U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

finsup

Hi All, I have tried to look up information on Combination Padlock patents without much success. Went to U.S. Patent office site but feel like a dog chasing his tail.
Can anyone give me advice on getting through the maze to review some details on older patents? Maybe just a pipe dream, but I would like to see documentation/illistrations, etc. related to original patents.
What is the process? Thanks, Gary W.

kwoswalt99

You can view the original patent docs on the government site, or you can use google patents.

wylk

Padlocks are very common so there are many, many patents. If you have a patent number of course it is trivial. If you have a patent date you can search for that as well as a US Classification Code of 70/$ (70 is for locks, $ means all subcodes). Be sure to select 1790-to-present to see patents before 1976.

If you want older (pre-1976) patents and need to search by anything other than number, issue date, and/or US Classification Code, the US Patent office is of no help. Try http://freepatentsonline.com but last I checked their index was poor before the 1920s. Google Patents is better indexed for really old ones but their OCR process was wildly inaccurate.

Billy B Edwards Jr. CML

wylk wrote
US Classification Code of 70/$ (70 is for locks, $ means all subcodes). Be sure to select 1790-to-present to see patents before 1976.

I can’t find my list of classification codes right now, but the sub class for combination locks starts around 300 and then upward for different types and locations of dials.
BBE.

[unknown]

wylk

The list of US Classification Codes can be found at http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/selectnumwithtitle.htm and if you scroll down to 70 and click “GO” you get all the subcodes.

brookeclarke

finsup wrote
Hi All, I have tried to look up information on Combination Padlock patents without much success. Went to U.S. Patent office site but feel like a dog chasing his tail.
Can anyone give me advice on getting through the maze to review some details on older patents? Maybe just a pipe dream, but I would like to see documentation/illistrations, etc. related to original patents.
What is the process? Thanks, Gary W.

Hi: I mainly use Google because they have used Optical Character Recognition and so in a perfect world you could find any US patent. But.. the OCR is far from perfect so your search will sometimes miss the patent your are looking for.

In the “olden” days I did patents searches in the Sunnyvale, California patent library. It’s the only one in the U.S. that does NOT file by patent number (pretty much useless for searching) and instead files by Top/Sub class number. So once you have found a patent that’s very similar in content to the one you’re looking for then search on top/sub class number. This is where the USPTO comes in.
You can take the results from the USPTO class search and feed that into Google.

In the past few month I’ve been learning about locks and a big part of that is finding the related patents, see: http://www.prc68.com/I/Locks.html

For more on U.S. patent searching see:
http://www.prc68.com/I/Learning.shtml#Patents

Is there a way for someone in the U.S. to search for antique English patents?

Have Fun,
Brooke

[unknown]