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.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 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.