Online Bridge Patent Searches Get Easy

The speaker at our last meeting (Jim Barker) talked about old bridge patents. Up to now searching old patents was tedious because the text is not in the USPTO database, except for patents after 1976. However google has just made it very easy by building a search engine that allows keyword searching of all the > 7,000,000 U.S. patents.

Go to http://www.google.com/patents

You can keyword search on the actual content of the patents. For example, search on: Roebling Wire Cable. The first item retrieved is Roebling's 1842 patent on the manufacture of wire rope.

Thanks to David Denenberg for this tip.