On-Line Patents

Factual Questions
1

Anybody know of a site that has old (and I mean like from 1900-1935 or so) patents on it? And one that doesn’t charge to look at the patents? I’m interested in finding out about a few things that were most likely patented around that time, but I haven’t got the money to pay the US Patent Office to do the search and send me the photocopies. Even if the site let me only see the patent numbers and the abstracts that would help a great deal.

2

Try looking around http://www.uspto.gov . I know they have every patent online (but not OCRed), and I’m pretty sure they have a keyword search.

3

The last time I checked the PTO’s site, the problem was that after you got a past a certain year (1976), you could only access the patents by patent number. All existing patents back to 1790 are available.

You could also find a Patent Depository Library in your neck of the woods.

I think there is at least one in every state now.

4

Yeah, there’s one not too far from me, but from what I understand, it’s an absolute bitch to get into and to get access to the material.

5

It shouldn’t be. I used to work in one. They are supposed to be open to the public. That’s the point of them.

The problem could be that not every Patent Depository Library has a complete collection of patents available. However, every library should have the requisite indexes.

You could end up doing a patent search manually, which is actually not that hard to do. I think what you need to do is go to the PTDL (Patent Depository Library) and get the Class and Sub-class you won’t and a list of all patents that are in that classification.

Then get the patents themselves off of the web.

6

BobT, well the one here is on a private college campus and it has really the only decent library in town, so they’re worried about people coming in and “liberating” stuff. Basically, if you’re not a student you have to carry around an electronic passcard that allows you access to the various areas of the library. Its tethered to something like a hubcap, that’s assuming you can get the folks there to let you have it.