Thomas A. Edison: Electric-Lamp, US Patent 223,898

Edition

Scan of the printed patent linked from Google Patents (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d4/9b/62/aac68f7e65536c/US223898.pdf, 1-bit, 300 dpi; the PDF served by the USPTO, image-ppubs.uspto.gov, holds the same page images). Its first page, the sheet of drawings, is the image at the top, cropped to the drawing and its signatures and kept in black and white. The specification (pages 1 and 2) is transcribed in full, word for word from the scan: the Google Patents OCR and a second OCR made for this poster served as a base, and every line was checked against the page images. The printed heading (“UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE.” / “THOMAS A. EDISON, OF MENLO PARK, NEW JERSEY” / “ELECTRIC LAMP.” / “SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 223,898, dated January 27, 1880.” / “Application filed November 4, 1879.”) is set in the header of the poster; the last line is almost illegible on the scan, and its date is the filing date given by Google Patents. Normalizations: words divided at line ends are rejoined without their hyphen, except in “nearly-perfect” and “air-washing”, divided at what reads as their own hyphen; page 2 repeats at its head the last two lines of page 1 (“material be molded around it in the act of carbonization there is an intimate union by com-”), given once here; the running heads and the line numbers of the margins are dropped; the prime of c′ and d′ is a prime sign. Small capitals are kept for the inventor’s name in the preamble and for the witnesses. The spelling of the print is kept (“platina”, “platinum”, “a inch”, “leading wires” without a hyphen in two places, “Signed by me this 1st day of November, A. D. 1879.”). The third page of the scan, a later certificate of the Commissioner of Patents limiting the term of the patent to that of its foreign counterparts and the order of 15 March 1893 cancelling it, is not reproduced. The caption of the drawing is not a period text: it was written for this poster from the specification.

Rights

US Patent 223,898 was granted to Thomas A. Edison on 27 January 1880 and printed by the United States Patent Office. In the United States, it was published before 1931, and patents are publications of the federal government. In France, its author died on 18 October 1931, before 1 January 1956 (Wikidata Q8743), so the term of protection has expired.

The USPTO states: “Subject to limited exceptions reflected in 37 CFR 1.71(d) & (e) and 1.84(s), the text and drawings of a patent are typically not subject to copyright restrictions.” (https://www.uspto.gov/terms-use-uspto-websites, section “Patent information”, retrieved 2026-09-27.)