Patents, Power, and the Fight Between David and Goliath

Send us Fan Mail America built its patent office before it had paved roads in its own capital, and that decision still shapes how invention works today. Bruce Berman is joined by Eric Hintz, an invention historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, for a conversation that traces the roots of the U.S. patent system back to the Constitutional Convention and forward through the rise of corporate research labs. Hintz explains why the framers designed a patent sy...