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

Working models of patent inventions

[StefanJ]

There was once a requirement that patent applications be accompanied by a working model of the invention.

The patent office once stored thousands of these little gadgets.

When the requirement was lifted, the patent office cleared out the warehouse, and gave way the models.

As you can imagine, most were probably trashed . . . given to kids who destroyed them. The surviving specimens are hot collector's prizes.

I once visited a collector's house, while doing "Dead Media" research. He had a few models. Most were of really pedestrian things, like automated brick makers.

STefan

How insightful

[siskbc]

If 10,000 patents were all that were issued from 1790 to 1836 (40 years) and considering we are up to patent number 7,000,000 (approx) right now, it would be interesting to have a graph of patents granted over time from 1790 to the present. My guess is that it would be an exponential curve.

Of course it would. The population has grown exponentially, as has effectively every other non-ratio metric associated with our country. GDP has gone up exponentially, food consumption has gone up exponentially, the stock market...you get the idea.

A much more insightful study would be patents/person by year. I would imagine that this figure has also gone up, though likely not quite with an exponential dependence. Most interesting would be sharp jumps in this curve that one might associate with specific events, like WWII, certain presidents getting elected, new USPTO directors, and so on.

Re:Ironically

[Minna Kirai]

Ironically, British troops had attacked Washington DC 24 years earlier, burning nearly everything except those patents, which they very carefully avoided.

Re:What is the distribution pattern

[servognome]

This is from a quick search I did by patent number:
1 - Traction Wheels - July 13, 1836
10 - Cutting Dye Wood - Aug 10, 1836
101 - Sails and Rigging - Dec 6, 1836
1,000 - Carriage Spring - Nov 3, 1838
10,000 - Paddle Wheel - Sep 6, 1853
100,000 - Horse Sun Bonnet - Feb 22, 1870
250,000 - Ditching Machine - Nov 22, 1881
500,000 - Combined Plush Tank & Manhole - Jun 20, 1893
1,000,000 - Vehicle Tire - Aug 8, 1911
1,500,000 - Submersible vessle for navigation under ice - Sept 10, 1920
2,000,000 - Vehicle Wheel Construction - May 12, 1932
2,500,000 - Interlock for Quick Fastening Doors - Dec 6, 1946
3,000,000 - Automatic Reading System - May 6, 1955
4,000,000 - Process for Recycling Asphalt-aggregate compositions - Dec 28, 1976
5,000,000 - Ethanol production by Escherichia coli strains co-expressing Zymomonas PDC and ADH genes - Mar 19, 1991
6,000,000 - Extendible method and apparatus for synchronizing multiple files on two different computer systems - Dec 7, 1999
6,750,000 - Electron device manufacturing method, a pattern forming method, and a photomask used for those methods - Jun 15, 2004
Approximate time between patents:
#1-10,000: 17 years
#10,000-100,000: 17 years
#100,000-500,000: 23 years
#500,000-1,000,000: 18 years
#1,000,000-2,000,000: 21 years
#2,000,000-3,000,000: 23 years
#3,000,000-4,000,000: 21 years
#4,000,000-5,000,000: 15 years
#5,000,000-6,000,000: 8 years
#6,000,000-6,750,000: 5 years