On Valentines Day, the community of intellectual property geeks noted a milestone, the issuance of the seven millionth in the current series of United States utility patents. DuPont was issued United States Patent 7,000,000 for an employee's innovation in the manufacture of
polysaccharaide fibers. Speaking as a chemist by academic training, I have no issue with the ingenuity of the named inventor or the utility of the invention.
But should DuPont have received this particular catchy patent number, tailor made for a press release? A glimpse at the online Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office suggests not.
The USPTO issues utility patents every Tuesday. Numbers are sequentially assigned. Each invention falls in one of three broad fields: general and mechanical, chemical, and electrical. Within each broad field, inventions are separated into classes and subclasses, each of which carries a numeric designation. Once all the inventions ready for issuance are ordered by numeric class and subclass, patent numbers are assigned sequentially, first to the wee's general and mechanical inventions, next to the chemical inventions, and finally to the electrical inventions.
A typical assignment is shown in this week's Gazette. General and Mechanical inventions are ordered by class and subclass and assigned numbers 7,000,251 through 7,001,434. Chemical inventions are similarly ordered and assigned numbers 7,001,435 through 7,002,464. Finally, Electrical inventions are similarly ordered and assigned numbers 7,002,465 through 7,003,800.
Boring, right? Usually something only a patent lawyer would notice (yes, I plead guilty). But check out the list of Electrical patents from February 14, the relevant portion of which is shown in full below:
Class Subclass Patent
709 215 6,999,999
217 7,000,001
Something missing? Well, yeah, a rather big milestone number. Where does one find it? At the tail end of the list of Chemical patents:
Class Subclass Patent
800 314 6,998,519
6,998,520
6,998,521
536 123.12 7,000,000
Simply put, the catchy milestone number was assigned out of sequence. Coincidentally, it was assigned to a company whose PAC gives a lot of money (albeit not all of it) to Republicans.