(Ссылка на руссктй оригинал: "Патентный эксперт")
In the late 1970s, after graduating from Mendeleev Institute, I already had a family and worked as a research scientist at the Institute of Physical Chemistry. The times were stagnant, needs were modest, and we regularly returned empty wine bottles for a small income, but money was still tight. One day, my dad inquired about my affairs and mentioned that the ASRIPE was hiring freelance experts. I should note that my dad was also a chemist, or more accurately, I was too. The acronym stood for the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Patent Examination, and my dad had long been working as a freelance expert in the Organic Chemistry department. This institute dealt with issuing copyright certificates to Soviet inventors, as the term "patent" was reserved for capitalists and their lackey scientists and engineers. The vacancy was in the Inorganic Chemistry department and enticed by the prospect of some extra income, I decided to give it a try.
I was met by my supervisor, the staff expert Eleonora Vasilievna, affectionately (since I came not from the street but on my dad's recommendation), and she quickly briefed me on the job. A freelance expert receives an application for an invention and some accompanying documents: a list of authors, experiment results, expected economic effects, etc. His task is to check the application for novelty and, in the case of a positive decision, issue a copyright certificate. Payment is piecework: issuing a copyright certificate - 15 rubles, rejection - 11 rubles, and if there is correspondence with the authors, every letter is 3 rubles.
For those not familiar with patent matters, I will explain that to obtain a patent or copyright certificate, two conditions must be met: a) novelty, and b) usefulness of the invention. Novelty means that no one has proposed or made anything like it since the creation of the world, but practically, a patent expert must only check patents from the last 50 years and only from the six most important countries: the USSR, the USA, England, France, Germany, and Japan. If it's the year 1980, then checking should start from 1930.
And how do I check? Computers already existed, but computerization was just beginning, and it hadn't reached patent affairs. Everything was on paper, thankfully not on clay tablets. All inventions were thematically classified into classes, the list of which was called the UDC - Universal Decimal Classification. The numbering starts with major branches: 1-philosophy, 2-religion, 6-medicine, 5-mathematics and natural sciences. The next level is the sciences themselves: 54-chemistry, 53-physics, and so on. Then chemistry was divided into 544 - physical, 547-organic (my dad and mom), 546-inorganic (our young expert), and even more precisely coded: 546.3-metals, 546.59-gold, 546.74-nickel...
So, each initial application had to be classified according to the UDC, for example, "The method of nickel extraction from ore" was classified as 546.74-05. After that, I had to go to the patent library of ASRIPE and request six folders for each country separately, where patents related to this class were stored, review every file in each folder, read at least the abstracts, and if you see something similar to your application, then read the entire patent. When reaching the year 1930, I could stop, check the search form, and move on to the next country. Sometimes one folder had about 50 patents, but usually around 10-20. I had no problem with Russian and English, struggled with French, and didn't know German at all, so I had to ask my dad to translate if there was no English abstract attached.
It's fortunate that inventors used to present everything concisely (Grandpa wanted to grumble), and an ordinary patent fit into 2-3 pages, a maximum of 10. Some guy named Knauer even managed to patent "A process of reincarnation or rebirth which results in immortality" in a single sentence, and that's it—try to get around that! The process was based on combining Einstein's theory of relativity with Newton's second law. Later, I encountered patents with 400 pages or more, even 5000 pages, as my dad called such patents, "balanda" - a diluted porridge they fed in Soviet labor camps. Even if there is novelty in such a patent, finding it would "take a lifetime." Some other time I'll tell you why this is done on purpose.
To start, Eleonora Vasilievna gave me 7 applications—all in inorganic chemistry but on very different topics and classes. I eagerly took on the task and quickly got into the swing of things. For the very first application sent from the Marisupol Metallurgical Plant, I found a so-called "full analog," i.e., an American patent from 1945, where the "method of purifying nickel from impurities by treatment with strong alkali" was directly described in the same way. There were two options: either they genuinely "invented the bicycle" in Marisupol, or they expropriated capitalists, hoping no one would notice. In my youth, I leaned toward the second option: the verification experiments were set up at remarkably similar temperatures and concentrations, but that didn't matter, most importantly, I wrote a refusal letter and expected to receive my 11 silver coins in three months.
Thrilled with my success, I started "hunting for betrayal" everywhere, meaning finding full analogs for other applications, and feeling like the principal investigator on vital assignments. I didn't limit my search to 50 years and reviewed everything in the folders up to the year 1790 (there were even such old patents). Often, my searches led to references to “closed” patent certificates stored in a special secret department of ASRIPE. I didn't mind going there and having granted access, getting the sought-after document. It felt like some patent inventors also had such access and shamelessly borrowed ideas from secret inventions—hard to check.
Surprisingly, luck often accompanied me, and approximately two weeks later, I went to Eleonora Vasilievna with a summary of the work done: 5 rejections and 2 letters requesting additional data. It seemed she was quite surprised, but after looking at the attached links to full analogs and my radiant face, she softened a bit and even smiled slightly, seeing my excerpt from the 1918 Belgian patent from which the inventors at the Cheryapinsk Mining Institute had borrowed their idea. "You know, Dmitry Leonidovich, in our department, the percentage of positive decisions is 98.5%, and we are striving for 99%, but let's try again," said Eleonora Vasilievna, giving me 5 more primary applications.
Now, I was puzzled and decided to seek advice from my dad. He outlined the situation for me as follows: mostly, the institute staff were someone's wives or relatives, and the job was prestigious, but no one wanted to strain too much. Most of them could choose applications in their narrow specialization—only a few UDC classes. In the search form for novelty, they recorded the same numbers of the first and last "viewed" patents for each country—e.g., Germany, checked from #345678 (1930) to #657890 (1980)—and rarely visited the patent library. Moreover, most experts did not read or speak foreign languages. Processing a regular application took half an hour, and then issuing an author's certificate, meeting the plan (10 applications per month), or 15 rubles if the work was piece-rate. Anything more complicated or requiring special knowledge was given to external freelancers like me. I almost believed him but decided to continue working honestly, and my dad didn't object much, probably because he was like that himself. Regretfully, I forgot to ask him back then about his own approval rate, and now it's too late.
Reviewing the 5 new applications resulted in three rejections, one inquiry, and finally, one approval—a positive decision. The lucky one was a certain Shulgin, who had no connection to any organization—a lone applicant. He invented a method of quenching certain parts by rapid cooling: 10,000 degrees per minute. I thought it was a typo—can't be that fast—and sent him a request. In response, I received a very detailed and interesting description of the process theory on 20 pages, starting, as usual, with "Respected expert apparently doesn't take into account...". The expert was ashamed of his own illiteracy and wrote a positive decision.
Contrary to my expectations, I received almost no money. Almost all applicants persistently contested my refusals in writing, despite the "full analogs," and demanded that the "respected expert" take into account the "significant difference" between the prototype and the original invention. The correspondence dragged on endlessly: according to the rules, the applicant was given 2 months to respond, and the case could not be closed until the deadline, and if they objected even after my third rejection, the case was transferred to the Expert Council of ASRIPE, and I sort of was taken of the process. The applicants were well-informed about the procedure.
So, I worked for about a year and a half, practically spending two evenings a week at the institute building on Berezhkovskaya Quai, and earned maybe 200 rubles. The final resolution was reached after I received the “fatal” application for the "Method of obtaining carbon dioxide from mineral waters." It was submitted by the Bukhinsk Chemical Plant, but it was signed by four prominent academics from the Academy of Sciences of Absurdistan, headed by its president Alimahliev, and the chief engineer of the plant, Heifetzoff, was the fifth co-author. The essence of the invention was that mineral (natural) water was treated with hydrochloric acid, and the resulting carbon dioxide was pumped into cylinders under pressure and sold as a reagent for the production of carbonated water.
By that time, my dad had already told me that the Soviet government encouraged invention and financially rewarded inventors. If it was possible to prove that the invention had been implemented in production, the authors and co-authors received 2% of the annual profit, but not more than 20,000 rubles in total. Considering that the average engineer's salary at the plant was about 2,000 a year, it was a decent addition and a stimulus for creativity. Often, some process was improved simply by introducing elementary control, for example, putting up security and limiting the theft of components, and the savings were explained by the effect of some invention, earning them this 2%. So, the academics were not in vain in striving to get an author's certificate.
At first, I treated this application as a joke and, without searching for analogs and without much thought, wrote that it was well known that when a strong acid (hydrochloric) acts on the salts of a weak acid (carbonic in this case), this 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 sources, for which Absurdistan is famous, contains precisely such dissolved salt – sodium bicarbonate. Since this is common knowledge, I had to reject the issuance of the author's certificate.
A month later, I received a response from Bukhinsk with a question from Heifetzoff: “Where is it well known?” I pondered a little, but then I came across my younger brother's chemistry textbook. I flipped through it and suddenly saw this very reaction:
NaHCO3 + HCl = H2O + CO2 + NaCl
Eureka, I thought. I will get another three rubles for the letter, and I wrote a repeated rejection with a reference to the “7th-grade Chemistry Textbook, Moscow, 1966, page 78”... Eventually, the effect was like a red flag to a bull: a week later, Eleanor Vasilyevna called me, terrified. President Alimahliev had complained directly to the director of ASRIPE, and she was in serious trouble – she was almost laid off (if it weren't for her husband in the Ministry of Transportation!) for the lack of proper control. In reality, they settled to fire the freelance expert, and my dad couldn't help.
Everyone sighed with relief, and I decided to enter graduate school and not chase easy money anymore. Around six months later, my dad informed me that the Expert Council had made a positive decision on the Absurdistan application. However, I never managed to get money for my expert work.
© Dimus, October 2017
English translation ChatGPT 3.5, 2023
Really funny
As usual