Inventing for Boys

It is nice and easy work to make a wood pattern, that is to cut out of wood the needed part of exactly the size and shape you want the finished casting to be. The wood for your pattern should be pine or poplar and thoroughly seasoned. A scroll saw frame will come in handy for sawing out small patterns.

Where two pieces of wood are to be fastened together a good glue should be used. After the pattern is built up file out the uneven places with the kind of files made for scroll-sawyers’ use. When this is done smooth up the pattern with medium fine sandpaper and finish it with very fine sandpaper.

Should any holes or cracks show in the pattern after it has been sandpapered fill them up with putty; and, last of all, give the pattern a couple of coats of shellac varnish or rub graphite into it all over to keep it from sticking to the mold. Your pattern is now ready to be cast in metal.

A pattern, if it is complicated, should be made by a skilled pattern maker for it must be made in a certain way so that it will draw from the mold easily and without injury to the latter and leave it perfectly smooth.

Casting in Iron and Brass.—Somewhere above I said that a pattern should be the exact size you want the finished casting to be but as a matter of precise statement iron, brass and nearly all other metals shrink when they are cooling and so the pattern must be a trifle larger than the exact size you require and you must also allow for filing and machining. (See Fig. 76.)

As iron shrinks about ¹/₁₀ of an inch to a foot, brass shrinks ⅕ of an inch to a foot and steel and aluminum shrink about ¼ inch to the foot you must allow this much for shrinkage in making your patterns. Type-metal is an alloy which expands on cooling and this is a useful thing to know. You will find a formula for making it in Appendix L, and all of the appendices from A to N contain detailed information on a variety of subjects that should be very helpful when you are making your model.

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CHAPTER VI
HOW TO PATENT YOUR INVENTION

With your model in such shape that it shows what your invention is and what it will do you are ready to apply for a patent, or letters patent as it is technically called, by those versed in the art.

What a Patent Is.—The term letters patent comes from the Latin litteræ patentes which means open or disclosed, as against the French lettre de cachet which means closed or secret.

A letters patent, or patent as it is called for short, is exactly what its name implies and that is a disclosure of your secret and for this disclosure of a new and useful invention on your part the government agrees to give you a monopoly, that is the sole right to make, use and sell it as you please for a term of 17 years.

But the government does not live up to its agreement with the inventor and the invention and patent for it are never securely yours until it has been tested in the United States Supreme Court and its judges have handed down their opinion in your favor. But since there is no better protection than a patent at the present time of course you will have to get one.

Choosing a Patent Attorney.—The next hardest thing to do after making a working model of your invention is to get a patent attorney to take out a patent for you.

I don’t want to infer by this that it is hard to find a patent attorney for on the contrary they are as numerous as sharks in the sea and twice as voracious, but a patent attorney who really understands his business and will take an interest in your affairs is as scarce as a pseudotriakis microdon,[3] unless you are backed by unlimited funds, and then you may get service.

It is a strange thing but just as soon as you begin to work on an invention you will see in every weekly paper and magazine you pick up the advertisements of patent attorneys and usually they are located in Washington “in a building across the street from the patent office” or in a building up the street from which the patent office can be seen.

Their ads are very alluring as they often offer as an inducement to make a free search, as explained in Chapter III; to keep your signed evidence of conception in their fire-proof safes, and to refund your money if they do not get a patent for you. That these knights of the patent bar will do all they say there is not the slightest doubt and that is just where the rub comes in.

Any patent attorney can get a patent allowed on nearly anything if the claims are written narrow enough but when it is granted it won’t be worth the paper it is written on and the patent examiner knows it, the patent attorney who gets it knows it and you will know it too after you have spent your good money for it but then it is too late. A patent attorney of this kind is a good one to keep away from.

The safest way is to go to a patent attorney in your own city or get into communication with one who lives nearest to you and engage him to prepare your patent application and prosecute it in the patent office.

And whatever you do make him agree to a flat-rate, that is to name a fixed sum which you are to pay him for his services including the fee for filing the application in the patent office. The filing fee is $15 and the lowest fee I ever heard of any patent attorney taking to prepare a case and seeing it through the patent office was $30, which with the final government fee of $20 makes a total of $65; and from this his fee will go on up to whatever amount he thinks he will be able to get you to pay.

Should you happen to secure the services of a so-called really high-grade patent attorney you will not be likely to induce him to make a flat-rate for this is poor business on his part. Instead the way a better class patent attorney will deal with you, as a rule, is to induce you to start in by giving him a retainer of say $25 or $50; then from time to time he will send you statements and as you pay them the amounts he demands will grow larger and the statements more frequent until by the time the patent is granted, you will have paid in enough to buy him a fur-trimmed overcoat or a Ford automobile.

The amount thus spent is not of so much consequence but what does matter is that where you and your patent attorney have no definite arrangement as to fees he is tempted, and in many cases yields to the temptation, to string the patent application along over a period of months if not of years, when if it had been followed up right along it would have been granted to you in a much shorter time.

The moral of this un-fable is to hold your patent attorney down to a fixed price right in the beginning and have him write you a letter stating the amount he is to get and the work he intends to do for it, and this will serve as an agreement.

The above are only a few of the bubbles in the patent system and to warn you of them all would take a book as large as an unabridged dictionary. The best advice I can give you is to study your invention from every angle, look up the state of the art in all its phases and then with a full understanding of just what you are entitled to write down all the points you want your patent to cover.

Now catch your patent attorney, being sure he does not catch you first, and to parodize a caption[4] of the immortal Roosevelt, fear the patent office examiner and take your medicine.

Applying for a Patent Yourself.—To get even a small part of what you are legally entitled to in a patent you should write to the Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D. C., for a copy of the Rules of Practice in the United States Patent Office, see Fig. 77, which will be sent to you free of charge. Read this booklet through not once, but many times, or at least until you understand everything in it for it will help you mightily in the preparation of your patent application and the prosecution of it.

You will learn from the Rules of Practice that you as an inventor may apply for your own patent and act as your own patent attorney in prosecuting it. And after you have learned the rules by heart you may feel that since you know more about your invention than any one else you can make the drawings and write the specification and claims as well or better than the average patent attorney.

But you should think twice and count ten with your eyes shut before you conclude to do this rash thing. Why? Because the patent office will not accept your drawings unless they conform exactly to certain rules; your specification, which means the description of your invention, must be written in a certain way, and the claims, which are the very vitals of the whole patent, must be drawn with exceeding care for while nothing of value must be left out it is even worse to write in too much as this limits your claims.

Besides these reasons it grieves a patent office examiner whenever a mere inventor comes forth and files his own patent application and conducts his own case even if he has the ability to do so and when it comes to amending his claims he will find the hurdles are rather higher to jump over than he at first supposed.

Applying for a Patent through a Patent Attorney.—Taking all these things into consideration my advice to you is to retain a patent attorney to prepare your case and see it through the patent office, and then you want to be prepared to watch every move he makes—that is to say when he has drafted your application, get a copy of it and go all over it yourself taking plenty of time to do it in; and then go over it with him covering every detail.

In due time after your application has been filed the patent examiner will send a letter to your patent attorney in which he notifies you that some, if not all of your claims, have been rejected and citing references to other patents chiefly to show that your claims lack newness and novelty.

The next step is taken by your patent attorney who amends the specification and claims to meet the objections raised by the patent examiner. Here again you should know how and where your claims are affected and you should aid your patent attorney to determine whether or not you should insist on your claim being allowed to stand as it is written or to so change it that it will satisfy the patent examiner.

It must be clear now that if your patent attorney is permitted to keep on changing your claims to meet every rejection of the patent examiner instead of fighting them out by the time the patent is granted it will have degenerated into merely a scrap of paper. Hence if you leave the whole case to the ability and judgment of your patent attorney you can be reasonably sure that your $65 or $250 or whatever sum you have paid him for obtaining your patent is as good as thrown away.

What You May Patent.—In all of the foregoing text I assumed that your invention consisted of a machine but according to rule 24 of the Rules of Practice a patent may be obtained for any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement thereof.

Since all mechanical movements have been invented and all necessary electric currents have been discovered and enough chemical elements are known it may seem on first thought quite impossible to invent or discover anything either new or useful, yet the patent office is granting patents at the rate of about 125,000 a year.

The way inventions are made is by forming new combinations. Just as there is no practical limit to the number of new words that could be formed by new combinations of the letters of the alphabet, so there is no practical limit to the new machines that can be invented by novel combinations of the mechanical movements, with the result that something can be done that had not been done before, or that something is done in a better, cheaper and easier way than it had ever been done before. And the same is also true of combining electro-mechanical devices and of combining chemical elements.

Inventing means that you are clever in combining certain movements, devices and chemicals in a new way to produce a certain result which may or may not have been done before, and so it is the new combination of things that you really get a patent on.

Looking Ahead.—It must be plain now from what has been said that when you have completed your machine, or product, or compound, all your inventive efforts will be in vain unless you go over every part with the utmost care and try to think out how it could be changed or done in some other way by some one else and so make your patent worthless, and your hard efforts wasted.

What you should do, though it is easier to advise than it is to accomplish, is to so word the claims of your patent application that they will broadly cover not only your particular combination but every other form of it. Finally should your invention be one of considerable magnitude and great importance you must keep working on it all the time and making improvements and covering the last named with patents or the other fellow—the patent thief—will get you sure, and often he will do it anyway.

What a Patent Consists Of.—All through this chapter the words drawings, specifications and claims are used and now suppose we find out just what is meant by them.

Every patent application is made up of five parts and these are (1) the petition; (2) the drawings; (3) the specification; (4) the claims, and (5) the oath. The petition and the oath are separate papers and do not appear in the patent when it is granted. The drawings, specification and claims form the patent when it is granted.

The form of petition by a sole inventor is as follows:

Other forms by joint inventors, etc., will be found in the Rules of Practice.

The drawing or drawings come first and these are made on white paper the thickness of Bristol board and the size of the sheet must be exactly 10 by 15 inches with a line drawn 1 inch from the edges all round making the sight, that is, the space in which the drawings are placed, exactly 8 by 13 inches. A reduction of a sheet of drawing for the author’s revolving arc for his wireless telephone is shown in Fig. 78.

The drawing or drawings, there may be one or more on a page and several pages if needs be, must show every detail covered by the specification and claims. The drawings may be made in isometric perspective as described in Chapter II, or plan or elevation views can be used, or both of these kinds of drawings as long as the pictures show exactly what the invention consists of and how it works. Usually the different parts are numbered and these are referred to in the description of the invention.

Should your invention be an electrical one, then a diagram of the apparatus formed of symbols (see Chapter II) should be used.

The specification, the front page of one of which is shown in Fig. 79, is that part of a patent which describes your invention or discovery and it should be as full and as clear as you and your patent attorney can make it and yet it must be concise and to the point.

Don’t try to hide, or keep anything back for should the patent be granted to you under these conditions it will be without value if it should ever figure in a suit. If you are not willing to make every detail known it is better not to apply for a patent at all.

The claims, a few of which shown in Fig. 80, are the all important part of every patent and these must be clearly, cleverly and carefully worded so that if you ever have to fight an infringer in court your claims will be found to cover exactly the details of your invention and this will make it harder for the other fellow’s expert to misconstrue them.

The oath. When you apply for a patent you must affirm, or make oath that you believe yourself to be the “first and original inventor or discoverer of the art, machine, manufacture, composition or improvement” for which you ask a patent. A form of oath to accompany a patent application is as follows:

A good way to get an idea of how a patent looks and reads is to send 5 cents in coin to the Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D. C., with the request that a copy of patent No. 814,942 be mailed to you.

While Your Patent is Pending.—In a month or six weeks after your application has been sent in to the patent office your patent attorney will receive an official reply, or action as it is called, and don’t be surprised and don’t let it worry you if you find that all your claims have been rejected by the examiner.

He will state his reasons in his letter for the rejection and give references, which are usually other patents, to show that some other inventor has anticipated you and that your claims are neither new nor novel.

Your patent attorney must then either amend the claims, that is reword and change them if you and he think the examiner is right, or else in your letter of amendment, you must show the examiner where and why he is wrong. At any rate you must satisfy his objections.

By the time your amended application reaches the examiner and he again acts on it he will have dug up a lot more of references from the archives of the patent office; and then you and your patent attorney can go all over the amending process again.

After having gone through with this sort of thing a dozen or more times and covering one or more years—I have just had a patent allowed that had been pending for nearly seven years—you and your patent attorney and every one else that may be interested with you will be sore unto death over the delays—that is everybody except the patent examiner and he thrives upon the inventor’s discontent.

Interference.—As if all these trials and tribulations are not enough it often occurs in the course of a pending patent that some one applies for a patent on the same, or nearly the same, invention as your own.

When this happens the patent examiner declares an interference, the purpose of which purports to be to show which applicant is the first, or real inventor.

When interference proceedings are begun you will have to make under oath a preliminary statement showing when you first conceived the idea of your invention, when you first explained it to some one else, when you made your first drawings of it and when you constructed a model of it; all of which shows the importance of keeping a record of each step of your invention and of having them frequently attested.

These sworn statements by yourself and your opponent are passed upon by the examiner of interferences and if either you or your opponent are not satisfied with his findings either one of you may take an appeal to the board of examiners-in-chief, and from this board to the Commissioner of Patents and finally, to the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia.

And don’t forget that all these proceedings and appeals are as meat and drink to the patent lawyers and that you and your opponent are contributing all of the money in exchange for a lot of red tape that ought to be abolished.

When Your Patent is Granted.—But some bright morning you will receive a government document printed on vellum, showing a picture of the patent office at the top and signed by the Commissioner of Patents at the bottom, the whole being tied together with a pair of baby blue ribbons and to the ends of which is affixed a red seal bearing the imprint of the Patent Office of the United States of America, and at last you have your patent. The front cover of a patent granted to your humble servant is shown in the frontispiece.

After Your Patent is Granted.—But after you have this valuable grant conferred by the government in your possession which is alleged to give you a monopoly on your invention for a period of 17 years you have only started on your career as patentee, for about the next thing that will happen, if your invention is worth anything and you are manufacturing and marketing it, you will find that some one else is making and selling exactly the same thing.

He may or may not have a patent on the article or machine and it—the patent—may or may not be remotely like yours but this doesn’t in the least matter, he will keep right on working your invention and infringing your patent until you will either have to sue him, or continue to lose large profits that should be yours and perhaps be driven out of the business entirely.

So, of course, you see your patent attorney and he, of course, advises you to begin suit at once. It sounds to your abused ears like right and justice but it means an outlay of much time and more money than you could begin to think of unless you have been through the mill before.

This time you will have to engage patent counsel—no mere patent attorney will do if you are to win—and you must have experts to testify for you and your patent cause—it is no longer called a patent case—and testify against your opponent. The only limit to the fee that able patent counsel will demand and collect is fixed by your bank account while $100 per day is the usual fee of a technical expert though like his legal ally he will ask and get much more if you can afford it.

After long months of drawn out preparation and taking testimony and quibbling you will find, if your legal talent is the smartest, that the patent granted you by the patent office has been sustained by the court. Such a decision may put the other fellow out of the business but it isn’t once in a thousand causes you can collect damages when you win. And from this you will observe that the business of the patent office is not to give you a monopoly but simply to grant you a patent and as to its validity the courts must settle that.

About Paper Patents.—A paper patent is a patent that has been granted by the patent office for a new and novel idea that has never been worked out in practice.

For instance, suppose you get an idea for an invention or an improvement that seems a good thing especially after you have looked up the state of the art, and when you draw it out on paper it seems certain to work. And let’s suppose that for the want of time or money you are not able to experiment on, or build a model of it; and you have fears that by the time you could build the actual machine some one else may have applied for a patent on the same thing.

Of course, you feel you want to protect the idea and to do so you proceed to apply for a patent and in its own good time the patent office grants you one. You have then a thing called a paper patent but you haven’t got the machine, or device or composition to back it up with.

Well, it’s just like writing a book about a trip to the moon; you know how far from the facts your guesses would probably be and it is the same thing with getting a patent before you have made the experiments or built a model.

A paper patent is not usually worth the time and money you spend on it because it lacks backbone, but they have caused many real inventors a deal of trouble and expense in fighting them.

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CHAPTER VII
MAKING YOUR INVENTION PAY

After reading what has gone before you may well conclude that an inventor’s life is not a happy one but let me remind you that whatever road you take to seek fame and to win fortune you will find it just as full of petty strife and big difficulties.

In sooth inventing is one of the easiest and pleasantest pursuits in which you can engage to make a good living and many inventors who were as poor as Job’s turkey when they began to think up new ideas and concoct useful schemes now have their thumb-nail biographies in Who’s Who and live on the fat of the land.

And you can do the same thing too if you have a real invention and a lot of native shrewdness. Yes, to be a money-making inventor you must have inventive ability plus business ability, or rather the other way about, for business ability counts for more in the game of success than inventive ability.

There are hundreds of inventors of the highest type who are comparatively poor men for the lack of business ability while many others, like Edison, all round inventor, Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake, and Eastman, inventor of the kodak, have made fortunes that run up into the millions because they are first, last and all the time hard headed business men. And you must be a business man too if you want to make money out of your invention.

How to Raise the Initial Funds.—By initial funds I mean the first money. It is easy to tell an inventor who has a rich dad or a bank account in his own name how to finance his invention.

But mine is a harder task in that I am taking it for granted you are like 999 out of every 1000 inventors and that you have little or no money, are fired with ambition and that you have a big idea.

Assuming that this is the precise state of affairs let’s go back to where we started from in Chapter I, that is to the last part of it where you had drawn out your invention on paper, written a description of it and had some of your friends put their signatures to it.

Should your invention seem to your friends to have merit it will take but very little urging to get one or more of them to furnish whatever amount of money you think will be needed to carry on the experiments or to build a working model. Of course you will in turn have to agree to give him, or them, a certain small interest in your invention, and this is fair exchange for you are putting up your brains against their money.

If your invention is a small one and but little money is needed to develop it into a marketable product a 5 per cent. interest is enough to give those who back you for taking the risk. A 10 per cent. interest is ample to offer for sufficient funds to develop a more complicated invention.

This will leave you a 30 or 35 per cent. interest to sell to others later on, when you have a working model and your patent is granted, to furnish the capital necessary for equipping a factory to make the device and to provide funds to market it—that is if you work out a plan along these lines.

But take my advice and keep a 55 per cent. interest in the invention for yourself; otherwise the control of it is taken out of your hands, and whenever it suits those who hold the controlling interest to freeze you out they will do so with pleasure.

By using the following form you can save the expense of having a lawyer draw up one for you and moreover you can also be sure there is no joker in it.

About an Interest in a Patent.—There is a big difference between assigning an interest in your invention and assigning an interest in your patent.

Many an inventor assigns an interest in his patent either before or after it is granted to some one who will advance the needed money. But this is a thing you should never do for after having made such an assignment, however small the part, the person who owns it can make, use or sell the invention which the patent covers, as he chooses, just as though he owned the whole patent and you can neither stop him nor even sue him for damages.

You can, of course, make, use and sell the invention covered by the patent too but usually it is the other fellow who gets the best of the bargain.

Royalties, Shop Rights, etc.—After you have built a working model and obtained a patent on it there are many ways of making money out of your invention.

One is to sell your invention and patent outright; another is to sell shop-right licenses; another is to have some manufacturer give you a royalty on each machine or device he makes and sells, and yet another way is to sell territorial rights, that is the town, county and state rights to manufacture your invention. Forms of agreements for all of these deals will be found in the Rules of Practice of the United States Patent Office.

Besides the above arrangements you can go into partnership with some moneyed man, or interest, and finally a good plan, where a large amount of capital is required to build a plant and start a business, is to form a company, or corporation as it is called.

Forming a Partnership.—Now that you have your model completed and your patent granted you will of course want to begin commercial operations immediately, and let’s suppose you think better of forming a partnership than any of the other above named plans.

There are a hundred ways to secure a partner, or business associate as the sharer of your fortunes is called, but it is a mighty hard thing to get a satisfactory one. A favorite way to enlist capital and one that is often resorted to by inventors in large cities is to advertise in the newspapers under the head of business opportunities.

An advertisement of this kind may put you in touch with the man you are looking for but it will also bring you a lot of curiosity seekers, riff raff and other undesirables who come generally with a view of inducing you to part with your money rather than to invest any of their own. This is also true of the so-called brokers who advertise to procure working capital for meritorious inventions.

One of the best ways to secure a partner who has the necessary capital and requisite business ability is to arrange to show your invention in operation and then invite your moneyed neighbors and the business men of your town, though you may not know the latter personally, to call and see it; and they will call and get interested if they believe in its possibilities for they are as anxious to make more money as you are to make a little of it, and they are keen to the fact that great fortunes have been built up out of simple as well as complex inventions.

This method of showing your invention to your towns-folk, either individually or collectively, is the safe way to get one or more good, substantial men interested in your proposition and to lay the foundation of a paying business.

Where the Promoter Comes In.—There are promoters and promoters; by which I mean that there are various sorts of promoters and then some.

A tin-horn promoter is an unprincipled fellow of some ability who secures an option on a patented invention, or on the stock of a company based on an invention, and exploits it for all he is worth to his own profit and without regard to the inventor or the stockholders. The chief business of a tin-horn promoter is to secure control of the entire stock issue of a company, sell it at inflated prices, pocket 90 per cent. of the proceeds and either doctor the books or disappear then altogether. Steer clear of the tin-horn promoter.

An ordinary promoter is merely an agent who acts as a go-between for the inventor and people with money to invest and by his enthusiasm brings them together for the good of the cause. A real promoter is a genius who possesses both business ability and the necessary wherewithal to start, accelerate and carry on any kind of an industrial, financial or commercial enterprise.

You will meet the promoter in one shape or another as soon as it becomes noised around that you have an invention of merit. The ordinary promoter will be of assistance to you at any stage of the invention where experiments are still to be made and the patent is yet to be granted. He may also prove of service after the preliminary work is done in securing for you a real promoter.

On signing contracts with the latter he will relieve you of all the cares of starting the business or of starting a company to start the business. And if you are not shrewd and careful and know just what he is doing and you should fail to have a hard and fast contract he will not only be likely to relieve you of the business cares but of everything else you may hold dear and sacred in this world.

An ordinary promoter will ask about 25 per cent. of whatever money he brings in for your use in developing the invention and a certain small interest—1 to 5 per cent.—in the company that exploits it. The real promoter wants and usually gets a working agreement of 50 per cent, of whatever profits there may be made out of the invention. If possible you should hold a 55 per cent, interest for this will give you the whip-hand and will save you much trouble in the end.

Few promoters though will agree to such a division and about the only way you can keep the controlling interest is to organize a company and manage it yourself but this takes business ability of quite a high order.

What a Stock Company Is.—A company is a number of persons who band themselves together for business purposes. A stock company, or stock corporation to call it by its proper name, is a company whose capital is represented by shares and which is held either in the treasury of the company, or by persons who buy the shares.

Three or more persons may form themselves into a stock company for any industrial purpose in the State of New York. A stock company must be incorporated, that is legally formed, under the laws of a State and different States have different laws. A copy of the corporation laws of any State may be had free of charge by applying to the Secretary of State.

How a Stock Company is Organized.—Suppose, now, you and two other, or more persons want to organize a stock company under the laws of the State of New York for say $10,000, although the value which you, and those interested with you, place on your invention and patent may be a great deal more.

Then you and the others make, sign, acknowledge and file a certificate of incorporation, a reproduction of which is shown in Fig. 83 (see outfit necessary for a Corporation), and this must contain: (1) the name of the proposed company; (2) the purpose for which it is formed; (3) the amount of the Capital stock (which means the entire amount of the stock, for which the company is capitalized and which, let’s say, is $10,000); (4) the number of shares of which the capital stock is to consist (each share of which must not be less than $5 nor more than $100 and the amount of actual capital must not be less than $500 in cash with which the company is to begin business) and the amount of cash must be stated; (5) The certificate must also contain the name of the city, village, or town, in which its principal business office is to be located; (6) its duration, which you can put at 50 years; (7) the number of its directors which must be not less than three; (8) the names and post-office addresses of the directors for the first year, and (9) the names and post-office addresses of the subscribers to the certificate of incorporation and a statement of the number of shares of stock which each agrees to take in the company. A certificate of incorporation blank ready to fill in can be bought for 10 cents of stationers who deal in law books and forms.

The Fees of the State.—The fees for incorporating a company are payable in advance at the Secretary of State’s office and these are for (a) filing the certificate of incorporation $10; (b) recording it, 15 cents per folio of 100 words; (c) a certified copy, if you want one, 15 cents a folio and $1 additional for the seal affixed to it; (d) the organization tax, payable direct to the State Treasurer in advance is 1-20th of 1 per cent, on the amount of the capital stock, which on a capitalization of $10,000 would be $5, and (e) all personal checks for fees or taxes must be certified, that is to have the paying teller of the bank your check is drawn on write good on it together with his name.