Subject: PATENTS - US 12/1/00 Patents are a great source of information about details of Pullman and Budd cars. The problem has been the expense of hiring a searcher to find the relevant patents, and then ordering copies. This problem is now largely eliminated by the following announcement from the Patent Office. All you need to do is find your way through the Manual of Classification, and you can then find all the relevant patents. U.S. PATENTS ONLINE GO BACK TO 1790 The U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office web site now includes the ability to retrieve patents all the way back to 1790. The USPTO has added two more servers and more than doubled its bandwidth to accommodate the traffic to the site. With the addition of the new patents, more than 6.5 million patents are available online. The database now offers the public an additional 1.7 terabytes of full-page images for the 4,204,863 U.S. patents issued from 1790 through 1975. Patents issued from 1790 through 1975 are searchable by patent number and current US patent classification; patents issued from 1976 to the most recent issue week are searchable by full-text fields that include current US classification data. To facilitate database searches, the USPTO's Manual of Classification has been enhanced to help users find all patents in a particular category of invention. The database is updated weekly.
The site may be found at http://www.uspto.gov/
Paul DeVerter II
Comments