Jack S. Kilby: Miniaturized Electronic Circuits, US Patent 3,138,743

Edition

Scan of the printed patent linked from Google Patents (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/30/d5/b4/ac7134ecd78946/US3138743.pdf, 1-bit, 300 dpi, nine pages). Its first four pages, the sheets of drawings, are set side by side in the image at the top, each cropped to the drawing, its heading and its signatures and kept in black and white. The specification and the twenty-five claims (pages 1 to 5, columns 1 to 10) are transcribed in full, word for word from the scan: the text of Google Patents served as a base (its first sentence, missing there, was taken from an OCR made for this poster with RapidOCR), the RapidOCR text was compared with it by script, every disagreement was settled on the scan, and every line was then read against the page images. The printed heading (“United States Patent Office” / “3,138,743” / “Patented June 23, 1964” / “MINIATURIZED ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS” / “Jack S. Kilby, Dallas, Tex., assignor to Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas, Tex., a corporation of Delaware” / “Filed Feb. 6, 1959, Ser. No. 791,602” / “25 Claims.”, and a classification number) is set in the header of the poster, without the classification, the place of the assignee and its state of incorporation. The list of references cited after the claims is left out. Normalizations: words divided at line ends are rejoined without their hyphen (compounds such as “single-crystal” and “conductivity-types” keep their own); the running heads, column numbers and line numbers of the margins are dropped; the bold type of the reference numerals and the italics of the figure letters (1a, 6b) and of the labels (a) to (g) are not kept; the two displayed formulas and the symbols ρ and ε are set in TeX; the subscripts of R₁ and R₂ are subscripts. The spelling of the print is kept, including “selectve”, “ahving”, “The water was again immersed” and the en dashes of “1–5a”, “51–54”, “8a–8c” and “P–N”. The caption of the drawings is not a period text: it was written for this poster from the specification.

Rights

US Patent 3,138,743 was granted on 23 June 1964 and printed by the United States Patent Office. In the United States, the USPTO states that the text and drawings of a patent are typically not subject to copyright restrictions, the exceptions (37 CFR 1.71(d) and (e), 1.84(s)) applying only to a copyright or mask work notice printed in the patent, and this one carries none. In France, the rule of the shorter term (article L. 123-12 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle, after article 7(8) of the Berne Convention): for a work whose country of origin is outside the European Union and whose author is not a national of a member state (Kilby was a US national, Wikidata Q182031), the protection lasts no longer than in the country of origin, which grants none.

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.)