Samuel Hopkins & America’s Experiment in Owning Ideas
We Built That!? | A JMiF Original Series
Buckle Up Besties!
It’s July 31, 1790. New York City. George Washington just signed the first patent ever issued under the brand new federal patent system, handing a fourteen year monopoly to a moderately obscure gentleman from Philadelphia named Samuel Hopkins.
And given the nation’s ongoing obsession with invention and giving near-mythological weight to many inventors throughout America’s history, you’re probably expecting this patent to have been issued for something quite impressive.
It… burnt wood ashes.
That’s the whole bit. It wasn’t electricity, a steam engine, some gleaming mechanical marvel destined to reshape civilization. Samuel Hopkins had figured out a better way to turn burnt trees into industrial chemicals, and the United States government looked at that and said yes, indubitably, you may own this.
Now, this absolutely doesn’t demean the patent on the surface. Nor does it minimize the invention or the inventor. There are over twelve million patents that have been grnted, so there are bound to be loads and loads of absolutely mundane creations that ended up making a huge impact on humanity. Sort of like traffic signals. And for Hopkins’ process itself, it did lead to sparks that further innovated the way America produced potash which ultimately made it more lucrative.
In the previous post, we established that American invention was never really American to begin with, and that the people writing history have always sort of had the privilege of having the last say in who actually gets the credit and who counts as an inventor. Now the country is going to do something radically different, and it’s going to make that decision one of the highest laws in the land.
Over the next 250 years we are going to meet a whole lot of folks who invented a whole lot of stuff. Allegedly. We will meet people who took credit for the work they did not do, contributions that got scrubbed out entirely, companies that quietly converted employees’ ideas into corporate property, inventors who got obscenely rich, inventors who got obscenely litigious, and brilliant people who lost everything while the thing they built changed the world.
And underneath virtually every one of these stories sits the same pile of uncomfortable questions:
- What actually counts as an invention?
- Where does an improvement stop and an invention start?
- Who gets to decide whether an idea is original?
- Who owns it once that call is made?
And the one that can sting the most, what does owning an idea actually get you? Samuel Hopkins would be America’s first chance to find out, and let’s just say it wasn’t the best time.
Meet Our Guy
Before we get into the how, let’s get acquainted with the who.
Samuel Hopkins was a Philadelphia Quaker with a good chemistry brain and, as we’re about to find out, an even better instinct for self-promotion. He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t a household name, then or ever, really. He was a guy who’d found a better way to do something unglamorous and industrial, and who correctly clocked that “better” could be turned into money if he moved fast enough.
That’s the whole introduction. No lightning-strike epiphany, no childhood workshop, no destiny. Just a Quaker with a furnace idea and good timing.
Wait, Ashes Are Worth Money?
Before we get to patents and cabinet secretaries, we need to talk about garbage. Specifically, burned garbage.
North America was covered in forest, and colonial settlers were clearing it at a genuinely unhinged pace. Most of that timber wasn’t good for building anything, so it just got torched. The result was mountains of wood ash. Not metaphorical mountains. Actual, towering, continent-scale piles of ash.
Here’s the part nobody tells you in history class: that ash wasn’t waste. It was full of alkaline salts, and if you leached it, boiled it down, and refined it further, you got potash. Push it a step past that and you got pearl ash. Both were some of the most valuable industrial commodities in early America. Soap, glass, textiles, all of it ran on this stuff, and it shipped overseas beautifully.
So the math went: trees became ashes, ashes became chemicals, chemicals became cash. A byproduct of deforestation quietly became one of colonial America’s biggest exports.
And that’s the thing. This unassuming eighteenth-century chemical process wasn’t a footnote. It shaped settlement patterns, trade routes, and the wholesale remaking of the North American landscape.
How Everybody Else Was Doing It
The standard process wasn’t exactly high tech, though calling it “standard” is giving it more credit than it deserves.
You took your wood ash, dumped it in water, and let it leach into a caustic, alkaline liquid called lye. You boiled that lye down in big open kettles until it evaporated away and left behind a crude, dark residue: black salts, essentially raw potash. If you wanted the fancier version, pearl ash, you’d bake those black salts again in a kiln to burn off whatever impurities were left.
That’s it. Simple, slow, and extremely well established. Farmers, settlers, and small-time manufacturers across the colonies had been doing some version of this for generations. No furnace required. No formula. And definitely no permission needed.
What Hopkins Actually Changed
Samuel Hopkins didn’t invent potash. Nobody invented potash, people had been making it for centuries. What Hopkins claimed was a more efficient way to produce it, and that efficiency was the whole pitch.
The basis for his patent wasn’t a faster method, exactly. The innovation was adding a step. He burned, or calcined, the raw ashes a second time in a furnace before dissolving and boiling them. He claimed this left virtually zero residue and produced more usable salt, without any additional labor or equipment cost. And like any good founder, Samuel Hopkins was in the business of selling Samuel Hopkins’ invention, so we shouldn’t just take his word for it.
Fortunately, there are well-documented testimonials about Hopkins’ process from individuals who were not a son-in-law, mother, or another family member. In 1793, four respected Philadelphia scientists and physicians signed a certificate saying they had watched Hopkins’ method outperform the standard process. Hopkins then published that endorsement himself, so this wasn’t exactly detached peer review.
There were other, more independent observations too. William Cooper, founder and namesake of Cooperstown, reported that local manufacturers thought the method could increase yield by as much as fifty percent. Thomas Jefferson’s own Farm Book noted better results obtained using “Hopkins’ way.”
So it’s a fair assumption that there was real merit to his improved process. What we can’t say with the same confidence is that it was economically better, once you account for the furnace, the labor, the license fee, and all those other pesky little details that have been quietly murdering perfectly good business plans since the dawn of commerce.
Technically better does not equal economically better, and Hopkins was about to learn that lesson the hard way. That distinction, inventing something new versus improving something that already exists, is a tale as old as time, one we’ll see repeated again and again throughout this series.
There’s one more distinction buried in here, though, and it’s the one that actually matters: how different does something have to be before it belongs to you?
Maybe The Real Invention Wasn’t The Furnace
Pocket that question, because it’s about to matter more than the furnace ever did.
It’s tempting to look at the document Washington signed and conclude that the important invention here was Hopkins’ extra step in the furnace. Honestly, I’m not convinced it was. The far more consequential invention might have been the system that let Samuel Hopkins stand up in the first place and say, this one is mine.
Before Hopkins, that sentence didn’t have much legal weight behind it. There was no federal apparatus built to hear a claim like his and actually decide whether to honor it. Somebody had to build that machinery first, the whole apparatus for weighing a claim and deciding whether it deserved protection.
And that machinery didn’t start with a Patent Office, or a committee, or a furnace inspection. It started even earlier than that.
Before America Could Protect Inventors, It Had to Invent the Rules
The United States didn’t invent patents. Temporary monopolies had been kicking around Europe for centuries. What the founders did was write the concept straight into the operating system: Article I, Section 8 gave Congress the power to secure inventors’ exclusive rights to their discoveries, for a limited time.
Sounds simple enough. It was not. The second you announce that inventors get exclusive rights, you’ve inherited a much harder problem, because somebody now has to decide what actually qualifies. The Patent Act of 1790 solved this in the most absurdly high-powered way you could possibly imagine.
There was no Patent Office. No building full of examiners shuffling paperwork. Applications went straight to three of the most senior officials in the entire federal government: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Any two of them could sign off on an invention, and then it went to the President for his signature.
Picture being an inventor in 1790. Your application isn’t vanishing into some anonymous bureaucracy, you’re asking Thomas actual Jefferson whether your idea deserves a monopoly, and then George Washington signs off on it personally, like it’s no big deal. Into that setup walks Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia, who gets his protection on July 31, 1790.
And before anyone fires off a message that opens with erm, actually, Jeffy, let me save you the trouble. Hopkins’ patent isn’t technically “Patent Number 1.” Continuous numbering didn’t start until 1836, and after a fire that same year wiped out a huge chunk of the early records, the surviving pre-1836 patents got reclassified as X-patents. Hopkins’ is generally filed as X1. But historically? Yes. Samuel Hopkins received the first patent issued under the federal patent system.
And almost immediately, the experiment ran headfirst into its next problem: having a patent and having a business turned out to be two very different things.
What Hopkins Was Actually Selling Was Permission
Hopkins did not hang the patent on a wall and spend the next fourteen years bringing up, at every dinner party, that George Washington had personally signed it. Which, to be fair, would have been entirely within his rights. He did what any founder in a brand new capitalist republic does. He tried to monetize.
In 1791 he published An Address to the Manufacturers of Pot and Pearl Ash, which laid out his process, included a drawing of the furnace, and threw in an explainer on how the patent law itself actually worked. Read that again. He wasn’t just selling a machine. He was teaching his customers how an entirely unfamiliar legal and commercial arrangement functioned, because otherwise they had no framework for understanding what he was even offering them.
What he had to sell wasn’t potash. It wasn’t really the furnace either. It was permission. So he built a licensing operation. Manufacturers paid for the right to use his process. It ran through his son-in-law and agents in multiple cities, with standardized license documents, and payment accepted in cash or in potash.
The surviving license issued to Eli Cogswell of Castleton, Vermont shows just how sophisticated this got: the right to operate one furnace for seven and a half years, for $200 or the equivalent in potash, with licensed goods marked as authorized by Hopkins.
Own the IP. License it out. Protect the brand. Collect the money. That’s a business model you’d recognize instantly if you saw it on a pitch deck today, and a Philadelphia Quaker was running it in 1791. There was just one small structural flaw in the plan. People had to actually agree to pay him.
That surviving Cogswell license carries one tantalizing detail, by the way. It’s numbered 310. Of course, that number has fed an irresistible theory. Had Hopkins really sold hundreds of licenses? At $200 each, 310 furnaces works out to $62,000, which in the 1790s is an eye-watering amount of money. Or, was there a simpler explanation. Reminisce for a moment on receiving your first checkbook. Even the bank issued the first books starting at check 2xx, because there are a lot of stipulations tied to checks with lower numbers. Hopkins had already proven exceptional marketing savvy, so perhaps he anticipated hesitation if there wasn’t the perception that this was a mature operation.
And the evidence points toward the latter. A fortune like that would have been sizable, and it would have taken a very real, very enduring effort to spend. There’s no evidence of a lavish lifestyle, and no sign of generational wealth. The 310 appears to be part of a numbering system on preprinted forms, not a hard-coded receipt for 309 previous customers. The Smithsonian even cautions that the actual number of licensees is unknown, and likely a lot smaller. What there is, instead, is well-documented debt.
The Business That Wasn’t
Hopkins’ biggest obstacle was brutally simple. His customers already had a perfectly good alternative. They could keep doing exactly what they had always done.
His patent didn’t give him ownership of the concept of making potash. It covered his specific process. The traditional method remained cheap, familiar, and entirely legal. A producer could watch Hopkins’ furnace run, do the arithmetic, and decide: nah.
William Cooper’s 1792 assessment is the cleanest evidence we have. The potash makers who saw the demonstration mostly agreed the method was better. Their objection was the price. For most of these people, potash wasn’t a full-time enterprise, it was something you did alongside farming and shopkeeping. Hopkins was asking them to spend money today in exchange for efficiency tomorrow, and a lot of them had bills due today.
That’s not a technology problem. That’s a business model problem.
So Hopkins did what desperate founders have done ever since. He hustled. He traveled, demonstrated, and built furnaces across New York and Pennsylvania. He went to Quebec looking for legal protection and, rather than being greeted as the prophet of ash technology, ran straight into competing claims. The privilege he received there was shorter than what he’d asked for, and shared rather than exclusively his. Same question he’d already run into at home, different country.
His partners weren’t much sturdier. By the mid 1790s he’d gotten tangled up with land speculators who were themselves sliding toward ruin as the speculative land economy came apart around them.
Here’s the part worth tattooing somewhere: a patent gives you the right to stop other people from copying your invention. It does not give you the power to make anyone want it.
By 1800 the record around Hopkins turns genuinely sad. Philadelphia tax rolls show his occupation quietly disappear, and then his name. The Quaker records are considerably more blunt. In 1802 the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting recorded that Hopkins had taken on obligations beyond his ability to manage, and had failed to fulfill his contracts or pay his debts. He himself described a train of difficulties and embarrassments. Two years later his circumstances were still rough enough that the meeting declined to transfer his membership.
Samuel and his wife Hannah relocated to Rahway, New Jersey, near their daughter Sarah and her husband. Family very likely provided refuge, though the evidence won’t quite let me paint the dramatic scene on the doorstep.
He apparently didn’t stop inventing anyway. He picked up additional patents relating to flour of mustard in 1813 and 1817. He died in 1818, exact date and location uncertain.
The Scorecard
Here’s the thing: you can’t really score something like this. We can, however, make a few observations in hindsight about how everything panned out. So, here’s what we know:
The Invention: Worked.
The Business Model: …mostly did not.
The Industry: Thrived, for reasons far beyond a Philadelphia Quaker and his furnace.
The Inventor: Struggled.
But more importantly, the first patent has been issued. We have the “who” and the “what.” The Constitution gives us the “why.” Now we get to see how this plays out across the entire span of American invention.
The Patent Act of 1790 is in place. The government has created a process for deciding what qualifies as an invention and who deserves the credit. Surely there can be no more disputes about originality, ownership, or who invented what.
Right?
Spoiler alert: the United States would fundamentally rebuild its patent system in 1793, 1836, 1870, and 1952, alongside dozens of additional amendments that have continued reshaping patent law ever since.
We are still adjusting it. We probably always will be. Every new technology creates new questions about what counts as original, where improvement becomes invention, who owns the result, and where one person’s idea ends and somebody else’s begins.
Coming Up Next
Everything You Wanted (Or Didn’t) to Know About the Pinnacle of American Cuisine and Ingenuity: the Hot Dog
A deliberate detour straight into the tangled, myth soaked, deeply contested history of America’s favorite food. We are about to spend two years arguing over who invented what, so we may as well start with my one and only no guardrails, AuDHD fueled, rabbit holing deep dive into the single food nobody on earth can agree about.
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