George B. Selden

George Baldwin Selden was an American patent lawyer and inventor from New York who was granted a United States patent covering an automobile design in 1895, one of the earliest patents issued in America for a self-propelled, internal combustion powered road vehicle. His training and career as a patent attorney gave him a close, technical familiarity with the mechanical claims needed to define and protect an invention of this kind, at a time when the American automobile industry itself barely existed. He is remembered chiefly through that one patent, which carried his name into the earliest institutional history of the American car industry even though he built comparatively little as a manufacturer himself. Selden was born on September 14, 1846 and died on January 17, 1922, having spent a career combining legal practice with hands on invention.