id author title date pages extension mime words sentences flesch summary cache txt en-wikipedia-org-874 Timeline of United States inventions (after 1991) - Wikipedia .html text/html 4650 567 62 Patent protection secures a person's right to his or her first-to-invent claim of the original invention in question, highlighted in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution which gives the following enumerated power to the United States Congress: 109) into law which proclaimed that patents were to be authorized for "any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement therein not before known or used."[4] On July 31, 1790, Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont became the first person in the United States to file and to be granted a patent for an improved method of "Making Pot and Pearl Ashes."[5] The Patent Act of 1836 (Ch. 357, 5 Stat. The renowned American physicist and engineer Eric Fossum invented the CMOS image sensor while working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.[9][need quotation to verify] On January 28, 1994, Fossum filed U.S. patent #5,471,515, which was issued to him on November 28, 1995.[10] ./cache/en-wikipedia-org-874.html ./txt/en-wikipedia-org-874.txt