Techtypes

Official national and international typologies

Patents are classified by official patent agencies and we can stretch the category systems to other patents which were not originally covered by that category system. Conceivably other data items like publication, aircraft, firms, and inventors can also be classified by the tech type expertise.

There are at least six techtype category systems in this Inventing aviation wiki: CPC, IPC, USPC, the historic French patent classifications, the historic German patent classifications, and our own informal terminology which helps us search, classify, and discover similarities ad hoc. in practice the most relevant one is the CPC -- it is modern, detailed, and used cross-nationally. Some historic patents have been assigned CPC codes, possibly by the patent agencies or WIPO. We can assign others. Some cases may be hard to classify.

Semantic phenomena

We are dealing with etymology, in the proper sense, and we are also dealing with convention.

Our elaboration within this process of typification evolves in a manner responsive to patent and other data, as we gather it, and we are responding to terminology which was itself in undergoing a process of evolution. There are interlinguistic issues to consider, such as the anglophone usage of “dirigible”(as a noun, meaning something along the lines of “steerable balloon”, or ultimately “airship”), being derived from the French (adjective) “dirigeable”. Hence from time to time we get some as it were redundancy between “steerable airship”, “airship”, and “dirigible”.

There are also evolutions and variations within the terminological usage trends within any given language. Over time, the francophone “propulseur à hélice” came to be, in France, simply the “propulseur”, with “hélice”(blade) being implied, in the manner in which we refer simply to “propellers”. In Belgian usage, during our key period of interest, simple “hélice” came to be the dominant usage, and this latter has become the modern norm.

There are rarer cases, in which an individual inventor seems to break usage in a manner which wouldn't seem to be nationally or linguistically based. The Danish Christian Magnus Gyde Jensen specifically describes a "steerable airship of the type where the whole system is heavier than the air". This is quite exceptional.

Our evolving typological lexicon

• See Simple tech terms for an evolving list of these terms.
• See Glossary for more on the interlinguistic aspect of our approach.

Enclosing categories	Categories on this wiki
Subcategories	Patent classification systems, CPC, IPC, USPC, Simple tech terms, French patent classifications, German patent classifications
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