X-Patent
On July 31, 1790 inventor Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont became the first person to be issued a patent in the United States. His patented invention was an improvement in the "making of Pot Ash by a new apparatus & process." The earliest patent law required that a working model of each invention be produced in miniature.
Aileron
Others who were previously thought to have been the first to introduce ailerons included:
Regardless of the 1868 Boulton patent and the extensive prior art created by multiple other experimenters, the Wright Brothers' Ohio patent attorney Henry Toulmin filed an expansive patent application, and on May 22, 1906, they were granted U.S. Patent 821393. The patent's importance lay in its claim of a new and useful method of "controlling" an airplane. The patent application included the claim for the lateral control of aircraft flight that was not limited to wing warping, but through any manipulation of the "...angular relations of the lateral margins of the airplanes [wings]... varied in opposite directions". Thus the patent explicitly stated that other methods besides wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of an airplane's wings to different angles on its right and left sides to achieve lateral roll control. Curiously, John J. Montgomery was granted U.S. Patent 831173 at nearly the same time for his methods of wing warping. Both the Wright Brothers patent and Montgomery's patent were reviewed and approved by the same patent examiner at the United States Patent Office, William Townsend. At the time Townsend indicated that both methods of wing warping were invented independently and were sufficiently different to each justify their own patent award.