Some Of The Lost X-Patents Found

Jerry Browne writes " The New York Times (reg req) is carrying a story about the recent discovery of some lost patents. Apparantly a fire at a temporay storage site in July 1836 destroyed the first 10000 patents issued. From the article..."The Patent and Trademark Office has issued nearly seven million patents; the first 10,000 are known as the X-patents. They were issued from July 1790, when the United States patent system was created under an order signed by George Washington, to July 1836, when every one of them burned in a fire...In the 168 years since the fire, only about 2,800 have been recovered....Until this spring, that is, when two lawyers...a clue to several important patents from the 1790's - including one from 1826 for the first internal combustion engine...""

Comments

Worthless info.

[bs_02_06_02]

Why all the hoopla? Aren't they expired?

Also, the fact that everyone forgot about them 160+ years ago only means that they are even less worthwhile today.
Unless some desperate soul is anxious to hunker down for a fun Friday night of reading burnt, forgotten, and expired patents. ??

Re:Worthless info.

[kunudo]

Historical value? Just because you can't find any use for them doesn't mean they're not valuable to some random historian researching early industry or something...

Re:Worthless info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why all the hoopla? Aren't they expired?

Maybe because you don't want a second patent issued for the same thing.

Re:Worthless info.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why all the hoopla? Aren't they expired?

Methinks you forget the entire *point* of a patent system.

The patent system exists so that inventors have an incentive to disclose their inventions to the public. This is so that others can use the invention once the patent expires, and the idea doesn't just sit in some forgotten vault.

The value of a patent to the country as a whole lies not in the time that the patent is valid, but after it expires, when it is freely availible to all for use.

Return of working model requirement?!

[192939495969798999]

I hope this helps to usher in the return of the working model requirement. As patents used to require a working model in order to be awarded, it surely would've been easier to figure out whose patent was which when the inventor actually had to have a working one! So long to all those hi-tech patents where the company merely drafted a requirements document and fired it off to the USPTO. Let's see you build one first! 10-20 million lines of code later, the hi-tech patent volume slides down a few more notches.

Re:If it happened today ...

[ChrisMaple]

Many major city libraries - for instance, Los Angeles - have complete patent collections on microfilm. There are also internet-accessible records in numerous places. Practically speaking, it can't happen today.

Re:What is the distribution pattern

[printman]

I did some quick charting against US population and the year; the peak time (so far) for new patents was from 1999 to 2002 with 166,667 per year (FWIW, we are almost there in 2004)

The rate of population increase since 1900 has averaged about 1.37% per year. Patents have increased at more than double that rate at 2.73% per year.

Furthermore, the population growth appears to be slowing while the patent growth is speeding up.

I would guess that this is the result of a lot more businesses getting patents for trivial inventions (or getting separate patents for different parts of their inventions) as well as the dominance of larger businesses which can afford to have full-time patent filing departments - i.e. patents are one more "product" that a company produces.