The patent expert

(Ссылка на руссктй оригинал: "Патентный эксперт")

By the late 1970s, after graduating from the Mendeleev Institute, I already had a family and was working as a research fellow at the Institute of Physical Chemistry. It was the era of stagnation: needs were modest, we returned bottles regularly, but somehow there still wasn’t enough money. One day, my father asked how things were going and told me that AUSRIPE was hiring freelance examiners. I was about to say that my father was a chemist too, but the truth is the other way around — so was I. The acronym stood for the All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Patent Examination, and my father had long been working there as a freelance examiner in the Organic Chemistry section. The institute’s job was to issue Soviet inventors authors’ certificates; the word “patent” was left to the capitalists and the scientists and engineers who served them. There happened to be an opening in Inorganic Chemistry, and, attracted by the prospect of a little easy money on the side, I decided to give it a try.

I was received warmly by my superior, a staff examiner named Eleonora Vasilievna. I was not just some boy off the street, after all, but the son of a well-known father, and she quickly brought me up to speed. A freelance examiner received an application for an invention together with supporting materials: a list of authors, experimental results, the projected economic benefit, and so forth. His task was to check the application for novelty and, if the decision was favorable, prepare the author’s certificate. Payment was by piecework: fifteen rubles for issuing a certificate, eleven for a rejection, and if there was correspondence with the authors, three rubles for each letter.

For those not very familiar with patent practice, let me explain: in order to grant a patent — or, in Soviet terms, an author’s certificate — the invention had to satisfy two conditions: it had to be new, and it had to be useful. Utility still allowed room for argument, but novelty was supposed to be checked in earnest: had anyone ever thought of the same thing before? In theory, that meant anywhere and at any time, practically since the beginning of the world. In practice, however, the examiner was required to review patents from the previous fifty years in the six principal countries: the USSR, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. If the year were 1980, your search began with 1930.

There was no real computerization yet. Patent work still lived entirely on paper, and we were already lucky it was not on clay tablets. Every invention had been assigned to classes and subclasses in the UDC — the Universal Decimal Classification. First came the great realms of knowledge, then the sciences, then subdivisions within those sciences, and so on, narrower and narrower until you arrived at some tiny specialty. Chemistry, for example, was 54; inorganic chemistry, 546; metals within it, 546.7; nickel, 546.74. And if the matter concerned not nickel itself but, say, a method of obtaining or extracting it, those digits acquired an additional process index, yielding something like 546.74-05.

So whenever I received an application, the first thing I did was determine its class. If it concerned, say, a method of extracting nickel from ore, it went under 546.74-05. With that number in hand, I would go to the AUSRIPE patent library, ask for the six folders for that class — Soviet, American, British, French, German, and Japanese — sit down at a table, and begin my review: first the abstracts, and, if something looked suspiciously close, the full patent. You had to work right there at the library table; nothing could be checked out. Those six folders would be set before me, and then the slow, rather monotonous, but in its way absorbing occupation began: leafing through patents, reading at least the abstracts, and if something looked very much like my application, studying the entire text. Once you got back to 1930, you could put a check mark in the search form and move on to the next country. Sometimes a folder contained as many as fifty patents, though ten or twenty was more usual. Russian and English posed no difficulty for me; I could puzzle my way through French; and I knew no German at all, so in doubtful cases I had to call in my father — unless, of course, an English abstract had been attached.

It was a blessing that in those earlier “golden days” inventors expressed themselves briefly — forgive the old man his grumbling — and an ordinary patent ran to two or three pages, ten at the absolute most. One fellow named Knauer managed with a single sentence, patenting a “Process of reincarnation or rebirth leading to immortality” — and that was that; just try getting around it. His process was based on combining Einstein’s theory of relativity with Newton’s second law. Later, I came across patents four hundred pages long and even five thousand pages, what my father called balanda — the watery gruel fed to prisoners in Soviet labor camps. Clearly, even if there were novelty in such patents, you could spend a lifetime trying to find it. Why people do that is a story for another time.

At first, Eleonora Vasilievna gave me seven applications — all in inorganic chemistry, though spread across very different subjects and classes. I set to work enthusiastically and quickly developed a taste for it. In the very first application, sent in by the Maridupol Metallurgical Combine, I found what was known as a “full analog”: an American patent from 1945 describing exactly the same “method for purifying nickel from impurities by treatment with strong alkali.” There were only two possibilities: either they had honestly reinvented the wheel in Maridupol, or they had expropriated the capitalists and hoped no one would notice. Being young, I leaned toward the second explanation, since the control experiments had been carried out at suspiciously similar temperatures and concentrations, but that was beside the point. The main thing was that I wrote a rejection and expected to collect my eleven silver pieces three months later.

Buoyed by success, I began “looking for treason,” that is, full analogs, in the other applications as well, feeling like an investigator for especially important cases. In my zeal, I did not stop at fifty years but reviewed everything in the folders all the way back to 1790 — and yes, patents that old did exist. My research often led to references to classified authors’ certificates kept in a special secret department of AUSRIPE. I was not too lazy to go there as well and, having obtained clearance, got hold of the document I needed. It was clear that some applicants had had that same clearance and had shamelessly borrowed ideas from secret inventions — try proving otherwise.

Remarkably, luck almost always favored me, and after about two weeks, I went to Eleonora Vasilievna with a report on my work: out of seven applications, five rejections, and two letters requesting additional information. At first, she was greatly surprised, but when she looked at the copies of the full analogs I had attached, and then at my beaming face, she softened a little and even smiled faintly at the extract I had made from a Belgian patent of 1918, from which the inventors at the Cheryapinsk Mining Institute had borrowed their central idea. “As a matter of fact, Dmitry Leonidovich,” she said, “in our department the rate of positive decisions is above ninety-eight percent, and we are aiming for ninety-nine. Still, let’s try once more.” And she handed me five more original applications.

Now it was my turn to be surprised, and I decided to ask my father for advice. He sketched the situation for me as follows: the full-time staff of the patent institute consisted mostly of someone’s wives and relatives; it was prestigious work, but no one was going to kill themselves over it. Most of them had the luxury of selecting applications in their own narrow specialty, just a few UDC classes. In the novelty-search form they wrote down the same first and last patent numbers as supposedly “reviewed” for each country — for example, Germany, checked from no. 345,000 (1930) to no. 657,000 (1980) — and they visited the patent library only rarely. On top of that, most of the examiners knew no foreign languages. Processing an ordinary application took half an hour, after which came the issuance of the author’s certificate and the fulfillment of the monthly plan: ten applications. Anything more complicated, or requiring specialized knowledge, was handed off to “freelance Negroes” — the Soviet term for the invisible drudges who did the real work.

I almost believed him, but decided to go on working honestly, and my father did not object too strongly, perhaps because he had been that kind of man himself. It is a pity I forgot to ask him then what his own rate of approvals had been. Now it is too late.

The next five applications resulted in three rejections, one request for more information, and, finally, one grant — a positive decision. The lucky one was a certain Shulgin, a lone applicant unconnected with any institution, who had invented a method of hardening some metal parts by ultrafast cooling — ten thousand degrees a minute. I assumed it must be a typo; nothing could cool that fast, so I sent him a query. Back came a very detailed and quite fascinating twenty-page explanation of the process theory, beginning, as such letters always did, with the words: “The respected examiner apparently fails to take into account...” The examiner was ashamed of his own ignorance and issued a positive decision.

Contrary to my expectations, I earned almost no money. Nearly all the applicants stubbornly challenged my rejections in writing and, despite the “full analogs,” demanded that the “respected examiner” take into account the “substantial difference” between the prototype and the original invention. The correspondence dragged on endlessly: under the rules, the applicant had two months to respond, and the case could not be closed until the deadline had expired; if they continued to object after the third rejection, the matter went to the AUSRIPE expert council, and at that point, I more or less lost contact with it. Applicants were very well informed about the procedures for reviewing applications.

So I worked that way for about a year and a half, spending two evenings a week in the building on Berezhkovskaya Embankment, and earned perhaps two hundred rubles. The denouement came when I received the fateful application for a “Method of obtaining carbon dioxide from natural waters.” The Bukhinsk Chemical Combine had submitted it, but it was signed by four distinguished academician-scientists from the Academy of Sciences of Absurdistan, headed by its president Alimakhliev, and only as the fifth coauthor did the chief engineer of the combine, Kheifetsov, appear. The substance of the invention was that hydrochloric acid was added to mineral or natural water, the released carbon dioxide was pumped into pressurized cylinders, and then sold for the production of carbonated beverages.

By then, my father had already explained to me that the Soviet state took inventiveness seriously and rewarded inventors materially. If you could prove that an invention or a rationalization proposal had actually been introduced into production, the authors and coauthors received up to two percent of the annual profit, though no more than twenty thousand rubles in total. Given that the average engineer’s salary at a factory was around two thousand a year, this was a very substantial bonus and a powerful stimulus to creativity — or at least to getting creativity onto paper. Still, there were genuine successes as well.

Back in the 1950s, my father had been a shop chief at the Dolgoprudny Photographic Materials Plant, which had been hauled out of Germany after the war as reparations. In one process, they were losing nearly half the product when the intermediate substance was crystallized from a methanol solution, then dissolved again in ethanol. My father became curious, dug out the German documentation from BASF, and discovered that after crystallization, the powder had simply been transported to another factory — why ship the solution? — where it was now dissolved in ethanol for the next reaction in the liquid phase. In Dolgoprudny, by iron Soviet logic, both German plants had been assembled in the same place, so my father proposed carrying out the reaction directly in methanol. It worked perfectly, the yield doubled, and the economic benefit came to six million rubles a year. Filing his rationalization proposal, my father, as the rules of the game required, included the shop’s chief engineer; the latter added the plant director and the chief technologist, but even after such a fair distribution of credit, my father still received five thousand rubles. With that money he bought a “Leningrad” television set. I happened to be born around then and was immediately in a position to watch my favorite “ Good Night, Little Ones.”

So, the academicians from Absurdistan had good reason to be eager for an author’s certificate, and they probably understood their chemistry well enough. At first, I treated the application as a joke and, without any search for analogs in the library and without much thought, wrote that it was common knowledge that when any strong acid, such as hydrochloric acid, acts on the salts of a weak acid, the weak acid is released from its salts. In the case of carbonic acid, it is released in the form of carbon dioxide. Natural water from mineral springs, for which Absurdistan was famous, naturally contains just such a dissolved salt — sodium bicarbonate. Since this was common knowledge, the issue of an author’s certificate was refused.

A month later, a reply came from Bukhinsk from Engineer Kheifetsov asking: where was this known to everyone from? I was briefly nonplussed, but then a chemistry textbook belonging to my younger brother happened to catch my eye. I leafed through it and suddenly there it was, the very reaction:

NaHCO3 + HCl = H2O + CO2 + NaCl

Eureka, I thought, that is another three rubles for a letter, and I wrote a second rejection citing a seventh-grade chemistry textbook, 1966 edition, page 78. That letter had the effect of a red rag on a bull. A week later, Eleonora Vasilievna summoned me, frightened out of her wits: President Alimakhliev had complained directly to the director of AUSRIPE, and she had got into serious trouble — nearly fired (if not for her husband in the ministry!) for a lack of proper supervision. In reality, of course, it was the freelance examiner who had to be dismissed, and my father could not help.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and I decided to apply to graduate school and stop chasing easy money. About half a year later, my father learned that the Expert Council had reached a positive decision on that application, and so a method of producing carbon dioxide by the action of hydrochloric acid on bicarbonate had officially been recognized as an invention. As for my eleven rubles for the rejection, they remained unpaid.

(c) Dimus, October 2017, rev.2 2026