In order to ensure that all parties concerned would understand the invention, drawings of inventions have generally been required from applicants for patents since the first patent statute was enacted in 1790. There were nearly 10,000 (9,957?) United States patents granted between July 31, 1790 and July 2, 1836. These patents were not numbered but were referenced only by Name and Date.

In conjunction with the Patent Act of July 4, 1836 (?) patents were to be numbered and patent No. 1 issued on July 13, 1836. The Name and Date Patents were subsequently numbered chronologically and an X suffix was used to distinguish them from the new patents. Thus, the first patent issued on July 31, 1790 is 1X. In our scanned document system it is X000001 (you can enter it as X1).

The Patent Office fire of December 15, 1836 destroyed all of the drawings to that date. Of the drawings destroyed in 1836, only about 2,845(?) were able to be restored/reconstructed. It is not clear as to how much artistic liberty the artists may have exercised when making the reconstructions. The restored drawings may reflect the style of the 1840's rather than the originals. More research is needed.

The Patent Act of March 3, 1837 required applicants to submit two copies of drawings so that one could be kept in the office and the second attached to the patent grant sent to the applicant. The 1837 requirement for two sets of drawings was dropped in 1870 when the Office began printing complete copies of patents as they were issued. All of the drawings for patents granted prior to the fire of December 15, 1836 are restored drawings. The drawings for patents from 1837-1870 are, for the most part, the original drawings submitted by the applicants.

The Patent Office set forth no specific standards for drawings prior to 1870. Thus the sizes ranged from a half sheet to large folio size drawings. Many of the drawings were done in black ink while others were elaborately done with watercolors. With the beginning of the routine printing of patents in 1871 the office required all drawings to be black on white and of a specific size.

The X-Patent drawing reproductions displayed in the PTO were made from the restored patent drawings that are in The National Archives. The patent drawing reproductions for patents that do not include an X suffix and are later than December 15, 1836 were made from the original patent drawings that are also in The National Archives.

United States patents are now in a disk system and thus if one has a patent number, retrieval time is only about 15 seconds! Today, only about 1,900 of these X numbered patents are in our PTO search files. These are now known as the X-Patents.

Those X-Patents, which end with a fraction, appear to be for patents that were erroneously omitted from the official list that was sent to Congress. When the inventor's documents were submitted for restoration of the patent the corrective action taken was to insert the patent into the list in the proper chronological sequence and as the list were already numbered sequentially the use of a fractional number was required.

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There are so many worthwhile projects, but so little time! For those projects that we can make a difference on we do our best. Those that are beyond our capabilities we must leave to others.

If there is any portion of the PTO history that you are interested in and would like to become more involved with I have at least the starting point for projects that could take several lifetimes. The PTO history is not a one-person project and I would be glad to share my research with you.

Jim Davie