Robert Gillespie, inventor, spent time in New York, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In 1810 he patented a perpetual still and evaporator, which he described in his A New Plan For Distilling With Greater Facility Than Has Ever Been Heretofore Practised In Any Country (Baltimore, 1810). Five years later he received a patent for a steam still. Gillespie became embroiled in a bitter and public patent dispute with James Wheatley, of Fauquier County, recipient of an 1813 patent for an improvement in the still and condensing tub. The men continued to quarrel even after agreeing to divide their rights by region according to a contract recorded in the Culpeper County Court (List of Patents description begins A List of Patents granted by the United States from April 10, 1790, to December 31, 1836, 1872 description ends , 81, 129, 149; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 12, 18 May, 13 July 1815; Gillespie to James Monroe, 11 Mar. 1816 [DNA: RG 59, MLR]; Gillespie, Observations on Mashing [Knoxville, 1817; broadside at NcU]; Harrison Hall, The Distiller [Philadelphia, 1818], 62–7).

Gillespie’s letter of june. 10, not found, is recorded in SJL as received from Nashville on 6 July 1814. The patent law of 1793, which TJ helped to draft, required a 30.d. fee from inventors submitting patent requests. In 1800 the law was amended to set the penalty incurred by an individual who used an invention without having purchased the right to do so at triple the actual damages sustained by the patentee, his or her executors, administrators, or assigns (PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 34 vols. description ends , 22:359–62, 25:398–9; U.S. Statutes at Large description begins Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States … 1789 to March 3, 1845, 1845–67, 8 vols. description ends , 1:318–23, 2:37–8).