German patent classifications

The unified German patent office starts to issue patents in 1878.

Alex Monge says there were 89 technological categories in this system until 1900, then subclasses were created with a letter after the number -- 20a, 20b, 77h, etc. Can cite work of Jochen Streb on this.

If so that means DE 77, DE 57, and DE 80 were categories until 1900, and DE 77h and DE 64a start then.

Before 1878, there was no unified Germany nor a unified patent system there. There was a German confederation of many principalities, or smaller national governments, sometimes called principalities, and most of these had patent systems too which overall issued on the order of 20,000 patents from 1843 to 1877.

Links

• w:German Patent Classification
• Overview of categories with totals of patents submitted and granted in each, 1881–1890 and 1891–1900. In Die Geschäftsthätigkeit des Kaiserlichen Patentamts (1902), p. 344. Note, in DE 77, there were 1676 and 2590 patents submitted in these decades respectively, with 717 (43%) and 1007 (39%) granted. The total numbers submitted during these decades were 94469 and 168496, with 42694 (45%) and 62514 (37%) granted.
• To do: upload sport/alpha list from _WEHC when uploads are working

Enclosing categories	Patent classification systems
Subcategories	DE 37, DE 46, DE 57, DE 65a, DE 77, DE 80, German patent classifications 1877, German patent classifications 1900
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