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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Links back to a blog post wherein P.T.Barnum and his "there's a sucker born every minute" line is discussed, but no hint of the number or other identification/content for the alleged patent application[1] is. Intriguing, but dubious.

[1] - ETA.

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Its probably a hoax, its too close not to be, but when I saw the preview for the movie "Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter" I thought, now that is not a combination I would expect, and of course "Abraham Lincoln - Patent Troll" would be equally unexpected. However, if you were doing a work of fiction you would have the descendents of Abe, who had slowly, patiently, keep the application alive in the patent office for over 167 years by tweaking the wording, a modest change there, only to have it issue in 2012 just before Facebook goes public.

Ok, its more like a National Treasure plot but still.

Despite Lincoln having four sons sadly he has no living descendants. His line ended 1985 with the death of his 81 year old great-grandson.

There is a disputed descendent, born 1968 and today living in Florida, but his DNA was never tested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Lincoln_Beckwith

It's curious that his lineage dying out is an example of a very counter-intuitive theory - that the one person who is the common ancestor of everyone alive today lived as recently as the time of Christ. Basically very few people keep their genetic lines open for more than a few generations, those that do are ancestors of enormous numbers of us.

http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf

One could always contact the Lincoln Museum. Lincoln might have prepared the application but not filed it.

The story is he filed it but it was denied.

I'm suspicious, but it doesn't seem completely out of the realm of possibility.

Lincoln did own a newspaper in Springfield, and he did actually own a patent on a completely unrelated topic.

This is all a secret conspiracy to get people to visit the Lincoln Museum.

Except that it mentions the response from the patent office that his application was denied.

The original article states that the author was physically presented this rejected patent application at the Lincoln museum.

Can't find a single mention of the Springfield Gazette in relation to Lincoln via Google, or at the Lincoln Museum site. Also can't find any evidence in searching, that the Springfield Gazette has ever existed. Certainly is suspicious.

You didn't try very hard...

http://www.mtpulaskiil.com/175th/175th-HistoryOfMtPulaski/Hi...

"A few years before, Mr. Lincoln had purchased the newspaper, The Springfield Gazette, which was a German-written newspaper that he had delivered to Mount Pulaski and other parts of central Illinois that had heavy German populations."

That said, I'm pretty sure this blog post is a piece of fiction. The "privacy controls" section is pretty telling IMHO.

It's a neat story, but I am suspicious too. The photo in the Springfield Gazette is a mirror image of this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abelincoln1846.jpeg . Wikipedia claims this photo is from 1846, but the newspaper is from 1845. Also, I would be surprised if a photo could be printed with that level of detail in 1845.

I wonder if this more of a tribute to P.T. Barnum (the first subject mentioned in the article) than Abraham Lincoln.

Remember they didn't have raster images in 1845. That would have been a physical stamp of some kind that was inked and pressed along with the type (or maybe afterward, since this seems to be a one-off). The historian in the story claims Lincoln used this picture a lot, so it's likely that he commissioned a physical block made for this purpose, quite high-quality and reusable in multiple publications.

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