to research and compile the first list of African-American patent holders within US history. So much of what we know about African-American patent holders like Lyda Newman, who I mentioned earlier, is thanks to Henry Baker and his work.

There’s a lot of racist mythology going around at this time, and there was a belief, a racist, but unfortunately widespread belief that African-Americans were not contributing to national progress and could not invent something new. Baker’s list disproved this by showing just how many African-Americans had received patents, created something new and advanced technological progress in the United States. And his list was actually used by the Civil Rights Movement up until the 1960s as proof of this ingenuity and these contributions made by early African-American inventors.

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