Patents for Collectors

The easiest way to find a patent is to search by a patent number found on the antique or collectible.

Does your item have a patent number somewhere on it (often on the bottom of the item?) Or is a patent number listed somewhere on the box, a tag, or instructions accompanying the item?

Here are 4 quick ways to search by patent number, and then obtain the full text of the patent.

1. Go to the USPTO Number Search Site and enter your number in the search box.

(Example: 2,076,074 )

2. Go to the PAT2PDF site and enter your number in the search box. This site gives you a PDF version of the patent to download for free.

(Example: 2,076,074 or 2076074)

3. Go to the advanced patent search page of Google Patent Search and enter your number in the "Patent Number" search box.

(Example: 5976023)

4. Go to the Yahoo! site and enter the word "patent" and your patent number in the search box. The first result will be a Yahoo! Shortcut that will take you directly to the patent in the USPTO database

(Example: patent 2076074)

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U.S. Patent Databases

The best free U.S. patent databases are:


USPTO Patent Databases
The official United States Patent and Trademark Office site includes access to the full-text of patents from 1976-. Full-page images of patents are included from 1790-.

•You may need to download a specific TIFF image browser plugin to view the actual page images of the patents (be sure to read the directions.)

•Use the "Advanced Search" link on the front page for more complex searches.



Delphion Intellectual Property Network
The Delphion Intellectual Property Network contains searchable bibliographic data (information about the patent) and the complete text of all patents since 1974, and bibliographic text and some images from 1971.

•It also includes the full images for patents dated 1790-1971.

•You may find the Delphion site easier to use than the USPTO site. You must register in order to use the free portions of this Web site. This site also provides many additional services for a fee.



freepatentsonline
This site includes the searchable text of patents from patent number 4,000,000 (December 1976) to the present. While not as complete as the first two databases, it is easy to search and has some nice display features.

The U.S. Patent Office uses a classification scheme with patent classes and subclasses to categorize inventions.

While you can search patent databases by a keyword, collectors will often want to search by patent class and subclass. This will help you locate the most on-target items.

For example, Class 446 is "Amusement Devices: Toys," and one of its subclasses is subclass 9, "TOY MONEY BOX-Having figure or mechanism operated or released by coin." If you then search by 446/9 as your class and subclass, you will locate all similar patents with this class and subclass.

Here's a patent found by searching by class 446, subclass 9: