James Jay Mapes received the first patent in the United States for artificial fertilizer on this date. A former professor of Chemistry, he had developed the use of a super-phosphate of lime on his farm near Newark, New Jersey. Phosphates were to transform American farming methods. Mapes died in January, 1866. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Travis Brown, Popular Patents: America's first inventions from the airplane to the zipper (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 86.