Historedia
Episode 2 of 3

Record Loss

When
1836-12-15
Where
Blodget's Hotel building
Part of
United States Patent Office fire in Washington, D.C.

The fire destroyed documents and models representing fifty years of American invention history.

Ruggles said that the documents and models destroyed by the fire represented the history of American invention for fifty years. The X-Patents, the first approximately 9,957 patents issued between 1790 and 1836, were destroyed by the fire.

Sources

  1. 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-21
  2. United States Patent and Trademark Office Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-28

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.