Edwin G. Bates was an American inventor and patent attorney who developed the Bates numbering machine, a tool for organizing legal, medical, and business documents.

Edwin G. Bates was born circa 1864 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was also raised and educated in Boston. He came from a background that was aristocratic and cultural.

Bates was said to be Catholic.

He was described as having "a rare combination of mechanical genius and sound common sense" and was said to be a "capable salesman".

In the late 19th century, the increasing volume of paperwork in business and legal environments made manual page numbering increasingly impractical. Bates' machine was developed to address this challenge by providing a more efficient method for applying sequential identifiers to documents.

His device introduced a self-inking hand stamps mechanism with an automatically advancing number wheel, which eliminated the need to advance the numbering manually after each impression. A final mechanism made it so that it only advanced every other time, letting it be able to print each number twice.

In 1888, he brought the numbering machine to Thomas Edison in Orange, N.J. to be examined. It was said that it "intrigued the interest of Mr. Edison".

In 1891, Bates patented the machine, and this form of numbering is still referred to as Bates Numbering.