at the patent office, taken out of context and embellished, was apparently the source of an urban legend that a patent office official (Charles H. Duell in some versions) claimed that everything which could be invented had already been invented. In his 1843 report to Congress, Ellsworth stated: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." The report then lists a record number of patents, implying his comment was intended to be humorous. Following Ellsworth's stint in the Patent Office, he settled in Lafayette, Indiana, acting as an agent for purchase and settlement of public land, but in 1857 he returned to Connecticut. Ellsworth later served as an early president of the Aetna Insurance Company. He was an early benefactor of Yale College, donating some $700,000 to his alma mater, as well as title to the Ellsworth lands in the former Western Reserve. Legacy Ellsworth died, aged 67, on December 27, 1858, in Fair Haven, Connecticut. Following his death, Ellsworth's papers were discovered among the family papers of the Goodrich family. Ellsworth was a Yale classmate of Chauncey Allen Goodrich, whose sister Nancy Henry Leavitt Ellsworth married. The journal of Ellsworth's first trip to New Connecticut came to the Yale University Library as part of the Goodrich Family Collection. The former patent commissioner's papers today make up the Henry Leavitt Ellsworth Papers at Yale's Sterling Library. Annie Goodrich Ellsworth, only daughter of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, married the publisher Roswell Smith, who with his partner Josiah Gilbert Holland founded, in partnership with the publishing house Charles Scribner & Co., Scribner's Monthly and St. Nicholas magazines. Later Smith founded the publishing house The Century Company, and assumed sole ownership of both magazines. He changed the name of Scribner's Monthly to The Century. His wife, the former Anna G. Ellsworth, dictated the inaugural message on Samuel F. B. Morse's new telegraph system. "What hath God wrought" read the message, suggested by her mother, the wife of Morse's great champion Henry Leavitt Ellsworth. The daughter of Roswell Smith and Anna G. Leavitt married the American artist landscape painter George Inness, Jr. See also Patent Office 1877 fire Patent Office 1836 fire References External links Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, National Agricultural Hall of Fame Henry Leavitt Ellsworth Papers (MS 196). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 500 Farmers