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Aero as power source

Leaving a rough note here for further development and comment. Having found an early volume of the GB Abridgments which catalogues aero patents before the 1860s, I'm seeing descriptions of the earliest British patents classified under "aeronautics". A large fraction of them deal with the application of power derived from the air to other types of transportation—namely, carriages, boats, tracks. E.g. Patent GB-1852-155, Patent GB-1849-12452], Patent GB-1843-9642, Patent GB-1853-1088; & see keyword track.

It would seem appropriate to devise a keyword for this category of invention.

Additionally, it seems significant for a history of technology and innovation, that more inventors proportionately saw aero as a means to an already known end, before later seeing it as an end in itself. Cheers, LTA (talk) 10:46, 21 February 2021 (PST)

Power derived from the air -- by windmills? There seem to have been American patents for "wind wheels" (analogous "water wheels") as well as windmills. There may be a distinction between wind wheel and wind mill but I haven't noticed it. -- Econterms (talk) 17:54, 23 February 2021 (PST)
Not windmills, but power in the form of motion derived from properly aero flyers such as balloons and kites which pull something on a track or on the ground. These were common and indexed within aero categories. LTA (talk) 14:37, 3 March 2021 (PST)
Ah. Sounds interesting. I see a discussion in Neilson's book that he doesn't want to include all the Aeronautics patents - e.g., not balloons, and maybe these also. Maybe count them as .5-relevant for now?
Tentatively calling these aero-as-power. LTA (talk) 09:20, 8 June 2021 (PDT)

Templates linking GB patents to pages in B&A (1893) and Neilson (1910)

Newly improved templates will link right to our descriptions of older British aero patents in two books which are perfectly scanned at Internet Archive. This wiki code will unpack like the references below: {{BrewerAlexander|40|p40-41}}, {{Neilson1910|71|p71}}

Mexican patents

Great find. It seems the reason they don't display at first (and come into lists doubled) is the apostrophe before the asterix, right after the template, introducing the inventor location and sources. Was this deliberate for some reason? If not, deleting the apostrophe is a pretty easy fix. Meanwhile, find/replace seems unwilling to target the string "M�xico". Also, the date granted on many or all of these came in as 1905. LTA (talk) 04:53, 30 April 2021 (PDT)

  • Yup. I tried to be careful but messed up a lot. And it made errors with an character with diacritics. I will try to clear out the extra apostrophes. -- Econterms (talk) 19:36, 1 May 2021 (PDT)
    • I'm bummed that we can't search-and-replace the strange character that came in. It can be done by hand, one by one. The strange character comes in because of some kind of dreamhost mistake and/or the Page Transfer extension. I know how to investigate when I work up the steam to do it. -- pbm

One standard patent report now includes Filing date

  • I added Filing date to the kind of patent report that shows up on Thomas Sloper because he has a patent thicket and it helps to figure out parent-child relations. Maybe this would help on all patent reports? Now I'm thinking this is long overdue. But we could also create templates with short/simple patent reports. Comments welcome. -- pbm
  • I think that would quite often be handy, and most particularly as applied to inventor pages. -- jrh

Categories for archives and/or repositories

  • I'm thinking we can mark pages here about physical archives in Category: Archives, and online or electronic ones in Category: Repositories. Good? I'm inclined to use plural but I'm not sure what's best. But that helps us track places and sources. -- Econterms (talk) 18:13, 20 June 2021 (PDT)
  • Would Category: Online repositories make the distinction relative to physical archives more explicit? Plural certainly.-JRH
    • Agreed. I've created them. Let's see if it does some good. There are MANY places, both online and physical, that have primary materials of interest. I guess databases with secondary information could be marked too, as "category: databases" or something. -- pbm
    • Regarding Category: Online repositories, in a few cases I'd like to create fairly brief pages, appropriately categorized, featuring external links along with succinct references to offices, modern or historical, with which they are associated, along with references to archival facilities which hold the actual physical documents.
    • Regarding Category: Archives, a key type of secondary information in the context of catalogues or "journals" as they call them at STIC, could be marked in various ways, with AGR 2 - Cuvelier for instance being great for primary documents as well as catalogues, but all Belgian, whereas STIC is greatly international in terms of catalogues, but holds no(?) patent originals. Perhaps highlighting as an emphasis on STIC, for instance, would be handy.
      • Please proceed creatively!

Concepts of patent class and subclass

JRH, I boldly made edits to HU V/h that may not seem suitable. The internationally comparable concepts to Főosztály and Osztály appear to be patent class and patent subclass. Across countries, patents were assigned to subclasses -- sometimes one subclass, or sometimes a list of them. Patent classes are descriptive, and are made up of collections of subclasses, and generally do NOT have patent assigned to them. E.g. "machinery" or "aeronautics" or "Sport" might be classes. I would like to say that these words match Főosztály and Osztály. Is that reasonable? -- Meyer (talk) 17:36, 12 September 2021 (PDT)

PBM, I don't mind. "Főosztály V"(even sometimes translating specifically as "general department") is inclusive of "Osztály V/h". Then the Hungarian system gets into further subclassifications, though not necessarily within our aero material.

Somewhere I'd emphasize variable degrees of a subclassification process. So classes would include such elements as the Dutch "Klasse", for instance, along with various analogous forms, with subclasses including the Dutch "Groepe", for instance, along with analogous forms. Etymology might be out the window in some cases, in terms of which word designates the broader grouping, with mere convention playing a role, but yes, we're getting to the thinking of the time. Patent classification systems could use a section on this, with ongoing speculations, as well as more outlined structuring of material being handled in analogous manners across the international context, with nationally specific term pages ordered in said section.

Airship - Dirigible - Steerable Airship

Speaking of etymology, relative to mere convention, and conventions swinging between languages, we know that English "dirigible" comes form French "dirigeable" (the adjective meaning "steerable" from "diriger" - "to direct"). A Hungarian translation might get us "steerable airship"(dirigible), but is there such a thing as a non-steerable airship? I'm thinking in terms of tracking proportionate data. Other terms, when we have them, lead to more legitimate precision. A blimp is specifically a non-rigid airship. Then again, these are also "steerable". I'm sort of tied up today, but do we need some disambiguation and possibly some eloquent and well-placed confession of ambiguity on these matters?

  • I think the term was meant to distinguish from older style balloons which (1) weren't shaped for efficient steering, and/or (2) didn't have any force of motive power to move them horizontally, and/or (3) didn't have fins or tail for control. At one time I thought "rigid" was part of the definition, but it isn't. I don't know where the sharp line is; I think of it as being the cigar shape versus the balloon shape, but maybe a dirigeable always has propulsion too. In modern use "airship" would always be steerable but I don't know about that then.
Regarding: do we need some disambiguation and possibly some eloquent and well-placed confession of ambiguity on these matters? YES that sounds constructive, if we don't already have it. There are books and other references to check on these terminologies. I just checked two books on the history of ballooning and didn't see a clear definition. en.wp treats dirigible as synonymous with airship, and says: "An airship or dirigible balloon is a type of aerostat or lighter-than-air aircraft that can navigate through the air under its own power." I like that, but we also want to establish what it meant back then. -- PBM 18 Sept 2021
  • I think some of the issues come up in terms of mere usage, and interlinguistic borrowing, antique and modern. "Blimp" even pops up from time to time in Hungarian-English translation, and that should definitely be non-rigid, though I'm not sure of each case. I like the above definition, and the general equation of airship=dirigible, rigid-non-rigid being great data when we have it. I'll put something on Techtypes about this sort of issue. -JRH
  • Excellent! -- PBM
  • There seem to be few uses of airship or aéronef before the era of dirigibility. Dirigible is really a less descriptive name and probably a shortening of "dirigible airship" (arrived at in English and French). Although as you suggest "dirigible airship" is redundant, it may have been been useful for communication purposes when the technology was new and the vocabulary uncertain. LTA (talk) 09:50, 19 September 2021 (PDT)

Gustav Knäpper

  • @LTA, can you find this fellow, Gustav Knäpper, in DPMA? I suspect he patented in DE before the patents we see. --Meyer (talk) 10:46, 24 November 2021 (PST)
    • Yes indeed, he had a German patent for the same compressed air propulsion device: Patent DE-1903-160742. LTA (talk) 23:01, 24 November 2021 (PST)

Edit with form deletes unused fields

It seems this still can happen; see this linked edit. This was a US patent with the upload glitch caused by multiple tech fields. When the data for "Assigned to" was deleted in the form that field disappeared. Furthermore the unintelligible "Full specification filed date=meteo" and "Application number=instrument" were invisibly deleted. LTA (talk) 03:00, 27 November 2021 (PST)

-I've been using edit with form somewhat more lately, since the issue between edit with form and accent marks got cleared up, and I've only revisited certain pages, with plain edit, in a few cases. What I'd been noticing, before and still, is that mere edit, whether or not I'd used edit with form, would be missing some or all empty fields. However, when I create a new patent page, from scratch, I cut and paste the entire long form onto a straight blank page, initiated by way of searching for the desired patent number and adding "Patent __-____-" as need be, and all the fields remain, whether I switch to and from edit with form or not. When I was using mere edit more, on pre-existing pages, because of the now-resolved accent mark issue I often had to add at least certain groups of fields, if not all (fields that had been unused). Any field that I've added, by hand if you will, remains, even empty fields that I would leave empty.

(I just did a blank field visibility test, going into mere edit, on one page I'd created from scratch, and one page that we'd already had and that I'd edited with form, and unused fields were missing from the latter, whether or not having previously used edit with form was the cause. For me, sans the edit with form accent mark issue, edit with form simply works, and I haven't done any manual field insertion in a while, and rarely use mere edit.) -JRH

Example patent not granted

@JRH -- Can you review Patent GB-1918-169183? My practice when a patent is not granted is to leave the grant year and grant date blank. What date are you using there? -- PBM @PBM -- I've tidied it. Oddly, Espacenet gives "publication data" 1922-12-19. -- JRH

  • Ah! That sounds right actually. The document was not granted patent status but there is a date it was published to the public. We can record that date. Interesting. -- pbm

Early aero-technical development analyzed as a social network

I'm done for the month(April, that was), officially, but kicking a few ideas around. Would some variation on the above be appropriate as a structurally facilitating page? Or something like "Early aviation analyzed as a social network"? I've squeezed simple social network onto a few pages, for now. I'm very keen on data display, and user-friendly integration, and on thoughts not getting lost.

  • Good! I can add to social network. Feel free to brainstorm. There's a formal literature in which a "network" has nodes (points) and edges (lines connecting the points). The nodes might be people, and/or companies, with substantive links, or they might be patents, with citations to and from one another. Or some other collection of information can be represented this way, and there are dynamic changes which can be "measured" by summaries of the nodes, edges, links, paths, and their properties. I have a likely coauthor who can go further here. -- Meyer (talk) 16:09, 27 June 2022 (PDT)
  • It just struck me that the above "node" and "edge" terminology, of the social network is directly analogous to the “nodes” or “artificial neurons” connected via positive or negative “weights” within the AI "neural network" discussion. They even talk about the challenges presented by surprise "edge cases" ! The linearly summed "weight" combinations fit into the profoundly non-linear "network". All of our data combination has this profoundly non-linear aspect.

Re-examination of the 19th Century advanced search page of inpi.fr

A quick re-visit, 1800-1850, cross-referencing various terms:

  • aéro yielded false leads
  • aér and aer yielded nothing (though they got us legit data in the past)
  • oiseau, as a wildcard, yielded nothing
  • ballon gets us GREGOIRE Gaspard(non-aero), and Henri Dembinski, and Joseph-Augustin Barratte, and Auguste-François Garnier(only semi-relevant), and LOUVET(only semi-relevant), and MILLET/LUCAS(which looks dodgy)
  • update from pbm: After visit to INPI.fr I may be able to get access to a giant spreadsheet of the data made available in their advanced recherche page, meaning we would not have to use the web interface to it. In a year it is expected that more information on these older patents will be available, including their elegant diagrams. -- econterms

Legal successors filing patents

The Hungarian word "jogutódja" translates as "legal successor". There are three Hungarian incidents of this:

There could hypothetically have been an honorific aspect to posthumous filing, though Joseph Hofmann was apparently not yet deceased. Over the three cases we have a company, a presumably educated (Dr.) landlord, another (Dr.)physician, and a factory manager, filing in what they likely perceived as being their own interest. Are these indicators relative to low quality patent phenomena? Rather, these third party filings are likely indicators of a patent's being of high quality.

There should be non-Hungarian parallels, of course. A spouse, or some other next-of-kin, could be a "legal successor". A creditor could be a legal successor. It is a matter of whether the third party in question pursued this entitlement, whether they saw the patent rights as a meaningful asset, whether they filed the patent.

  • I'm reflecting on whether we should make informal inferences. We could enter "legal successor" in cases where the original inventor died and a close relative then becomes the applicant/owner during the application process. That seems useful to me, if it matches the formal Hungarian category. Then we could quickly get a report on how common these cases were, how they were apparently handled, and so forth. You can just decide this. -- Meyer (talk) 12:30, 17 January 2023 (PST)
  • I would be in favor of our doing something with this. My guess is that the designation popped up in the Hungarian protocols responsively. Interestingly, a search internal to this wiki of "legal successor" brings up other disproportionately Hungarian results, aside from the patent-generated "jogutódja" term. In theory, aside from Hungary, anything analogous, in terms of patent filings, would come up from within a small subset of "Applicant is inventor? No" material. (talk) 13:09, 17 January 2023 (PST)

New compact templates for French and British sources

Colleagues, for patents which are both on espacenet and on google, I've switched away from: {{esp|FR|391218}} and its GB equivalent to this template: {{FRpatentsources|467096A}}. This second, newer template constructs and shows both links. The A (or E) suffix has to be capitalized or the resulting hyperlink doesn't work.

When add I find it convenient to go to the google one first, use what it has in text, and only then look at the details in the espacenet one because they are on a pdf. Google also sometimes has a count of post-1948 citations by later patents.

French patents before about 1904 aren't on espacenet or google yet but I think based on my conversation with the French patent office that they're coming. They are scanning them. -- Meyer (talk) 14:04, 21 April 2023 (PDT)

Noted! I've noticed a few, even pre-1900, trickling onto Espacenet, over time. Regarding very early French material, I've been using a "1969" internal search to find "|Filing date=December 31, 1969" and-or "|Grant date=December 31, 1969" glitch material that has come up via certain data shuffles. (Of course there are a few legitimate 1969 death dates and publications.) I'm correcting everything. Interestingly, the most antique French data gives more address and occupation data. -JRH 22 April 2023

Other compact templates for patent sources

  • Swiss patents: {{CHpatentsources|73161}} ; note the lack of any letter at the end.
  • Austrian patents: {{ATpatentsources|67267}} ; note the lack of any letter at the end.
  • German patents: {{DEpatentsources|118834}} ; note the lack of any letter at the end.
  • American patents: {{USpatentsources|884432}} ; note the lack of any letter at the end.
  • Canadian patents: {{CApatentsources|126457}} ; note the lack of any letter at the end.
  • Dutch patents: {{esp|NL|13391C}}

{{TOCright}} and other tools aiding in the accessible ordering and display of data

The {{TOCright}} function was of great assistance on the page of Robert Esnault-Pelterie, among others. Given that, I noticed that mere "=== References === " registers well relative to the above-mentioned function. I inserted === Patent data followed by publication data === so as to give

a place relative to TOC. This does still require scrolling through by all the patents (and there will be more, in this case), in order to see the publications report. Is there a way to address this? I've used === Other standard format data === as a heading for the name, birth date . . . and so forth form.
Were you asking how to address the need to scroll so much? I'm thinking about how to shrink or hide the list of patents. REP is a special case. He may have more patents than anyone else. I can't think of too much to do here. On Wikipedia itself there is way to put a list into multiple columns, and there is a way to hide a chunk of tech inside a show/hide box, where you'd click "show" to see it all, and "hide" to see just an introductory line. I just tested and the second one doesn't work here. It would be cool to make it work, which may be possible. There may well be a way to get multiple columns to work.
One thing you can definitely do is to shrink the font. Put <small> above the standard reports, and </small> below them. Then the characters will be smaller. This doesn't save much vertical space, though.
I think your approach to making a header above the standard reports so that they have a section in the TOC is a nice idea. We could do it for every case . . . although I think I like the compact way it looks now usually.
-- Meyer (talk) 20:28, 10 June 2023 (PDT)

REP is a special case indeed. He has so much data of various kinds that the TOC brought some order. So I added the headings. In usual cases the headings built into

are very fine, patents and publications both headed, but they are as if one function, relative to my inserted headings, and TOC. In this rare case, I was wondering about some off-chance that TOC could somehow offer the option of jumping straight to publications. I'm all in favor of not applying TOC features to the majority of inventor pages. -JRH
Surprised there is no obvious option for show/hide. It does seem like there are extensions that will do this, e.g. Extension:CollapsibleSections. LTA (talk) 12:20, 11 June 2023 (PDT)

Patent dates discussion

Patent dates could have its own talk page but instead allow me to pose my little question here. Back the 1860s, US patents don't have filing dates listed at the beginning—but they do have a date of signature at the end. Is that a filing date? Or does it occur too late in the process, after the lawyers have already negotiated with the office? On Patent US-1861-32182 there's a month and a half between signing date and grant date. LTA (talk) 06:22, 4 July 2023 (PDT) P.S. These signature dates are included in a minority of patents from this period. LTA (talk) 08:15, 4 July 2023 (PDT)

It makes sense to me to use the date the inventor signs as a filing date in those cases. In cases where we have both, I'm doing some comparisons; generally they are within a week of one another. We could leave a note saying we used the inventor-signing date, but I bet there's a simple breakpoint in the 1860s when the official filing date becomes available so it can be implicit, and they are close to one another. Agreeable? Sensible? -- Meyer (talk) 11:12, 11 July 2023 (PDT)
Sounds just fine. LTA (talk) 19:12, 12 July 2023 (PDT)

Regarding Filing date & Grant date & Publication date

Filing date

Fortunately, almost all international and proprietary points of interest revolve around filing date. This applies to additions to parents within each national system, always based on filing date.

Particularly when we have originals on hand, filing dates are the most straightforward. A Hungarian patent will have its "Date of filing of the application" within the modern entered data, and this will always match the “A bejelentés napja” date shown on the original.

Priority date

Filing date also applies to the international priority date phenomenon which connects to the Convention de Paris pour la protection de la propriété industrielle. The priority date, whether or not we have seen it, is the filing date of whichever nation the patent was first filed. The enthusiasm with which each nation complies with the above provisions or displays its compliance is highly variable, relative to these 1883 agreements.

  • A British patent, such as Patent GB-1908-11948, may head with "(Under International Convention)" and give the priority date and the nation in which said earlier filing was done.
  • An Austrian patent such as Patent AT-1910-43142, will usually have its "Priorität vom . . . ", and the appropriate date, and the nation in question, and more rarely the non-Austrian patent number.
  • A Hungarian patent, such as Patent HU-1909-48795, will have its "Elsőbbsége" followed by the appropriate earlier non-Hungarian date. For better or worse, their efficiencies do not touch and are not affected by any oddities evolved on Espacenet.
  • France seems to be in decent compliance, for the most part.
  • Spain is very difficult, in that it does have data which interfaces with Espacenet, yet only partially, and erroneously. We have every reason to believe that priority date data showing up next to a Spanish patent in a column of results is actually the filing date, in Spain, and not usually, almost never, the actual priority date.

Grant date

  • Patents are “accepted” in Britain, “Délivrée” in France. In the case of many other nations, "grant date" is a semantic toss-up. Fortunately, again, filing date is the most crucial data.

Publication date

This has come to us partially by way of neat analogues relative to certain national systems, as displayed on original patent documents.

  • Each French patent will have its date “Demandée” and its date “Délivrée” and its date “Publiée”, and this last will comport with the Publication Data as displayed on Espacenet.
  • Britain actually gets more complicated. When a patent has been accepted, its Espacenet Publication Data will match the date accepted (our "granted") as displayed on the original document. Patent GB-1919-144395 is one of the overwhelming majority of cases in which the "publication data" featured by Espacenet matches the "complete accepted" shown on the British original document. I'm also highlighting the patent as another rare neat example of multiple provisional specifications well-dated and numbered under the auspices of one complete specification document. When the patent has not been accepted, there will still be Publication Data. Patent GB-1918-169183 is a handy example of this latter.
  • Spain is very difficult, again, in that it does have data which interfaces with Espacenet, yet only partially, and erroneously. We have decent reason to associate the Espacenet Publication Data with the patent's being granted.
  • Hungarian patents have a “Publication/disclosure” date entered within the modern entered data, and this data always follows the filing date by some months or years, but this “Publication/disclosure” date is never shown on the original. Rather, a “Megjelent (year). évi (month) hó (day)-én (or án)”, that is “Released (month) (day), (year)”, is given on the original, and this almost invariably comes weeks or months or occasionally years later still.

Related to aircraft?

I don't see the criteria for "Related to aircraft?" spelled out at Template:Patent. Are they written somewhere else? A while back we agreed that projectiles (bullets and grenades, mainly) would count as 0.5 or partially related to aircraft. Going through the US patents I see many "propellers" some of which could be related to aircraft, but others which are paddle-wheels for boats and have little applicability. Maybe it would be a good time to spell out the criteria. Also, considering that we have not collected a similar sample of patents (for projectiles and non-aeronautical propellers) from countries outside the US, for formal data evaluations it would probably be desirable to include only patents with "Related to aircraft=1". LTA (talk) 08:15, 4 July 2023 (PDT)

Spelling out the criteria sounds fine. Also, our count of solidly "related to aircraft" patents is still artificially low, aside from the other issues. Aside from "Yes", versus "1", there are still significant numbers of patent pages on which the field is blank.-JRH

  • Great point, this is a big inconsistency in the data. According to "Drilldown":

    Related to aircraft: Yes (6990) · 1 (6193) · Keine (2745) · No (203) · Partially (181) · 0 (131) · 0.5 (89) · .5 (87) · -1 (80) · 1? (28) · 0? (5) · frame (4) · 1911-06-27 (4) · rudder (3) · marine (3) · 1911-07-04 (3)

Within Keine here is the national breakdown:

Office: Keine (5) · ?? (1) · AH (1) · AT (18) · AU (4) · BE (26) · CA (5) · CH (4) · DE (32) · DK (3) · ES (11) · FR (274) · GB (619) · HU (5) · IT (4) · LU (1) · NL (1) · NO (1) · NZ (1) · SU (2) · US (1727)

Combining "Yes" and "1" shouldn't be a big deal but coming to terms with these blanks may take some effort. LTA (talk) 04:11, 5 July 2023 (PDT)

Rename Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft?

Right now the page title is Luft Verkehrs G.m.b.H.. This form seems rare in the wild and I propose moving the page and standard company name to Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft. I suggest this, tentatively, over Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. since it seems there is an AG form as well which we might want to include with the same name. Gesellschaft was used as part of the name because "Luft-Verkehrs" means "Air Traffic", so, I infer, it doesn't read; it needs to be "Air Traffic Company". LVG is a standard abbreviation.
Any thoughts? We already have two dozen patents associated with this company and I suggest we change the names en masse to either of the options above. Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. is what I see usually appearing. The search on the main page should be set up to catch a few variants, in any case. LTA (talk) 12:15, 11 August 2023 (PDT)

Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft sounds fine, with a few caveats. "Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft m.b.H." shows up on a spot-checked German patent, with the "G" in "LVG" and in Luft Verkehrs G.m.b.H.(in all its variants) being equivalent to "Gesellschaft". "AG" usually equals "Aktien-Gesellschaft", though occasionally "Arbeiten-Gesellschaft". So very technically, "AG" may involve a different organization type. If you have any observations on any related minutia, feel free to jump in on company types, by the way. I'm still in favor of consolidating results on one page, even Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft. I'm of the school that notation, on patent pages and on the organization page, is what makes the unified bulk display kosher. -JRH

Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft works for me, or LVG. Consider also Luftverkehrsgesellschaft, the phrasing on de.wp. My understanding is that "Gesellschaft" is usually part of the company name, whereas "m.b.H." is a legalistic suffix, and when one sees GmbH it is sometime all a suffix, and the G is not really part of the company's common name. (I will visit company types to help establish this in our common records.)
I am happy to edit other pages to match the rename. In most cases I'd want a patent page to show the Applicant firm that was on the original patent, but if that leads to too many names, and a complicated query/report with more than four similar names, or too many redirects, or any mess, it's okay to tweak the Applicant firm to match the name of the company page. -- Meyer (talk) 09:12, 12 August 2023 (PDT)

I'm also most in favor of keeping what is displayed on the documents we see on the record somewhere, including on the patent pages, and not getting too carried away with presumed generalizations. G.m.b.H. is an abbreviation of “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung”, and there is some inconsistency in terms of what is part of any common company name. AG, in particular, opens at least the possibility of a significant change in corporate status. One way to avoid mess, in terms of excessive reports on particular pages, is too retain at least some of the pages, with friendly and prominent though non-obtrusive mention, linking between them. We don't always know what insignificance, or significance, is behind the differentials in usage. -- AvionHerbert (talk)

Detailed disambiguation of names

The detailed lists for Phillips surname disambiguation and Thompson surname disambiguation make sense. Deep researchers in this historical field benefit from this sort of thing. Thank you, AvionHerbert. -- Meyer (talk) 08:40, 21 September 2023 (PDT)

You're welcome Meyer

Patent FR-1911-331197(?)

Presently, Patent FR-1911-331197, as is, links to a 1903 non-aero patent, unconnected to André-Julien Mahoudeau‎‎. I wasn't sure how the lead got entered into our data, so I didn't want to mess with it.

  • Got it. Moved to the name of another incomplete Mahoudeau patent. This one might have appeared because of my typo in Dec 2023. -- Meyer (talk) 17:34, 19 January 2024 (PST)

Also, Patent FR-1856-mo may possibly, though only possibly, check out as a Patent FR-1856-26857, though only possibly of Modeste-Abel Latouche. I ran into Internal Server Error when trying to save some speculations:

Note: A "système de navigation marine, sous-marine, etc." does show up, with this filing date, simply identified with inventor LATOUCHE. It would be designated as Patent FR-1856-26857, if we were to find that it has LTA applicability. This is all feasible, and with the inventor being Modeste-Abel Latouche.

This 26857 is a patent of fifteen years. This "LATOUCHE" is at this point addressed at 14, rue de Provence, Paris, département Seine, with occupation "secrétaire de la société de navigation de Paris (75056)", Classe 6.

Works of Sam Leonard Walkden

@User:AvionHerbert & @User:LTA -- you've both edited about Sam Walkden this year, which inspired me to add all his works listed in the 2nd Brockett bibliography. I'm done. If inspired, take a look at any of that and edit freely. LTA, I do think the two editions of his book should have their own own page since the second one is 90 pages longer and was published in a different year. That suggests that if someone were someday to summarize or review them, they would have historically-informative differences. So I split that page into two. I hadn't known of Mr. Walkden till now, but he seems to have been quite a focused aerodynamicist, not a journalist passing by.

FYI, I have 17700 other entries from that Brockett to add, too many to paste in one by one. There are severe glitches with non-English characters when I do a mass upload, and it takes effort, but I'll try again. -- Meyer (talk) 10:06, 26 December 2023 (PST)

It seems logical that, if a three sentence blurb in a magazine sometimes warrants its own entry as a publication, ninety pages of extra text would also deserve that. Having two entries would also enable one to clearly cite one or other other. On the other hand perhaps it would get excessive to form a separate entry for every edition of a book, as a rule.
Along the same lines I have been thinking that the Reports and Memoranda of the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics probably each deserve their own page, as they are major research contributions, each with a unique author, date, and subject. It seems a bit scandalous, actually, how hard these seem to be to find.
Now that I look at it they seem to be indexed separately in Brockett, 1921 so maybe the work of cataloguing them has mostly been done for us, already. LTA (talk) 15:24, 26 December 2023 (PST)

Aeroplane

I've added observations onto this page vis-à-vis the sprawl of interlinguistic usage tangent to "aeroplane" as a name of an entire vehicle. That is, I understand the etymology, but our data entry hasn't taken this consistently into account. Tech field entry "aeroplane" may sometimes reflect wings in particular and-or what we call airplane. I thought we should have some of this made explicit, on page aeroplane, in that ambiguity of usage, and often outright leaning to the whole-vehicle usage, pertains to a multitude of publications, along with company names, not to mention patent and other data. Likewise with hydroplane and hydro-aeroplane ; in the sprawl of casual usage, even high-end antique writers seem to have used "hydroplane" the "hydro-aeroplane". We are dealing in cases like these with multiple linguistic particles, in conjunction, each and any of which particles underwent abbreviation, and evolving signification.

Editor Vorobiev/Vorobyov

@User:LTA, it's exciting to see your findings from the Russian journals. Boris Vorobiev seems to be a central figure. I'd seen his name in Brockett but didn't know of his editorial role till you found it. He may have known the whole Russian scene.

It seems that this last name is common in Russia, and that there are 8 notables in Russian Wikipedia named Boris Vorobiev (more or less), but not ours: [1]

I'm jazzed to see a little bio of him based on sources you've found. For Cyrillic names it may be that we need expanded versions of "Standard person reports" with 10 or more alternative spellings, but that seems fine. The wiki is good at that. If I knew how, I'd write a generalized one that could take a large but varying number of arguments. There's a technique for that, detecting that the Nth argument is blank and adjusting for that. Will do it someday. Anyway it's fun to see inching forward in Cyrillic and to identify this person I can remember. It brings structure and coherence to scattered facts. -- Econterms (talk) 08:43, 3 February 2024 (PST)

I've got a copy of The Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publications, if we want to bring that into the proceedings. It gets into pre-Soviet and Soviet differentials, along with issues of dates and so forth. -JRH

  • Boris Nikitich Vorobiev is up and running with some related articles created as well. His papers are held at the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and do contain correspondence, etc., with other significant people. One way to find more info short of visiting would be to see who's used this archive (fond, as they call it).
Yes it would be great to automatically 'multiply' some of these reports. I'm hoping we will get into some kind of a groove with orthography and not have the same person spelled 10 different ways in templates throughout the site. But it is undeniable that we're dealing with names spelled multiple ways in their own alphabet, in addition to all the possible transliterations! That book sounds quite applicable!
Guaranteeing some unpredictability, too, is the fact that plenty of these Russians had opportunities to spell their own names in Latin alphabets, and did so according to their own preferences. For example General Рыкачёв has -ёв (sometimes -ев, sometimes -евъ) at the end of his name like Vorobiev but signed his name "Rykatcheff" (even in English publications) instead of Rykatchev or Rykachov. LTA (talk) 15:49, 4 February 2024 (PST) P.S. Special:Drilldown/Person?Countries=RU to quickly survey the forty RU people. LTA (talk) 22:32, 4 February 2024 (PST)

Ѵ, eliminated 1917-1918, possibly factoring into Russian patent classifications

I'm currently digging into Patent RU-1906-21016. This Ѵ issue pertains more likely into the character after the "/", rather than to that preceding it.

One hypothesis is that "Group V/VIII" = RU Group V and RU Group VIII. This would be the pre-1910 classification system. There are some notes at Russia, Russian patent office, and ru that pertain to decoding the patents, and where new information could be added. Possibly there should be some redistribution of material from the main Russia article to the patent office article.
For what it's worth I've seen tons of ѣ, і, and э, pretty minimal ѳ, and no Ѵ in materials mostly 1900–1917. LTA (talk) 20:18, 8 February 2024 (PST)
PS I think these listings in Notes of the Russian Technical Society more or less confirm that the group names are traditional Roman numerals. The perception of the typed Ѵ there is astounding though. I will see if these listings will also confirm dual group classification. The headers of the categories are pretty vague and hardly descriptive of the inventions we're looking at, which probably explains why they switched to the new system. LTA (talk) 22:40, 8 February 2024 (PST)

Yes, and we are learning that administrative peculiarities practically destined to trip up the archival visitor might have offered no confusion to people engaged in the nationally specific administrative culture at the time. That is, I would never tilt a Roman numeral V so that it could even possibly resemble the Ѵ, but in context, at the time, for the caste involved, it wouldn't have presented any confusion. Seeing the two "fonts" together in one entry did stand out. I'm happy to play ball with the V/VIII until and if we find any data to the contrary. -JRH

File:Golubev-1909-GroupV.jpeg – again the Ѵ. Does this have to do with ease of typing on Russian typewriters? LTA (talk) 09:08, 10 February 2024 (PST)

Patent families with absent hypothetical original

In some cases we know about an original patent but we don't have complete information about it, in which case it gets a name like Patent BE-1909-12-24 Marie Jasogne and Theodor Dobresco. Many such names are redlinked but we could choose to create limited entries for these patents because we know they exist and therefore they are valid data. The remarkable Patent US-1913-04-21 George Raymond Lawrence also falls into this category, though it may never have been granted, because it's cited in foreign filings.
In other cases such as Patent RU-1909-27293 of Todd Churchill Woodworth there's no reference to a US original though it seems likely one existed. There is a three-way tie between RU, GB, and FR, for first filing on the Gregorian date of January 12, 1909.
We would like to tie all of these patents as a family, would we not? Should we arbitrarily assign one (I'd lean towards GB in this case) as the original and declare the rest supplementary? Would the arbitrarily chosen original then have |First filing=1, all the rest |First filing=0, and as family year the filing year of the arbitrarily chosen original?
Tangentially: the guidance at Template:Patent/Supplementary to is quite helpful but is there another place on the site, possibly reader-facing, that deals with the concept of the patent family? Patent family? Ciao, LTA (talk) 22:40, 10 February 2024 (PST) I'm keen on creating more of those parent patent pages, with unknown numbers and so forth, as needed.-JRH

Retention of IPC and CPC classifications which have been removed from particular patents on Espacenet

Long ago, we set this, the retention, as somewhat of a precedent, when revisiting patents. I'm wondering about this. Aside from the great interest in the antique classification systems, it seems that said retention is a preservation of data which the team at Espacenet has deemed imperfect, a preservation of "erroneous" which is also inconsistent and undocumented in its nature.-JRH

We've decided to remove, when Espacenet has removed, on a "moving forward" basis, when revisiting the appropriate patents in the course of other things. This has to do with among things the use of links, as "sources", of data points which are no longer verified via the link.-JRH
If we no longer have a source connecting a patent to some IPC/CPC, it's sensible practice to remove our link to. But this is a judgment call; if it seems useful to keep it one can leave a note saying why. This issue comes up with the somewhat mysterious '2700' CPC classes that appeared in some kind of transitional phase. -- Meyer (talk) 16:55, 24 February 2024 (PST)