United States Patent number 1 | Hacker News Reader

United States Patent number 1

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45 pointsbhavin22 comments

Just to be clear this isn't the first US patent, just the one assigned #1 in the current numbering system (I think?).

More info on the "first" US Patent. http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2001/01-33.jsp

According to wikipedia there were other almost ~10k patents before, but they were destroyed in a fire and are known as X-Patents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Patents

Google has these too

http://bit.ly/8X7Ydw

I don't mean to add to the noise floor, but is there a reason you generated a bit.ly link for this? This isn't twitter with particularly restrictive character constraints; all it serves is obfuscation as far as I can tell.

I'm genuinely curious what the reasoning is.

Non-bitly: http://google.com/patents/about?id=nrxzAAAAEBAJ

I like James Ernest's version better, where a time machine gets patent #1.

http://www.cheapass.com/products/boardgames/cag034.html

This looks like a ton of fun.

How long for OCR to become usable for something like this? Google's OCR transforms the readable "Locomotive Steam-Engine for Rail and Other Roads" to "BAIL AND OTHER ROADS"

So far? About 3 decades.

According to Wikipedia, it's been much much longer than that, but this is my point.

looks way more readable than modern patents. Almost like it wasn't written by a lawyer. Only 4 pages.

The number system came later. X series gives the earliest patents, including the first issued: X1

http://bit.ly/8X7Ydw

Please don't use URL shorteners.

Sorry. Here's the link:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=nrxzAAAAEBAJ

That's General Washington's signature in the middle, and Edmund Randolph's (first Attorney General) on the bottom.

The cabinet was the PTO in 1790.

Man, the beginning of the patent makes this sound like the greatest invention ever. Let trains brave mud,rain,ice and anything. Except I think the US postal service has some prior art to the whole mud,rain and ice thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service_cr...

It appears that Herodotus has prior art on that.

I see... patents have always been ridiculous. Unsurprising.

What is ridiculous about that patent?

That to any engineer worth his/her (but mostly his in that time) salt that must have been blindingly obvious.

After all, the 'rack and pinion' had been around for a while and the rack really is just a gear rolled out.

Like the line numbers in the margin.

It's that way in almost all patents, I think. It may be a style requirement.

It's so when your patent is disputed, you can cite things like "In column 9, lines 34-36 of document E2, it is disclosed that..." (I'm translating just such a dispute claim now. For a tampon applicator. I'd rather be learning about railroads.)

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