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This Building Hosted Lincoln’s Inaugural Ball and Displayed the Declaration of Independence. Today, It’s Home to Two World-Class Art Museums
The Old Patent Office Building now houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. A new exhibition spotlights the structure’s rich history of encouraging innovation
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On Valentine’s Day in 1860, a Massachusetts woman named Henrietta Green Batty obtained a patent for an unusual invention: a “spring egg cup” that ejected the shell after the user finished eating a boiled egg. Outfitted with elastic springs, the device would enable diners to enjoy their breakfast “with unsoiled hands, with much greater convenience and without being exposed to the annoying heat of the egg,” the 35-year-old mother of three wrote in her patent application.
To secure her patent, Batty provided a written description of the egg cup, paid a $30 fee, and submitted both a drawing and a scale model of the device. Officials at the United States Patent Office then reviewed the application, issuing a letters patent that identified Batty as “the original and first inventor or discoverer of the said egg cup.”
More than a century and a half later, Batty’s letters patent is going on view in the same building where it was once issued. Located in downtown Washington, D.C., the Old Patent Office Building is now a historic landmark that houses two Smithsonian museums: the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). Batty’s invention is a highlight of “The Spirit of Invention: Patent Office and Patentees,” a new NPG exhibition that revisits the building’s early history, with a focus on how the site fostered ingenuity in the still-young nation.
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“The ability to patent inventions has long been a catalyst for innovation in the United States,” curator Ann Shumard says in a statement. Without the protections afforded by patents, Shumard tells Smithsonian magazine, “you would not have had the incentive needed for individuals to produce inventions that would ultimately serve the public.”
“The Spirit of Invention” relays the story of American creativity through photographs, artworks and artifacts from the gallery’s collections. Andrew Jackson, the president who authorized the Patent Office Building’s construction in 1836, and Abraham Lincoln, the only U.S. president to hold a patent, are both represented by watercolor portraits. Also on view are daguerreotypes of 19th-century innovators, including Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and Solomon Andrews, who developed dirigible airships in the 1860s.
Need to know: Abraham Lincoln’s patent
- In March 1849, Lincoln—who had just left office as congressman representing Illinois—applied to patent a device for “buoying vessels over shoals” by attaching “adjustable buoyant air chambers” to the sides of a boat.
- The model that Lincoln commissioned to accompany his application is housed in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
In addition to these portraits, the exhibition features images that trace the Patent Office Building’s evolution. Built in stages between 1836 and 1867, the structure was influenced by the architecture of ancient Greece, a style that “was very much in vogue at the time,” Shumard says. Unlike the Romanesque U.S. Capitol, whose design evoked “the oligarchic republic of Cato and Cicero,” the Patent Office Building’s Parthenon-inspired layout “saluted the grassroots democracy of ancient Greece—a vision more in keeping with Jackson’s own political ideals,” historian Adam Goodheart wrote for Smithsonian in 2006.
Patent Office employees moved into the still-unfinished building’s south wing in 1840. Much of the rest of the structure housed “a perpetual exhibition of the progress and improvement of the arts” in the U.S., wrote Henry Ellsworth, the nation’s first commissioner of patents, in a letter that same year.
Across 63 display cases, the exhibition space showcased patent models, scientific specimens from the 1838 Wilkes Expedition to the Pacific Ocean, European art acquired by local collector John Varden, objects brought back from Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry and national treasures that would soon join the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, among other artifacts. The Declaration of Independence resided in the Patent Office Building for 35 years; the tent where George Washington planned his strategy during the American Revolution also made an appearance.
At the exhibition’s height in the 1850s, more than 100,000 people visited annually, making the Patent Office Building one of the capital’s most popular tourist attractions. The space “was not only a site where the Patent Office examiners were reviewing patent applications,” Shumard says, but also, “in a sense, a museum. … It was inspiring for people to be able to come and see tangible evidence of the inventiveness” of their fellow Americans.
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Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, worked as a Patent Office clerk during this pivotal era in the federal agency’s history. Hired in 1854, she received a salary of $1,400 a year, making her “the first woman ever to be hired to a regular position in the U.S. government with work and wages equal to that of a man,” former patent examiner Kenneth W. Dobyns writes in The Patent Office Pony.
Barton’s male colleagues bullied her relentlessly, blowing smoke from their cigars into her face and spitting tobacco juice at her. Despite this harassment, Barton remained unfazed, telling a friend that “any blow that they could slanderously aim at me in these days would make about as much impression upon me a[s] a slingshot would upon the hide of a shark.”
During the Civil War, Barton balanced her duties as a temporary clerk (her full-time position was eliminated in 1857, but she was rehired on a part-time basis between 1860 and 1865) with her advocacy on behalf of wounded soldiers. Nicknamed the “angel of the battlefield,” Barton witnessed the brutal reality of war both on the front lines and at her place of employment.
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In 1861, members of the First Rhode Island Infantry Regiment were billeted in the Patent Office Building’s west wing. Later in the conflict, the building also served as a military hospital—a role that brought it to the attention of another famous figure, the poet and journalist Walt Whitman.
Like Barton, Whitman cared for sick and injured soldiers, playing games with the young men and reading to them aloud. As Whitman later wrote in his diary, the hospital beds scattered among “ponderous glass cases crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention” made for a “strange, solemn and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight.”
Toward the end of the Civil War, the Patent Office Building hosted Lincoln’s second inaugural ball—“the single most dramatic historic event to take place” within its walls, Charles J. Robertson, former deputy director of SAAM, writes in Temple of Invention. Held just five and a half weeks before Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, the ball boasted an extravagant menu of oyster and terrapin stew, lobster, pheasant, quail, and cakes and tarts galore.
Some 4,000 people attended the celebration, but for at least one guest, it served mainly as a reminder of the war’s toll. “Tonight, beautiful women, perfumes, the violins’ sweetness, the polka and the waltz,” Whitman wrote for the New York Times, “but then, the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of the old wounds and blood, and many a mother’s son amid strangers, passing away untended.”
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After the war’s end, the Patent Office received an influx of applications. In 1867 alone, examiners issued 13,015 patents—far more than the 10,000 the office had issued over the first 46 years of its existence, between 1790 and 1836. An 1869 engraving on view in “The Spirit of Invention” testifies to this period of immense productivity, showing some of the Patent Office’s roughly 320 employees combing through drawers as they evaluate the surge in submissions.
The Patent Office had moved to the new building in the aftermath of a December 1836 fire at its former home, Blodgett’s Hotel. The inferno destroyed the specifications and scale models for nearly 10,000 patents. Months prior, Jackson had unwittingly anticipated the tragedy when he authorized the construction of a new purpose-built, “fireproof building.” To meet this requirement, architect Robert Mills, whose portrait is featured in the exhibition, “devised an innovative system of masonry vaulting that elegantly spanned interior spaces without the aid of wood or iron,” Goodheart wrote in 2006.
Thomas U. Walter, the architect who succeeded Mills as head of the building project in 1851, strongly criticized this approach, implementing his own system of iron-reinforced vaulting in the north and west wings. Ultimately, however, Mills’ system proved to be most effective.
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When a blaze broke out in the building on September 24, 1877, the flames engulfed the roofs and ceilings of Walter’s wings, which collapsed into the exhibition halls below. Mills’ east wing—the only section of the historic building still standing today—escaped largely unscathed, but Walter’s “were severely damaged and had to be basically gutted and rebuilt,” Shumard says.
Although the financial losses inflicted by the 1877 fire were significantly higher than those associated with the 1836 inferno, “the information loss was only partial,” Dobyns writes in The Patent Office Pony. Some drawings and models were destroyed, but these inventions could still be reconstructed from their original written descriptions. “No patents were totally lost,” according to Dobyns.
The Patent Office remained in its historic home until 1932, when the agency moved into the Department of Commerce’s newly constructed headquarters. The Civil Service Commission assumed control of the building, subjecting this “noble edifice” to “abuses and ‘modernization,’” as Robertson puts it in Temple of Invention.
Workers installed fluorescent lighting, laid linoleum over the marble floors and painted the walls “institutional green.” When the commission vacated the site in 1953, a congressman suggested razing the building. His proposed replacement? “That great monument of the American 1950s: a parking lot,” Marc Pachter, then-director of the Portrait Gallery, told Smithsonian in 2006.
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Luckily, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened. The effort to save the structure was “an early example of the push for historic preservation, which was really just beginning in the mid-1950s,” Shumard says. From there, Congress transferred possession of the building to the Smithsonian, which opened its dual art museums in 1968, after extensive renovations.
Fifty-eight years after SAAM (then known as the National Collection of Fine Arts) and NPG first welcomed visitors, “The Spirit of Invention” invites the public to reconsider the structure’s storied place in American history. From a portrait of Seth Boyden, an inventor who perfected the process for crafting malleable cast iron, to a photograph of Peter Cooper, whose work as a glue manufacturer inadvertently gave rise to the sweet treat Jell-O, the exhibition underscores the Patent Office Building’s role in fostering innovation across the centuries.
“At every stage of its development, this was intended to be a building of the future,” Pachter told Smithsonian in 2006. “It was meant to be organic, optimistic, exuberant.”
“The Spirit of Invention: Patent Office and Patentees” is on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery from June 26, 2026, to June 6, 2027.
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