This isn't useful without knowing the same numbers for 100+ years ago. Lincoln filed a patent on a mechanism to lift a boat over shoals and obstacles, which alm

This isn't useful without knowing the same numbers for 100+ years ago. Lincoln filed a patent on a mechanism to lift a boat over shoals and obstacles, which almost certainly wouldn't have worked and was never used. If almost no patented inventions were used in the 1800s then it's hard to use that as a metric for determining if the patent system has gotten worse.