Automation Pending at Patent Office : Research: The agency houses 27 million documents in its primitive stacks. Getting the data loaded into computers is proving to be a big job.
At some point the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office must have gotten heartily sick of seeing Thomas Edison walk through the door with a light bulb or a phonograph under his arm. Gee, Tom, where are we supposed to put all this stuff?
In fact, Edison was just getting started in 1880 when the Patent Office decided it no longer absolutely had to have a working model of every single farm implement, machine, appliance, tool, toy, gizmo or ding-dong developed by the nation’s fertile minds.
Still, in a career that spanned more than a half-century, Edison took out 1,093 U.S. patents, far more than anybody else (Henry Ford had 161, Alexander Graham Bell only 30). Edison was the first person inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1973.
An endless supply of factoids like these squirt out of the Patent Office like particles from an atomic pile (U.S. Pat. 2,708,656, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, Dec. 19, 1944). The office has issued 5.6 million patents since 1790, including 109,728 in 1992.
This is a lot of information. “Research and development organizations estimate that 70% of the technology here is gathered together at no other place,” said Deputy Assistant Patent Commissioner Boyd L. Alexander. “For an R and D lab, it’s very useful.”
Well, not quite yet. Since 1984 the Patent Office has been embarked on a 20-year, $1-billion project to automate its operations, a colossal job. At this point, patent examiners can access by computer 48% of all “images” (patent text and diagrams) in the system.
R and D organizations, inventors and the general public can use some of this, but most visitors still hunt up what they want in “stacks,” where 27 million documents (patents and cross-referenced duplicates) are stored by category in supermarket-sized rooms filled with pigeonholed shelves.
The mix of high- and low-tech is a feature of many federal bureaucracies, but the Patent Office in Arlington, Va., has developed the theme into something of an art form. With “reinventing government” all the rage, it is administratively au courant --a Commerce Department agency that pays for itself with fees it charges for patent applications and other services. In 1992, the Patent Office collected $427,814,520 and ran a $5,423,230 budget surplus.
Once past the glitter, however, things are decidedly low-tech. The primitive stacks motif continues upstairs at headquarters where each group of examiners has its own reference room of patents filed in layer upon layer of “shoe cases.”
These cases are actually shallow drawers set in cabinets, which came into being after Thomas Jefferson, the first U.S. patent commissioner, ordained that patents should be stored in shoe boxes until the republic thought of something else (this took nearly 200 years). The shoe cases today are a mix of the very old (sturdy oak) and the very ugly (gray sheet metal).
The patent examiners, 1,800 experts in disciplines ranging from nuclear war to cloning vegetables, study new patent applications by prowling around the shoe cases making sure that an invention is original.
They also check to make sure it is “useful,” which, office guidelines say, means it must have both a laudable purpose and “operativeness.” (In other words, it’s got to work). Currently it takes 18 months to get a patent. Really low-tech.
By 1980 the ancient methods were inadequate to the workload, leading to an increasing number of bad patent searches, Alexander said, which led in turn to a rash of patent-infringement suits. It was time to automate.
The system, still being installed, is upgraded as technology evolves, raising efficiency while lowering costs, said Alexander.
When the new system was first put on line, Alexander noted, an examiner’s computer workstation cost $70,000. Currently a workstation costs $35,000 and the office is starting to install new personal computers at $12,000 to $16,000. In two years, Alexander said, inventors will apply for patents electronically, mailing in disks with their work filed in a special format.
Every patent since 1971 is filed on rapid access disks that can be scanned instantaneously for key words and phrases. All patents are stored like microfilm on slower moving disks kept in cases known as “jukeboxes.”
An examiner cannot do a computer text search for anything older than 1971, but it is possible to call up and print any diagram in the building. Asked to find patents for the toys known as “Transformers,” the ray gun-toting fold-up creatures that entertain 6-year-old boys for days, Gary R. Robinson, a patent examiner and technology specialist, came up with 67 items. Really neat was U.S. Pat. 5,052,680, “Trailerable Robot for Crushing Vehicles,” a combination toy tractor-trailer/Godzilla.
Challenged to produce classics, Robinson quickly delivered a high-tech show-stopper: U.S. Pat. 821,393 “Flying Machine,” by O. & W. Wright, May 22, 1906. Then, with scarcely a pause, he called up a low-tech marvel: “Metal Rolls for Paint,” J. Rand, Sept. 11, 1841. Known henceforth as the toothpaste tube.
