Patents serve to uphold the myth of the “self-made American inventor” and act as a marker for civilization used to justify racialization and erasure of the legacy of Black innovation.

However, Baker’s task in situating African Americans within this cultural framework was a difficult one. In the frenzy not only to assess new inventions, but to use their numbers and categories to assess American progress through the precious national commodity of “Yankee ingenuity,” late nineteenth-century discussions of inventiveness were increasingly confined to the patent record rather than to inventive activity more broadly, as these discussions had long been understood.1 Lists of new patents and patentees peppered the pages of Scientific American and were published weekly in a USPTO digest. These were analyzed and discussed in widely circulating newspaper and magazine articles bearing titles like “Uncle Sam’s Latest Triumphs”(2) and “Women Prove Inventive Genius Through Patent Office Record” (3). Such articles drew primarily from the patent record to advance arguments about the contributions of various groups, industries, and regions to American power and productivity, and to situate them as worthy citizens. As Baker well understood and as historian Rayvon Fouche has since noted, “inventions that received the federal stamp of approval with a patent confirmed that black people could achieve civilization” (21). However, until 1865, enslaved people had been legally disqualified from owning any property at all, including patents (Johnson).2 Even at the time of Baker’s writing, racial discrimination among lawyers and financiers made it difficult for Black inventors to patent their work (Fouche 14). Patent numbers were thus a poor record of their long legacy of inventive contributions to the young nation. Baker’s efforts were further complicated by the USPTO’s color-blind application system, in which applicants were not invited to disclose their race.3 He notes that although “something over 1200 instances have been gathered as representing patents granted to colored inventors . . . so far only about 800 of these have been verified as definitely belonging to that class” (6). And, despite the often-touted low cost of patenting in the United States compared to other nations, the $30 to $35 initial fee and periodic renewal costs were a barrier for many Americans, African American and otherwise (Khan164). As a result, many Black inventors would simply put their inventions into circulation without patenting them. Others would attempt to assign their new patents to someone else who could better afford the costs of manufacturing their innovation. Fearing discrimination, Baker notes, still others would actively conceal their racial identity in attempting to promote their inventions (6). Within this context, it was extremely difficult for Baker to document Black invention through the patent record, even as he reminded readers of all of African Americans’ unpatented inventive activity over the previous two centuries. In the many years since Baker’s writing, patents have remained central to American conceptions of technology, innovation, and ideal citizenship. More than any other genre, the patent sustains the mythology of the self-made American inventor as (White, male) ideal citizen. In addition to protecting the profitability of a particular idea or design for a person who has secured a patent, patents function rhetorically to materialize the persistent myth that inventions are the work of a single person—a Romantic “citizen creator” (Vats 47)—and accomplished through sheer ingenuity rather than the ongoing, widely dispersed efforts of people working within a community of practice. Likewise, the equation of the official document of the patent with the human capacity of ingenuity disguises the biases within the patent system and within patent law itself, which rhetorician and legal scholar Anjali Vats has argued continues to affirm racial scripts that center White men’s inventive efforts (15). In order to broaden our understanding of the history of invention, then—to address distortions in the way we understand who has invented, under what conditions, through what avenues, and for what purposes—we must both consider the challenges of patenting and develop methods for examining the inventive activities of those who have operated largely outside the patent system. Such a pivot aligns well with calls from technical communication scholars such as Angela Haas, who has argued for the need to seek out “diverse and underrepresented histories of technological use, production, and expertise” (304). So, too, does it reflect Natasha N. Jones, Kristen R. Moore, and Rebecca Walton’s desire for an “antenarrative” of the field of technical communication to provide a “poly-vocal, dynamic, and fragmented—yet highly interconnected” and “nondominant . . . narrative[...] about the work our field can and should do” (212). Heeding such calls means both interrogating the centrality of the patent to our narratives about invention and considering how attending to other sorts of texts might reveal forms of innovation that remain, for a variety of reasons, unpatented. Heeding these calls also means we must question old methodological assumptions about what constitutes definitive or even viable evidence of technical or inventive activity. Here, I draw from feminist rhetorical historiographers Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s concept of “critical imagination” to “think between, above, around, and beyond” the patent (71) in order to glimpse “something not previously noticed or considered” (72) as evidence of inventive activity. Because I am shifting my attention from the individual patent holder as “the” sole inventor to the shared, ongoing inventive activities of communities, I am not so much interested in locating an individual’s sketches, journals, or models of specific invented objects as in the circulation of shared and contested knowledge about broader areas of invented activity. As a result, I use Royster and Kirsch’s concept of “social circulation” as a means of seeing “how ideas circulate[d] . . . across places and regions in local, global, and transnational contexts” (99) through artifacts not traditionally associated with invention, such as instructions, newspaper articles, and correspondence. In what follows, I offer the patent as a site for exclusions and erasures, understanding it much like the mid-twentieth-century voter applications that Natasha Jones and Miriam Williams have investi-gated: as appearing to be “objective and neutral” while actually functioning “as a technology of disenfranchisement” (371). Whereas voter applications directly disenfranchise individuals, patents are systemically implicated in a broader cultural project of disenfranchisement that contributes to the long-standing equation between technological innovation and American citizenship, while simultaneously limiting how we define innovation and invention. As I suggest, the patent has functioned in this way because of the resources, literacies, and professional networks required to complete the application process; the competitive, individualistic, profit and linear progress-driven understanding of invention that it helped materialize; and its cultural significance in affirming the centrality of White, male citizenship as the standard against which all others might be measured. In addition to considering the patent as a genre of exclusion, I suggest that our ways of understanding, imagining, studying, and encouraging invention and innovation are themselves culturally and rhetori-cally situated “innovation rhetorics” through which we limit our imaginings of where, when, and to what ends innovation occurs. The US patent system materializes one rhetoric of innovation, affirming an individualistic, competition and profit-based innovation rhetoric that assumes a linear narrative of progress and contributes to the maintenance of a gendered and racialized ideal citizen inventor. It is because of this dominant rhetoric that our conception of technology remains so stubbornly tethered to mechanical, digital, and industrial realms (Gurak and Bayer; Oldenziel) and “new” innovations (Haas288). Identifying and situating innovation rhetorics helps us to denaturalize these ways of thinking. Additionally, innovation rhetorics help us understand that what counts as “relevant” evidence of inventive activity will vary depending on the historical and cultural context, which will help us to more effectively take up Baker’s project of recognizing invention beyond the patent. In short, I argue that scholars ought to undertake projects that understand invention as a collective activity in which members of a community of practice address a shared set of problems or tensions; utilize similar spaces, tools, and procedures in addressing these problems; and work through similar channels of funding, knowledge, and power. Such research involves the exploration of “innovation ecoystems,” a term coined by scholars in management studies to describe how innovation is encour-aged or incentivized in contemporary, industry, national, and global contexts.5 The concept might be usefully adapted to historical contexts to help delineate the unique systems through which innovations are shaped, enabled, and constrained, absent or in tangent with patents. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to fully delineate any one innovation ecosystem, here I offer a glimpse at one historical example of an ecosystem possessing its own innovation rhetorics that, because they do not always reflect the individualistic, competitive, profit-oriented, and linear thrust of our dominant innovation rhetorics, we might easily overlook as “inventive.”