In the 1800s, a patent office official recommended the patent office be closed because everything that could be invented had already been invented.

This statement is false because it is an urban legend with no factual basis. The supposed quote by Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth in an 1843 report was taken out of context and referred to the exhaustion of patent applications in that specific year, not all possible inventions. Similar apocryphal stories have been attributed to other officials, but none are documented. This myth persists because it illustrates the difficulty of predicting technological progress.