Wilmington, Delaware, Oct. 05, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Hagley Museum reinvents itself with new exhibit, ‘Nation of Inventors‘

For Immediate Release

Wilmington, Del. – The Hagley Museum and Library’s highly anticipated Nation of Inventors exhibition opens on Saturday 8th October. The exhibit tells stories of a diverse group of men and women, each with unique circumstances and life experiences, who embodied the entrepreneurial spirit of America. Much like the inventors featured in the exhibit, Hagley has endured setbacks — including Hurricane Ida’s flooding of the Brandywine River in September 2021 — to make this opening a reality.

Throughout our history, the vast majority of American inventors have been ordinary people who have gone unrecognized. They followed a series of steps to develop, document, design and test their inventions, with countless iterations and changes along the way. Many sought to protect their ideas with a US government patent. From 1790 to 1880, early inventors were also required to include a small model of their invention along with their application.

These three-dimensional patent models are rare artifacts that visually represent 19th-century innovations, often in response to the nation’s rapid urbanization and industrialization. They demonstrated the key components, usefulness and novelty of inventions. Hagley’s collection of nearly 5,000 patent models and the Nation of Inventors exhibit follow Hagley’s mission to inspire people to innovate in their own lives.

For example, Catherine R. Mott’s 1878 “Improvement in Fire-Escapes” (Patent No. 202,115) was designed for women and children. A danger to life in New York City was the high concentration of multi-story apartment buildings with no safe means of evacuation. Mott’s invention consisted of “taking a cage ladder on the wall of a building and connecting it to balconies or platforms” so that its occupants could safely…