Early photograph of the neoclassical Patent Office Building used as the exhibition's key image

National Portrait GalleryPenn Quarter / Chinatown

The Spirit of Invention: Patent Office and Patentees

Now showing26 June 2026 – 6 June 2027Free

The museum turns its lens on its own building: the early Patent Office, told through portraits of Andrew Jackson, Samuel Morse and Lincoln, the only president to hold a patent.

Exhibition website

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On now All of October 2026

On Valentine's Day 1860, Henrietta Green Batty got a patent for a spring egg cup that threw out the empty shell, so breakfast could be eaten "with unsoiled hands" and without "the annoying heat of the egg." The Patent Office issued it in this building, and the letters patent is on view here.

The Portrait Gallery's home was built between 1836 and 1867 as the Patent Office, and this small show tells that story from the museum's own collection. You meet Andrew Jackson, who signed the 1836 law, in a painted miniature, and the architect Robert Mills, who designed it to be fireproof. Then the patentees: Samuel Morse and the airship builder Solomon Andrews in daguerreotypes, and Lincoln, the only president to hold a patent. In a city that runs on federal paperwork, the one in the frame is for an egg cup.

It fills the Early Photography Alcove on the first floor. Admission is free, and the museum is open daily from 11:30am to 7pm.

Look for

Henrietta Batty's egg cup patent
Look for the 1860 letters patent for a "spring egg cup" that ejected the shell, issued to a Massachusetts mother of three in this same building.
The 1869 engraving of patent examiners
Look for Patent Office staff combing through drawers, drawn during the postwar flood of applications, when 1867 alone brought 13,015 patents.
Thaddeus Lowe's 1862 tintype
A Civil War-era portrait of the inventor whose portable hydrogen generator filled the Union army's reconnaissance balloons.