Library Hours

The Law Library will be closed on Friday, July 3rd, and on Saturday, July 4th, in observance of Independence Day.

Filed under: Library

The First U.S. Patents

This information comes from Tom A. Turner, of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program, in response to a question about the first 100 U.S. patents:

When patents were first issued by the Patent Office, starting in 1790, there was no numbering system.  So very few patents were issued, so they were simply arranged by date and name.  The Patent Office did not begin to number  patents until July of 1836.  In December of 1836 there was a fire at Blodgett’s Hotel (which housed the Patent Office) resulting in the loss of 10,000 patents and 7000 patent models.  So Patent No. 1 (which issued in July 1836) is not actually the first patent issued.  The pre-1836 patents that were lost to the fire were reconstructed by methods such as contacting the owners; nonetheless, not all of the patents that were lost were ever reconstructed.  Only 2845 patents were restored.

So, in some cases, we presently know the name of the patent and the inventor’s name, but no image exists.  These pre-1836 patents are generally referred to as X patents or Name and Date patents.  On the USPTO website you can pull up the entire group of X patents that we have images for with a simple search–

Using the Patent Number Search choice on the PatFT database on our website, enter the letter X.  It will pull up a listing of 2618 available X patents.  According to that list, the only images we have for the first 100 x patents are x1, x4, x36, x46, x51, x61, x72, x74, x92, x93 and x95.  You will get the same results if you look for the x patents on the Cumulative Index to the USAPat discs.  The 100 X patents on the Excel spreadsheet that you found on the PTDLA site, therefore, are not all viewable.

So, the professor will not be able to view all of the true first 100 patents.  He can, however, view all 100 of the patents that were given the numbers 1-100 on PatFt on our website.

For a source on the patent office fire, see the book “Temple of Invention:  History of a National Landmark” by Charles J. Robertson, a Smithsonian publication that you received as a PTDL two years ago.  The lost patents are described on pg. 27.

Filed under: Intellectual Propery, PTDL

Internet, copyright, creativity

Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, and co-editor of Boing Boing, has written an interesting article explaining how copyright competition helps creators and how monopolies harm them. Check it out.

Filed under: Copyright, Intellectual Propery, Technology, Writing

Cool Firefox add-ons

Add-ons are Firefox extensions that one can add to the basic browser to add new features. Bonnie Sucha, a super librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law Library, has put together a list of add-ons useful for legal/library researchers. Go check ‘em out.

Filed under: Cool links, Technology, Web 2.0, legal research, library 2.0, software

New Online Law Review Sumission Service

The Law Librarian Blog has a post about Washington & Lee’s new online law review submission service, LexOpus, which “assists authors and law
journals with the submissions process. The system allows an author to
submit a work to a sequence of author-selected law journals. An author
may also, or instead, invite offers from any journal by choosing to
indicate the work as open to offers. Works may be hidden from public
view if the author wishes that. Please note that LexOpus only accepts
English language works.”

Filed under: Law School, Writing, law journals