Does the building in the picture above look familiar to you?
That's right, this is the building on the front page of the US priority that we see every day, which is the legendary US Patent and Trademark Office, the headquarters building of the USPTO.
Speaking of this building, there is also a sad past.
The USPTO headquarters building was formerly a hotel named Blodgett, but as a hotel, it never really opened for a day. In 1810, the hotel officially became the headquarters of the USPTO.
In 1836, a fire broke out at the USPTO headquarters. The fire was disastrous. It burned all the patent application materials since the founding of the United States in 1776. About 10,000 patents and patent application materials were in the fire. Burned to ashes. Therefore, the U.S. Patent No. 1 that we can see now is actually not the real No. 1 patent in the United States. The real No. 1 patent disappeared in the fire in 1836.
After the fire, the USPTO renumbered the patent applications from 1. In order to distinguish them, X was added before the patent numbers that disappeared in the fire. For example, there is the No. 72 patent with the inventor Silas Lamson in October 1836 and the name of the invention: the sickle, and the No. 72X patent with the inventor Eli Whitney in 1794 and the name of the invention: the cotton gin.
Although the USPTO called on the patentees to send back information to the USPTO within a few months after the fire and reconstructed about 2,800 patents, there are still more than 7,000 patents that have not been found so far. The baby is hidden in the safe. Now, looking for the more than 7,000 patents that have disappeared has become a game that many lovers of American patent history are keen to invest in.
If any patent attorney receives a comparison document marked with an X, he must also tell the page number!
