Men of Progress

And so especially if you're a small or medium sized firm, that that kind of external facing strategy where you're going out into the marketplace for inventions to license with an independent makes a lot of sense because you don't carry as much overhead for your R&D lab.

Eric, I'm reminded of the great 1862 painting, Men of Progress.

I've written about it, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

The building where it hangs is an extraordinary 1837 Greek revival structure that was built to house the patent office.

Yeah.

and i'm not sure they had quite figured out you know how they wanted it to be there's also this really nice um model from heinz and it's a fruit and vegetable sorter it's kind of like a bin and you kind of turn the crank and it sorts uh sorts you know tomatoes or beans or whatever it is into different sizes and um you know so that just really cool stuff like that where it's like okay like these these household names and uh technologies that you think of uh that are just really cool i think we have like a singer sewing machine things like that some of these old patent models um uh that are really interesting and and we're the start of some huge businesses uh and technologies in the country

readers of my blog ip close-up can see the short article on men of progress if they choose to it's one of the most popular i believe over the years gotten thousands of hits which is among the most read and we have published uh it also it It says so much, and I think it strikes a chord.

That's why it's so red.