Who received the first United States patent, issued in 1790?

Samuel Hopkins received the first United States patent, issued in 1790.

Hopkins’s patent covered an improvement in making potash, a potassium compound used in products such as soap, glass, and fertilizer. President George Washington, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph examined the application under the first federal patent system.

The Patent Act of 1790 created a system requiring inventions to be judged useful and sufficiently novel. The first patent was granted on July 31, 1790, and was signed by Washington, Jefferson, and Randolph. Only a small number of patents were issued under this initial system.

Samuel Hopkins is sometimes confused with better-known inventors such as Eli Whitney, whose cotton-gin patent came later, in 1794. The first patent did not concern a famous machine; it concerned a chemical manufacturing process important to the early American economy.