Or At Least Wildly Inaccurate

If you've been reading any of the the various (for lack of a better word) link aggregation sites (Fark and Slashdot, mainly.  It hasn't hit Boing Boing as of this moment.), you'll have probably seen the article about a physicist who claims that innovation is has peaked and is slowing down (as related to population growth).  Now, I won't argue that point; the article, as is, really doesn't give enough information for me to make what I'd feel to be an informed decision either way (although I will admit to leaning towards not believing it).

No, what this is about is that quote that people have been posting, because they think it seems appropriate.  You know the one:  attributed to a patent office employee, and referencing how everything has been invented.  Yeah, that one.  Well, I'd just like to say: stop it.  The quote is, at best, apocryphal, and was most definitely never said by the man whose name is most commonly attached to it.

(Settle in, folks, I'm about to go off on a rant, and that's never a good thing.  Especially when it's late and I'm tired.  I think I caught most of the grammatical errors, but I could be (and often am) wrong.)

So, let's look at the clues that suggest that it was most likely never said.  For starters, there's the descrepency over who exactly said it.  The most common name attatched to it is Charles H. Duell, in which case the date given for the quote is 1899.  Alternatively, it's given to an unnamed "director" who resigned in 1875, an unnamed patent office clerk in 1833, or an unnamed employee of the British patent office (in which case, no date is given, other than a general date of sometime in the 19^th century).  Strike number one.

The most common source, as mentioned, appears to be Duell.  Which is a wonderful testament to the ability of misinformation to spread over the Internet.  Do a search, take a look at the Google page summarys that appear, and look at how many of them are exactly the same.  All those quote archives simply plagarise off of each other, without ever checking to see if the information they're copying is accurate.  (Which is much like all the various lyric databases.  If you find one song mislabelled in one of them, it's probably mislabelled in all of them.)

Of course, that's not saying it wasn't already well travelled before the Internet arrived.  It was apparently well enough known back in 1985 for President Reagan to use it in a speech to business leaders.  (I'll be polite and keep the snarky comments to myself.)  It's just that, what with the Internet, a search for information on Duell gets drowned out by the sheer amount of noise being put out by all these quote indexes.  But I digress….

Getting back on topic: the quote doesn't appear to match the tone of Duell's reports to President McKinley for the period during which he was Commissoner (1898 to 1901), in which he talks about the growing number of patents submitted each year and the need for America to foster innovation.  Or how about his opinion in his own words, taken from his 1900 report: "The world owes as much to inventors as to statesmen or warriors. […] Their labor-saving machinery does work that it would take millions of men using hand implements to perform. In this century the debt will be piled still higher, for inventors never rest."  Doesn't sound like someone who thinks that "Everything that can be invented has been invented", now does it?

So, that's it; I'm done.  For a fuller discussion check out the Skeptical Inquirer article A Patently False Myth Still!, from which I grabbed most of the info.
The Reagan quote can be found in the online papers available from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.  October 3, 1985: Remarks to Business Leaders in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The quotation from Duell's 1900 report comes from a post to the Patent Information Users Group mailing list.

Now, seeing as (according to a post on the Stumpers mailing list) this quote has been being debunked since at least 1945, could we please stop using it?

Next week: Bill Gates and 640K.