NYT: Lawyers Unearth Early Patents
The Patent and Trademark Office has issued nearly seven million patents; the first 10,000 are known as the X-patents. They were issued from July 1790, when the United States patent system was created under an order signed by George Washington, to July 1836, when every one of them burned in a fire. Virtually every patent is available to the public on paper, microfiche, CD-ROM and the Internet – except the X-patents.
