a permanent condition, you know as well as I do; but before that time we had no trouble in getting good men through the civil service, and the test that they give those men for entrance to the office is quite severe. That is bad enough; but, worse than that, we can not keep the men who are there. We are losing now about 25 per cent of our examining corps every year. Twenty-five per cent of them are going out by resigning. There is a tremendous demand for scientifically trained men just at this time, and those men will not stay in the Patent Office for the salaries that they are paid. Now, I see that the committee has presented to you a bill for an increase in those salaries. You are not bound by those specific increases, but we must have something to keep us going, or else the office is going to deteriorate seriously. The CHAIRMAN. Can you have the chief clerk give us some idea as to the turnover in your force from year to year? Mr. NEWTON. Yes, sir; I have that data here, and I will submit it in record form. I want to submit, Mr. Chairman, as it will show you better than I can tell you, the last civil-service examination for admission to the Patent Office. With your permission, I will put this into the record and you can look it over. Mr. MACCRATE. Which grade does it cover? Mr. NEWTON. It covers the lowest grade, or the grade of fourth assistant examiner. There is no examination after that, but they are promoted. We have in the Patent Office at present a system of promotions of this kind: We have an examination about once a year or once every two years, or as soon as the list is exhausted, on patent law and practice. It covers the work that they actually have to do in the Patent Office and we grade those clerks according to the standing that they make on that examination and promote them right down the list. We take into consideration other things than what the examination shows. For instance, we take into consideration the length of service, a man's reputation for good work, attention to duty, industry, etc. They are promoted right down the list, from grade to grade, until they get to be primary examiners. I will submit this statement, showing the last examination for appointment to the Patent Office. (The matter referred to is as follows:) SUBSTANCE OF QUESTIONS ON TECHNICS. [Time estimate 31 hours.] 1. Manufacture of porcelain, steps in process. 2. Production of zince oxide: (a) American process, (b) French process, (c) manufacture of vulcanized rubber. 3. What are the uses of tungsten, chromium, nickel, and ferrosilicon and ferromanganese in metallurgy. Give chemical and physical effects of each. 4. Manufacture of carbide, calcium carbide, carborundum, carbon disulphide; give reactions of each; give description of furnaces in their production. 5. Name five sources of fertilizer; description and preparation of each ready for use. 6. Production of copper; copper matte through refining. 7. Describe a shrapnel shell ready for use. 8. Describe a 5-kilowatt radio set; installation; diagram connections for sending and receiving apparatus. 9. Give methods, sketch, and diagram electrical production of nitrates from the atmosphere. 10. Construction and operation of a uniflow steam engine; (a) Diesel oil engine; (b) sketch ideal indicator cards, discuss thermal and mechanical efficiency of each. 11. What are the advantages and disadvantages of compression and absorption system of refrigeration. Discuss installation using one of each. What are the advantages and disadvantages of carbon dioxide and of air as refrigerants. 12. Describe the construction of a large, modern gun for coast defense or naval use. 13. Discuss theoretical tooth outlines used in gears, the practical process of gear cutting; mention what extent the fundamental gear deviates from the theoretical line. 14. Describe the mechanical construction of a constant current transformer used with series street-lighting system; name sources of loss in a transformer and relative amounts at no load and at full load current. 15. What is picric acid; from what made; from what are its constituents made; for what used; give chemical actions in (a) and (b). Manufacture of black or smokeless powder. Two questions from first six and three from last nine required. PHYSICS. 1. Define (a) dyne, (b) amplitude, (c) beats, (d) occlusion, (e) impedence. 2. Explain a slide, wire, Wheatstone bridge, and explain fully the method of using it. 3. Cubic sheet of metal 100 sq. cm., 6 mm. thick, is exposed to a temperature of 100° C. on one side and 0° C. on the other. Find the time traversing the plate. Sp. cond. of cu. 713. 713X100X1X100 4. (a) Define the first and second laws of electro dynamics, (b) define isothermal expansion, (c) define adiabatic expansion. 5. (a) Make a drawing and explain fully the operation of the ordinary force pump, (b) Sprengel air pump. 6. (a) State five types of simple machines, (b) define mechanical advantage, (c) define efficiency of a machine. 7. (a) Describe fully the principles of the gyroscope, (b) explain precession, (c) give two distinct examples of gyroscopic action. 8. (a) Explain radio activity, (b) the X ray. 9. Describe Kuntz's method for determining the velocity of sound. 10. (a) Describe Fresnels biprism, (b) draw and explain the diffraction grating. 11. Three hundred grams of shot at 100° C. are dropped into a glass beaker weighing 30 grams and containing 60 grams of water at 0° C. and 2 grams of ice. What will be the final temperature sp. heat of glass 2; lead 0.0315. CHEMISTRY. 1. Define (1) colloid, (2) halogen, (3) ketone, (4) aldehyde, (5) paraffin. 2. Name two reducing agents, two oxidizing agents. Give a chemical reaction illustrating each. 3. Describe the preparation of chloroform giving the chemical reactions (by formulas). 4. Describe manufacture of glucose (by formulas). 5. Qualitative analysis (1 question). 6. Structural formulas of isorpropyl, etc. (1) What is meant by primary, secondary, and tertiary alcohol. 7. Complete and balance five reactions. 8. Give complete description of manufacture of Fe. 9. How much MnO2 is required to react with hydrogen chloride to form 100 grams of chloride? 10. Where are the principal deposits of sodium nitrate found, for what is it used, and what is its commercial industrial value in the arts? MATHEMATICS. Answer any five. 1. What common fraction when written as a decimal is .1234? Give your process in full? α b 2. If a and b are real and have like signs prove that + >1 for all 26 2u values? 3. Give the angles and the sum of the sides of a triangle, to construct the triangle. 4. If two parallel planes are cut by a transversal plane, prove that the intersections are parallel. 5. If the span of a parabolic curve is 40 feet at its base and the crown is 12 feet above the ground, what is the span of the arch at 3 feet below the crown? 6. Find the cordinates of a point equidistant from the points (3,2) and (-3,4) the slope of whose return to the center is on the line to (1,5). 7. Given the ellipse x2+3y=28, and the two points, (5,1) and (−4.2), find the coordinates of the point on the ellipse such that the triangle formed by joining these points has a maximum value. 8. In any plane triangle whose circumscribing circle has a radius of r, prove that 2 sin C' 9. Find the limiting value of (log x/x)/ when x is infinite. If u=yx prove d'u that d'u dxdy dyda 10. Prove that: (a) 1+tan A-secA=0. cot A (b) sin (A+B) sin (A-B)=sin 2A-sin 2B. Mr. WHEELER. Did you say you have 85 vacancies? Mr. NEWTON. There are not 85 vacancies, but there are 85 fourth assistant examiners authorized, and we have not been able to fill all of the vacancies, or scarcely any of them, through civil-service examinations. The CHAIRMAN. What is the status of those men now? Are they civil-service employees or temporay employees? Mr. NEWTON. They are temporary employees. The CHAIRMAN. They have no civil-service status? Mr. NEWTON. No, sir. I can not put them under civil service or put them permanently in the civil service. The Civil Service Commission, because they could not furnish me any men, allowed me to appoint these men temporarily. They are only temporary appointees, and they will have to go as soon as the Civil Service Commission is able to furnish me the men. As I have said, they have not been able to furnish any since the war began, or very few. They have probably not furnished more than 6 or 8 men out of 100. There are some temporary appointees who have come in and stood the examination and then been made permanent in that way, but the Civil Service Commission has given me only about 6 or 8 men in the last two years when I needed about 100 from the outside. I put into the record the last civil-service examination, and you will see from that examination what is required in that grade. The committee might ask me, "Why do you not lower the grade?" Gentlemen, I am afraid to do it. You heard Judge Hand yesterday in his statement as to what these men are doing. These assistant examiners and primary examiners in the Patent Office are doing identically the same work that the Federal judges are doing. Nine-tenths of the work of those examiners is this: They have a certain device here as shown in a patent, and here is another device, and the question is, "Is this device patenable over that?" That is all the work that the judge is doing in patent cases. In the circuit court of appeals the judges are doing in patent cases just what these men are doing. It is for these men that I am asking your assistance. They are passing on these questions, and they are questions that frequently involve immense amounts of money. I have allowed a patent myself that I was told paid royalties amounting to millions of dollars. To litigate this matter and allow an inventor to claim exactly what he is entitled to and prevent him from claiming anything that has been done previously by anyone else is one of the most difficult, intricate, and well-balanced problems that you can imagine. There has been a good deal said here by people from outside the office that might be misleading to the committee. I can not begin to mention all the matters, but there was a little thing a few days ago that I will call attention to. Mr. Fish remarked that it was a remarkable thing to him that there was nobody who had stolen anything in the Patent Office. The truth about the matter is that it is no temptation at all, because those inventions go through the Patent Office as a matter of course. We very seldom recognize an important invention. We have got to look at thousands of things that are presented to us, and all in about the same light. The patent that I referred to that I allowed several years ago and that became so valuable was one of those. I had no idea that it was so valuable at the time it was pending. Indeed, the inventor allowed his Canadian patent to forfeit in five years, because he did not think it amounted to anything. Yet it has been the life of the phonographic art itself. It is the flat disk record we see everywhere. As I have said, I have not been able to keep these men in office. Some time ago, a year ago, or even before the war, I took this problem up and tried to solve it. The German patent office probably, next to ours, is the biggest patent office in the world, and they have no resignations from their corps, or they are very seldom. Before the war, as I said, I tried to find out why the Germans had so few resignations as compared with our own Patent Office. In making that investigation we adopted this plan: We wrote to about all the men that had resigned from the Patent Office in the last four or five years, amounting to 128 people. We asked each one, "Why did you resign?" We put a series of questions to them, asking them such questions as these: "Why did you resign? What salary did you get when you left the office? What would you, now since you have resigned, recommend that the office should do to keep these men?" We got answers from a great many of them, or from most of them, and I would like to put a statement of that in the record, so that you can see what these men were thinking of. I will read you a little of it. In reply to the question as to what was the average salary they received when they resigned, their answers showed that out of 128 the average salary received was $1,882. That was the average salary when they resigned from the office, or the average salary of the 128 men was $1,882. The average salary received by them the first year after they resigned and went out into private business was $2,478. That was before the war, when things were not on the same basis as now. Some of those men had been out for four or five years, and we wanted to know what their salaries were at that time to see if they had kept going up faster than they would have done in the Patent Office, and from the answers received it appeared that the average salary or income, exclusive of office expenses, received by them at the time of the reply was $4,500, which they never would have received in the Patent Office, and that was about two or three years after they left the office. I would like to put this entire statement into the record. The CHAIRMAN. Without objection, it will be incorporated in the hearing. (The matter referred to is as follows:) Letters were addressed to 128 men who have resigned from the office during the years 1911-1917, inclusive, and 70 replies were received. The responses show that: The average salary received by the 70 who replied at the time of resignation was $1,882. The average salary received by them for the first year after resignation was $2.478, an increase of 31.6 per cent. The average salary (or income exclusive of office expenses) received by them at the time of the reply was $3,895, an increase of 107 per cent over that received just before resignation. Of these men 38 resigned during the year 1914, or prior thereto, and hence had been three or more years out of the office. The average salary of the 38 at the time of resignation was $1,852. The average salary of the 38 for the first year after resignation was $2,377, an increase of 28 per cent. The average salary (or income exclusive of office expenses) received by the 38 at the time of reply was $4,558, an increase of 145 per cent over that paid by the Government at the time of their resignation. Comparative statement showing salaries received in the Patent Office, salaries paid outside the Patent Office, and salaries proposed for corresponding grades of examiners under H. R. 6913. [Instances cited are of resignations occurring between May 1 and July 1, 1919.] The CHAIRMAN. Have you a tabulation showing how many of the men to whom you addressed that letter had resigned to take positions as patent advisers? Mr. NEWTON. I have a record that will show that. Mr. WHEELER. What do you pay the chief clerk? Mr. NEWTON. $3,000. Mr. WHEELER. Mr. Woolard resigned about a year ago. What does he receive now? Mr. NEWTON. He told me he was making from five to six thousand dollars. Mr. WHEELER. Did he not receive that position when he resigned from the position in the Patent Office on account of the knowledge he had acquired in patent law and patent procedure? 130836-19-13 |