Inequality leads to a misallocation of talent when individuals are credit constrained. This paper studies such misallocation by tracing the effects of a large reduction in the cost of patenting on innovation. I exploit a patent fee reform in the United Kingdom in 1884 to investigate the responsiveness of inventors, and create a novel dataset on 54,000 inventors and their patent renewals. The reduction in the cost of inventing leads to a considerable and persistent rise in the quantity of lower- and high-quality ideas patented. Inventors respond strongly by delaying to patent lower-quality ideas before the reform and by bunching patents just after the reform. Innovation, as proxied by high-quality patents, increases in the longer run with an elasticity of 1.25. To test for the presence of credit constraints I generate two proxy measures of wealth using inventor names and addresses, and find a larger innovation response for poorer inventors. These results indicate efficiency gains from decreasing the cost of inventing and in addition, from relaxing credit constraints.