What year was the first U.S. patent issued?

The first U.S. patent was issued in 1790.

The recipient was Samuel Hopkins, who received the patent on July 31, 1790, for an improvement in making potash and pearl ash using a new apparatus and process. President George Washington signed the patent, alongside Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph.

The patent followed the Patent Act of 1790, the first federal U.S. patent statute. That law authorized a three-person Patent Board rather than the modern Patent Office. The board examined inventions to determine whether they were sufficiently useful and important and could grant protection for terms of up to 14 years.

Early patent records are unusually difficult to study because most documents issued before 1836 were destroyed in the Patent Office fire of that year. These lost records are known as the X-Patents. The surviving history of Hopkins’s patent therefore marks not only the beginning of U.S. federal patenting, but also the start of a numbering and archival tradition that was later reconstructed.