Edward W. Byrn

Edward W. Byrn was an American patent attorney and former examiner in the United States Patent Office in Washington. His experience there gave him an unusual overview of the inventions of his century, and in 1900 he published The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century, an illustrated survey, drawn largely from patent records, of the telegraph, telephone, electric light, railway, steamship, photography, the phonograph and dozens of other advances that had transformed daily life since 1800. The book, written for general readers, remains a useful record of how the century understood its own achievements.