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BULB DISCUSSION BOARDS => Antique Bulb Discussion => Topic started by: Tim on January 03, 2001, 08:50:00 pm

Title: Patent searches on the net!
Post by: Tim on January 03, 2001, 08:50:00 pm
This might be of interest to others. The United States Patent Office has now included images to their online database of patents (was only text based) - a cool feature that makes great use of the net. Patents can be searched by patent number or keywords and it looks like the data goes back as far as 1800.

The only problem is that I couldn't get the TIFF viewer plug-in to work so images were not showing for me when searching patent numbers  (http://www.bulbcollector.com/ubb/frown.gif)  If anyone's feeling adventurous give it a shot, check it out, and tell me if you've gotten this to work. I was trying look up #366,606 (an incandescent lamp socket patent):
 http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html (http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html)

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-Tim
BulbCollector.com (http://www.bulbcollector.com)
DewCollector.com (http://www.dewcollector.com)
Title: Patent searches on the net!
Post by: Ed Covington on January 03, 2001, 11:03:00 pm
Tim, I'm out of my area of expertise but add this, should it be of any value.

I've been emailing to a gentleman in PA regarding patents. I haven't gone into the patent system (online) myself as I had a great facility in the Cleveland Public Library. (For those of you who are interested in looking at hard copies you might look at the following site to see if there is a library near you: http://www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/govdocs/patlibs.html. (http://www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/govdocs/patlibs.html.)

The gentleman in PA was interested in obtaining some early patents and he found the following. I hope he doesn't object to my quoting directly from an email to me:

"With these (patent) numbers, I went to the web site http://www.getthepatent.com (http://www.getthepatent.com)  and applied for a free trial period. The patents are searchable by patent number and they are in a ".tiff" format for which you need a special reader that you can download free - the lite version. I downloaded this free reader and was able to read these two patents at the above named web site. Unfortunately, the Lite version of the reader wouldn't let me print these patents so I tried a little trick - I converted those tiff files into PDF files (Adobe Acrobat) and saved them on a floppy disk. Then I could print those two patents with no trouble. It was quite tricky but this finally worked."

He emailed the entire patents to me and the images were great.

Thanks, Tim, for bringing this subject up.
Title: Patent searches on the net!
Post by: James on January 04, 2001, 09:33:00 pm
Hi Tim,

I also tried this site and can't get the pics to work either.  About a year ago I used to frequently use its predecessor, and back then I had the same trouble.  I emailed them and they replied that due to capacity problems the service was frequently congested and viewing images could be temperamental.  After several attempts at different times of day I could usually get in though, so keep trying it if you're sure your PC is correctly configured.

I know you are only interested in antique lamps, but for anyone interested in the more modern lamp technologies you can find everything issued since 1971 at www.delphion.com (http://www.delphion.com)   You can either search for a specific patent, or learn a terrific amount by browsing through Classes 313,314,315 and 445 which cover electric lamps.
Title: Patent searches on the net!
Post by: migette on January 05, 2001, 01:44:00 pm
Just a very quick note, no luck with the US patents web site. Let me wish all of you a very good new year and new Millenium as I beleive this is the true start of it.I would welcome any one who maybe in my area to visit. My email is peterbentfls@btinternet.com Good hunting those items are out there, but where??????? Peter.
Title: Patent searches on the net!
Post by: Tim on January 06, 2001, 11:17:00 pm
Thanks for the info and links. Still no luck here either getting into the USPTO image database, seemed like a good idea anyway. I'll check the other patent sites out - they sound interesting.

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-Tim
BulbCollector.com (http://www.bulbcollector.com)
DewCollector.com (http://www.dewcollector.com)
Title: Patent searches on the net!
Post by: Carl Wright on January 08, 2001, 01:29:00 am

I'm new this site but have you ever been to the Ruters University site? You can download  Edison's patents from this site in PFD. http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents.htm (http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents.htm)

[This message has been edited by Carl Wright (edited January 09, 2001).]