10 Most Influential Patents of All Time

The patent system exists to encourage disclosure. In exchange for a time-limited monopoly, inventors must explain exactly how their invention works — creating a public record that others can learn from, build on, and eventually use freely.

Some of those disclosures changed everything. Here are ten patents whose influence extends far beyond their formal term.

1. Bell's Telephone — US174465 (1876)

Alexander Graham Bell filed his telephone patent on February 14, 1876 — the same day as a competing caveat from Elisha Gray. Bell's filing arrived hours earlier. He got the patent. Gray got a footnote.

US174465 claimed a method for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically by inducing undulatory current in the circuit. The claims were sweeping — so broad that Bell's lawyers used them to successfully argue that any technology transmitting speech as electrical signals infringed.

The patent expired in 1893. Within years, hundreds of independent telephone companies formed. Bell's company (the future AT&T) survived through infrastructure control, not patents.

Status: Expired. In public domain.

2. Edison's Lightbulb — US223898 (1880)

Edison wasn't the first to create an incandescent light. Joseph Swan patented one in England. But Edison's US223898, filed in 1879, covered the specific carbon filament and high-resistance approach that made practical electric lighting commercially viable.

The patent's real achievement was the system around it: Edison filed numerous related patents covering power generation, distribution, and metering, building a patent thicket around the entire electric lighting ecosystem.

Status: Expired. In public domain. Browse this patent at /patent/us/223898.

3. Wright Brothers' Airplane — US821393 (1906)

Orville and Wilbur Wright flew at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. US821393, granted in 1906, covered their "wing-warping" system for controlling lateral balance — the key innovation that made controlled flight possible.

The patent led to years of debilitating litigation with Glenn Curtiss and others. Many historians argue the Wright Brothers' aggressive patent enforcement actually held back American aviation development. The US government ultimately brokered a cross-licensing arrangement during World War I to break the deadlock.

Status: Expired. In public domain.

4. The Transistor — US2524035 (1950)

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947. US2524035 (and related patents) covered the point-contact transistor — the fundamental switching device that replaced vacuum tubes and enabled modern electronics.

AT&T, recognizing that transistors would be everywhere, made a historic decision: license the patents broadly at minimal cost rather than enforce them exclusively. The result was an explosion of transistor-based products and companies — including the firms that would become Silicon Valley.

Status: Expired. In public domain.

5. The Laser — US2929922 (1960)

Gordon Gould filed application notes for what he called LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in 1957. Patent battles over who invented the laser — Gould, or Townes and Schawlow at Bell Labs — lasted decades. Gould's key patents weren't issued until the 1970s and 1980s, by which point laser technology was already widespread.

US2929922, associated with Schawlow and Townes, was one of the foundational filings. The laser patent wars were eventually settled through cross-licensing, with Gould's company collecting hundreds of millions in royalties on patents that issued long after the technology was invented.

Status: Expired. In public domain.

6. PageRank — US6285999 (2001)

Larry Page's PhD research at Stanford produced the algorithm that became Google's original search ranking system: PageRank, which treated links as votes, weighting them by the importance of the linking page.

Stanford licensed US6285999 to Google in exchange for equity — a deal that ultimately netted Stanford approximately $336 million when Google went public. The patent expired in 2011, but by then Google had moved far beyond PageRank as its primary ranking signal.

Status: Expired. In public domain. Browse at /patent/us/6285999.

7. The MP3 — US5579430 (1996)

Fraunhofer Institute's MPEG audio layer 3 patents, including US5579430, covered the compression technology that made digital music portable. The patents generated over $100 million in licensing revenue annually during their enforcement period.

Their expiration in 2017 was quietly significant: the patents that powered the entire early digital music industry — Napster, early iTunes, the first iPod — entered the public domain. The announcement from Fraunhofer was almost anticlimactic given that streaming had already displaced downloaded files.

Status: Expired. In public domain.

8. iPhone Touchscreen — US7966578 (2010)

Apple's US7966578, one of several core iPhone touchscreen patents, covered methods for processing multi-touch gestures — the ability to recognize pinch, spread, and rotate gestures as distinct inputs separate from single-touch scroll.

This patent became a central exhibit in Apple v. Samsung, one of the largest patent disputes in history. Samsung paid Apple over $500 million in related damages across multiple proceedings. The litigation reshaped how Android manufacturers designed their touch interfaces.

Status: Expired. In public domain. Browse at /patent/us/7966578.

9. CRISPR Gene Editing — US10000772 (2018)

The patent covering CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in eukaryotic cells (cells with nuclei — including human cells) has been the subject of one of the most expensive patent disputes in biotech history. The Broad Institute (MIT/Harvard) and UC Berkeley have spent tens of millions litigating priority over who invented CRISPR's key applications.

US10000772, held by the Broad Institute, covers the specific application that makes CRISPR commercially significant for medicine. The underlying science was shared by multiple researchers; the patent rights were not.

Status: Active. In force. Browse at /patent/us/10000772.

10. mRNA Vaccine Platform — US10702600 (2020)

The mRNA lipid nanoparticle delivery technology that made COVID-19 vaccines possible traces through a web of patents, principally developed by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman at Penn and licensed to Moderna and BioNTech. US10702600 and related patents cover the modified mRNA approach that bypasses immune rejection.

These patents are currently central to litigation between Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech over COVID vaccine royalties — a dispute worth billions. The outcome will shape how mRNA vaccine IP is governed for the next decade.

Status: Active. In force.

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What these patents share

None of these inventors got rich from the patent alone. Bell's monopoly was built on network infrastructure. Edison's on manufacturing and distribution. Page's equity came from building the search engine, not from the algorithm. The mRNA vaccine inventors are still fighting over royalties decades after the research.

Patents create the window of exclusivity. What you build inside that window determines whether the patent was worth anything.

PatentBrief is not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice.