Patent News


Jun. 21, 2017

Washington Examiner Opinion: The bipartisan Stronger Patents Act will protect America’s perpetual motion machine: innovation, by Charlie Sauer

This post originally appeared in the Washington Examiner on June 21, 2017.


Sitting in a hot office in Kansas City, Mo., in 1992, I was trying to do the impossible: develop a perpetual motion machine. I now know how far away I was from such an invention, but it might have been one of the best summers of my life. I learned about magnets, friction, momentum, energy, and, most importantly, I learned about the innovation process.

I didn’t develop a perpetual motion machine (obviously) and nowadays I make sure my children understand that in our household, we obey the laws of thermodynamics. But my mind was awakened to the possibility of innovation: the principle that has given us cars, airplanes, the Internet, and so on and so on. See, we already have a perpetual motion machine: it’s called the American economy, and we need to make sure nothing stops its forward momentum.

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