A patent gives its owner--the inventor or the person or business to whom the inventor legally transfers the patent--the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention "claimed" in the patent deed for approximately 17 to 18 years, provided three maintenance fees are paid. You can use this right to exclude others by filing a patent infringement lawsuit lawsuit in federal court.

To know if your invention is really new the patent attorney has to do what is called a prior art search. That requires searching previous patents and the discipline related literature or journals or magazines. Then a determination can be made to proceed or not to proceed on filing for a patent.

Patents protect novel, useful and nonobvious (a patent law term) aspects of machines, items of manufacture and useful processes.  First your invention, idea or embodiment must be sufficiently novel, it must not have been on sale or appeared in a printed publication for a certain period before you file the patent application.

Also, there are design patents and plant patents. Design patents protect the ornamental or three-dimensional design of an item. Plant patents protect certain asexually reproduced plants.

A Provisional Patent Application is a short version of a regular patent. It is used as a place-holder of sorts to establish an early filing date for a later-filed Regular Patent Application (or Non-provisional application).

If you don’t have the facilities, skill or time to build and test your invention, and you are not in a position to file a complete utility patent application, a provisional application may be a good choice at that point.

It is not a regular patent application and if you don’t file a regular patent application within a year of the provisional patent application’s filing date, the provisional application will go abandoned and be forever useless. Also, your provisional patent application cannot provide a filing date for subject matter not disclosed or described in it.

I cannot recommend them and cannot work with them under the canons of ethics. Some call them fee-base-inventor-exploiters.  Only a Patent and Trademark admitted attorney or agent can prosecute a patent application for an individual or entity.

It lasts 20 years from the filing date and a design patent lasts 15 years after the grant date. (Title 35 USC 154)

You should not proceed to develop, build or test it or reveal it outsiders.  I can provide steps to take to preserve your date of invention and then proceed to develop the idea.