A few years back I tried to look up patents on the internet and found you could not do it. I just found that they have changed that, and the U.S. Patent Office had a great searchable site.

I was successful in finding some patents by my old friend John Adams in Virginia, for instance #4524476

However, I also looked up an old patent number off a gadget for paint pinstriping I had shown to puzzlephotos for identification.

The number was clear and on the end of the bottle: US PAT 92,148. It seemed low - maybe old, I thought. Strangely enough, that number probably was bogus, since it refers to an old 1869 patent for a wagon wheel gage.

Bet there is a story behind that.

Anyhow, the Patent search site is amazing. There is a text only section that gives all the legal sounding description mumbo-jumbo, i.e. "Be it known that.. this abstract states . . . refer to figure #21. ." etc. But even better is the image section that shows the actual drawings and pages from the patent itself. I had to install a special advanced TIFF plugin to make it work, and it actually works BETTER in Firefox than IE!