Sampling One Hundred Years of Button Patents
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For the history buffs, the following index provides more than
150 examples of
early button and clothing fastener patents. Most are from the
latter half of the nineteenth century and most claim
improvements over previous inventions. Note the many patents
that were issued to women. Just for fun, click on the
short patent description to see an image of the patent and the
first page of the patent text. The images were designed for a
screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels (see lower left link on
home page if you would like to use this resolution). Some text
is just plain hard to read after reducing the original scans to
fit on a web page.
One wonders how
many buttons from these inventions never made it into a
collection.
For those with a mechanical bent, 25 button manufacturing tools
and machines are grouped at the bottom of the table.
For the more adventurous, you can click on the links at the bottom of the page to access the US Patent Office where you can find more information on a specific patent number or look for patents by classification. The effort is not trivial for the older patents. Most viewers will have to install an add-on to your browser to see the image format (tif) as discussed at the US Patent Office site. A simpler solution is to use the Google advanced patent search engine which also has a link at the bottom of the page. |
| U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - (Patents by Patent #), (Patents by Classification), Accessing Patent Office Images |
| Google - (Google Advanced Patent Search Engine) |
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