Pre 1920 Patentee Search

Patentee or inventor searches only return results from 1920 to date on the uspto's advanced search screen. Do this with or without the double quotes: "your_inventor_here".in. ex: edison.in. Even in the uspto's 1790 to present [entire database] the earliest Edison patent returned is from June 1920. The same search below will find 160 patents from 1876 to 1919. If you know a patent number you can look it up here, just enter a patent number in the upper left pane and press the PN button.

On this site you can do a case insensitive search of references to pre 1920 patents. It currently contains 357,078 unique patents (referenced by patents 1976 through 2019-12-31) which is about 27% of the utility patents issued before 1920. See this page on where this data came from, including a Creative Commons Attribution acknowledgement.