Scope and ContentWinning official Letters Patent like those shown here, awarded to Latimer in 1886 for his Cooling and Disinfecting Apparatus, was the end result of all the hard work he and other inventors put into applying to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. Latimer would earn seven of them. But obtaining a patent was no guarantee that an inventor would be able to finance, manufacture, or sell their invention, and it does not appear that Latimer ever put his apparatus into production.