… for inventions and the like
So… last week, The Legal Genealogist tackled the difference between patents and deeds.
You know… the difference between a document evidencing a land transfer from the sovereign to a private owner (like the patent the U.S. government would issue when a homesteader finally proved up his or her claim) and a document evidencing a land transfer from one private owner to another (like the deed you and I probably got when we bought our homes).1
Now how about the difference between patents… and patents?
The one, of course, being those land documents.
And the others looking like this:
Now I have addressed this in the past,2 but there’s a reason why it’s coming up again now.
It’s because Ancestry has just added two more patent databases to its collections — one of which made me smile because it’s just plain cool to see my baby brother’s patents listed on Ancestry. In addition to the U.S., Patent and Trademark Office Patents, 1790-1909 collection, we can now access two more collections: United States Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Patents, 1970-2019; and International Patents, 1890-2020.
These kinds of patents, of course, evidence a “grant of some privilege, … or authority, made by the government … of a country to one or more individuals.”3 In this case, it’s the privilege granted by the law to the inventor to be the only one to take advantage of the patent for its term — originally 14 years.
The very first patent law passed here in the United States was adopted on 10 April 1790.4 And we were johnny-come-latelys. The first patent law anywhere, folks generally agree, was adopted in Venice in 1474.5
Originally, U.S. patents were limited to utility patents — processes, machines and the like. Design patents were added for ornamental designs in 1842, and plant patents as of 1930. The one millionth U.S. patent was issued in 1911; patent no. 10,000,000 in 2018.6
Now think about that. Ten million patents by 2018. That’s an awful lot of folks in our families who may have gotten a patent at one time or another. As I mentioned, my baby brother. Even my chemical engineer father got two: he got one patent in 1959 for a method of refining by withdrawing feed liquors from a centrifuge7 and another with a co-worker in 1967 for a hydrogen generator.8
We can now check Ancestry’s patent collections to see if our ancestors (or siblings or parents!) had a patent — and we can also use other options as well:
• the U.S. Patent Office’s own web-based search system, with its Patent Full-Text Databases. We can enter all kinds of search options (last name, first name, patent language, date, state where the inventor lived and more) and choose between newer patents (1976 to present) and all patents (1790 to present) just as a few of the choices. For any hit, the system offers the choice between full text (if it’s available) and images of the patent.
• Google Patents, which has both simple search and advanced search options. The advanced search page has all the options, and there’s a help page for searching that database.
And of course this isn’t just an American notion, so don’t forget to check the patent offices elsewhere, and a great tool for that is the European Patent Office’s Global Patent Index. For European patents only, check out the EPO’s European Patent Register.
Patents are surprisingly wonderful genealogical tools. They can flesh out the stories of our family members, provide original signatures and link individuals together (as witnesses to a patent application, for example). And because there are so many of them — 10 million by 2018 just in the United States alone! — odds are we’ll find someone in our family in those records.
Check ’em out.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Those OTHER patents,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 2 Dec 2021).
SOURCES
Image: “Flying machine patent drawing by W.F. Quinby 10/5/1869,” U.S. National Archives, via Flickr.com.
- Judy G. Russell, “Of patents and deeds,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 22 Nov 2021 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 2 Dec 2021). ↩
- Ibid., “Patents and patents,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 11 Dec 2014. ↩
- Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 877, “patent.” ↩
- “An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts,” 1 Stat. 109 (10 April 1790). ↩
- See generally Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “History of patent law,” rev. 16 Nov 2021. ↩
- See “Patents through History,” 10 Million Patents, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (https://10millionpatents.uspto.gov/ : accessed 2 Dec 2021). ↩
- Patent no. 2,869,779, issued 20 Jan 1959 to Hugo H. Geissler; digital images, Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/ : accessed 2 Dec 2021). No, don’t ask me what that means; I went to law school, remember? they don’t teach that stuff in law school! ↩
- Ibid., U.S. Patent No. 3,350,176, issued 31 Oct 1967 to Hugo H. Geissler and Stanley S. Kurpit. Ditto as to what that is. ↩
And once you find these published copies of the patents, you can order the original files from Kansas City NARA, Record Group 241, Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, 1836 – 1978. My husband’s GG-uncle had several patents. Once I contacted them, they asked for some money, and then sent the images via email.
Of course, everything — and I mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G — from NARA has been slowed by the pandemic, and Kansas City is one of the regional repositories most affected. So patience. BIG time.
Agree, Judy, that a surprising number of our ancestors filed patents. For much of the 1800s and early 1900s it was possible for ordinary people tinkering in the back yard to come up with an invention. Two distant cousins working in a mining district in Upper Ontario had a couple of steam engine modifications. And because anything they came up with in Canada could be copied in USA and then re-sold into Canada, they took out patents there too. The same for an Australian uncle who worked in Australia and had patents in several Australian states in the 1850s and took out ones in Britain, France and USA as well. US Patent archive is therefore often a good place to start for researching any invention of world significance. I originally used it for work, so when it came to family history, it was familiar, but the older files are a bit different.
And if you use some of what we would elsewhere call tags and classification numbers, you can look for what the competition was doing and maybe how your ancestor responded with an improvement.
I even found one of my ancestor’s plumbers came up with a “better” small gas water heater. Only patented locally, but advertised for a while in the newspapers so probably sold a few. Newspapers and magazines (Popular Mechanics, Popular Science for example) announced some patents, and in places where they had a government gazette for official announcements, some of them did too.
And transfers of patent ownership, and contests when two clashed.
But start with the US Patent Office archives.
According to the recent WIPO World Intellectual Property Indicators report there were more than 3.27 million patent applications worldwide in 2020 alone. Less than half of all applications (1.59 M) resulted in patent grants. 597,172 applications were handled by the USPTO in 2020. China dealt with nearly 1.5 milliion applications in the same period.
Thank you for the links! I found my cousin’s four patents filed while he worked for DuPont. He has told me about them a few times, but now I can order copies.
Terrific!
Great resource, Judy. I was able to find my Great-Grandfather’s patent for a Copy Holder for a Type Writer Machine, along with my 3rd-Great Uncle’s patents for a Street Car Switching System, a Velocipede, and an Improved Coffin! Now on to ordering copies, (with patience).
Outstanding!! Congratulations!
This was pretty interesting to read. Thank you for providing the links! I was able to find my first cousin’s (four times removed) patents for some of his inventions!
So glad you found it helpful!