Patents · 1849
Abraham Lincoln: Buoying Vessels over Shoals, US Patent 6,469
United States Patent Office · Letters Patent No. 6,469
Lincoln’s patent for expansible buoyant air chambers that lessen a vessel’s draught to carry it over bars and shallows.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
- Print from
- A3
- License
- Public domain
- Source
- patents.google.com
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Abraham Lincoln, 1849
Theme
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Print from A3: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
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Edition
Scan of the patent linked from Google Patents (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/92/64/49/fe49e21fbf8f09/US6469.pdf, 1-bit, 300 dpi, three pages). Its first page is the sheet of drawings, under a typewritten heading (“ABRAHAM LINCOLN” / “MANNER OF BOUYING VESSELS” / “No. 6,469” / “Patented May 22, 1849”); the image at the top is that sheet without its heading, cropped to the drawing, turned a quarter turn clockwise so that the figure labels read horizontally, and kept in black and white. Pages 2 and 3 hold a typeset printing of the specification, which is transcribed in full, word for word: an OCR made for this poster (RapidOCR) served as a base and every line was checked against the page images (the OCR of Google Patents lacks the first part of the text). The printed heading (“UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE” / “ABRAHAM LINCOLN, OF SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.” / “BUOYING VESSELS OVER SHOALS.” / “Specification forming part of Letters Patent No. 6,469, dated May 22, 1849; application filed March 10, 1849.”) is set in the header of the poster. Normalizations: words divided at line ends are rejoined without their hyphen; the page number and running head of page 3 are dropped; the spacing of tightly set lines is normalized (a space after each comma, as in “(D, D,)” and “C, which”); the italic reference letters (f, g, h, i, e, k, m) are set in italics; a broken letter is read as “constructed”. The spelling of the print is kept (“draught”, “centre”, “pullies”, “letters patent”). The witnesses are in small capitals, as printed. The caption of the drawing is not a period text: it was written for this poster from the specification.
Rights
US Patent 6,469 was granted to Abraham Lincoln on 22 May 1849. In the United States, it was published before 1931, and patents are publications of the federal government. In France, its author died on 15 April 1865, before 1 January 1956 (Wikidata Q91), 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.)
