Charles Holland Duell

Charles Holland Duell (April 13, 1850 – January 29, 1920) was a New York patent lawyer who served as U.S. Commissioner of Patents from 1898 to 1901 and later sat as an Associate Justice of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. His name became shorthand for short-sightedness because of a sentence he is not documented as ever having spoken. What he actually said, in a December 1901 newspaper feature, was that the advances of the past would “appear totally insignificant” beside what the new century would bring — an almost exact inversion of the line pinned on him.