United States Patent Office fire in Washington, D.C.
- When
- 1836–1837
- Where
- Blodget's Hotel building; Congress
- Episodes
- 3
A fire broke out at 3 a.m. on December 15, 1836, in Blodget's Hotel building in Washington, D.C., where the Post Office shared the same building. An initial investigation considered arson due to suspected Post Office corruption but ruled it out. Ruggles said the documents and models destroyed represented the history of American invention for fifty years, and the X-Patents were destroyed by a fire.
Episodes
- Fire Occurrence
The fire broke out at 3 a.m. on December 15, 1836, in Blodget's Hotel building in Washington, D.C.
- Record Loss
The fire destroyed documents and models representing fifty years of American invention history.
- Legislative Response
Congress changed record keeping methods and passed an act to restore lost models and drawings.
Background and detail
Background. The fire occurred in Blodget's Hotel building in Washington, D.C., on December 15, 1836, breaking out at 3 a.m. The Post Office shared the same building, and an initial investigation considered the possibility of arson due to suspected corruption in the Post Office, but this was later ruled out.
Losses. 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 a fire; fewer than 3,000 of those have been recovered and re-issued with numbers that include an "X".
Aftermath. As a result of the fire, Congress and the newly legally revamped Patent Office changed the way it handled its record keeping, assigning numbers to patents and requiring multiple copies of supporting documentation. The March 3, 1837 Act made provisions to restore the models and drawings lost in the 1836 fire. By 1849, the restoration process was discontinued.
Sources
- 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-21
- 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.