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  1. #21
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    Nov 2005
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    I wonder if we could start a scan library here...... Just thinking out loud being we have a section for that.......

  2. #22
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    Oct 2009
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    Jim, yes I will send it out. Then if you want you could add it on here as Dean mentioned. Doug

  3. #23
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    Google patents "Coles and Donaldson"

  4. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by Doug MacQueen View Post
    Google patents "Coles and Donaldson"
    Cool, that did show up quite a few, and they were assigned to Guardian Metals which was a Mosler company. I tried a search on http://freepatentsonline.com for an assignee of Guardian Metals and came up with a few more that did not have Donaldson's name.

  5. #25
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    www.google.com/patents

    is the search I use for almost everything in that realm. At least back to a point in time then it kinda drops off before 1850.

  6. #26
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    My impression/experience is that the US patent office (http://patft.uspto.gov/) is excellent for things back to about 1976 but nearly useless for anything earlier, requiring an exact patent number, or issue date and/or Current Classification. http://freepatentsonline.com is fairly good for things back to approximately the 1920s. Google Patents is OK for things earlier but relies on optical character recognition (OCR) and can be extremely awful, sometimes recognizing the form printing company as the inventor etc.

    I remember discovering that freepatentsonline had OCR'd "X-Ray" but the software thought "X" was the Greek letter Chi, and had thus filed everything as "Chi-Ray" rather than "X-Ray". I pointed this out to them and they replied that this was the way they had received the data from the patent office. They still haven't corrected it.

    So each has its uses and limits.

  7. #27
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    Dec 2009
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    Here is a Mosler advertisement from Bankers Magazine, 1928 (volume 117 page 382), touting the installation of a Donsteel door in the new National City Bank at 52 Wall Street in New York City. Unfortunately the building was demolished in the 1980s to make room for the newer building at 60 Wall Street so it should be safe to assume the vault is gone. This is a scan from microfilm, hence the poor quality of the images.

    Click image for larger version. 

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  8. #28
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    Oct 2009
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    Cleveland, Ohio USA
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    The Cleveland Public Library has copies of the U.S. patent books from around 1850 on up into the 1900's, which unfortunately are now kept offsite. With the exception of patent drawings and and descriptions in the earlier sets of books, all the patents were on microfilm and there was no index book of the earlier patents. These were a bit of a pain to access. Then they were put on discs making searches far easier. Several years ago I copied the index section concerning safes and locks for each year from when the books started to somewhere around 1910. I had already copied hundreds of patents but once Google Patents was available to me, things got really easy. I do miss going through the books though. I saw a lot of interesting unrelated patents. For instance the term "booze" was from a man named Booze who had patented a still. But speaking of patents did anyone ever get Jack Sullivan's Patent book? Haven't heard anything more from him ever since he promoted here.

  9. #29
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    Here is another Donsteel advertisement from Bankers Magazine, 1926 (volume 113 page 242). As before, a scan from microfilm.

    Click image for larger version. 

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  10. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by Halflock View Post
    www.google.com/patents

    is the search I use for almost everything in that realm. At least back to a point in time then it kinda drops off before 1850.
    I don't know when it was that the patent office had the fire but from what I can find all of the patents before 1837 are assigned X numbers. The oldest I am aware of is 673X from 3/17/1806 issued to R. Gaines for a balance pendulum lock. I've never seen that one so don't know how it works.
    BBE.

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