[rollei_list] Re: US Patent and Trademark Office
----- Original Message ----- From: "Don Williams" <dwilli10@xxxxxxx> 
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 4:39 PM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: US Patent and Trademark Office



Interesting.
I used to work for a company that had an apartment in Crystal City, 
just down the road from the Pentagon.*
Somewhere in one of the connected buildings, (maybe even the basement of the Crystal City complex) was some portion of the Patent Office, forgot just what they did. I walked in, looked around and walked out since I didn't have anything to look for. Also, I find that reading patents is a very boring process. Every succeeding claim includes the prior claim, all in detail. They muck up the drawings so that 
you can't even recognize your own patents.
I would guess that being a patent attorney would be a well paying, stress-free line of business, but I think it would be very boring. 

DAW
*With regard to the Pentagon, I was once able to write a trip report which concluded: "The last person we saw was the secretary of defense". Of course the truth is that we saw his back and he never saw us.
Some patents are interesting others are intended to obscure stuff, mainly that the patentee doesn't have much to patent. I've been researching the history of sound recording and certain areas of electronics for a long time now and find that patents are often very necessary reading. Dr. John Frayne, who was a pioneer researcher for Bell Labs and an old friend, once told me that when they did the patent search for the new Western Electric 3D stereo recorder they discovered that much of the work had already been done and patented by Bell Labs in the early and mid 1930's. The labs were making experimental stereo disc recordings in about 1935. Many of these survive and have been released as Lps or CDs. The ones I've heard are quite remarkable. Of course, the labs were not aware in the 1930's that they were re-inventing much of a process explored by Alan Blumlein of EMI. Blumlein was making 45-45 discs while Bell Labs were doing vertical-lateral and also using intensity microphone technique. Some of Blumlein's recordings also survive and are astonishing. All this stuff is hidden in obscure patents. Bell Labs might have some excuse for not being aware of the EMI work but all of the original stereo work was published in the Bell Labs Journal including a special issue dedicated to it. Bell Labs was doing three channel high-fidelity photographic recording in the late 1930's. These machines were capable of flat response in excess of 30 to 15,000 hz with very low distortion and noise level about 60db below the saturation point. They were also using elementary "companders" to improve signal to noise ratio, these were a kind of early Dolby unit. Google patents allows text searching of _all_ US patents regardless of date. It has proved to be an extremely valuable research tool. 

--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
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