John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain: Three-Electrode Circuit Element Utilizing Semiconductive Materials, US Patent 2,524,035

Edition

Scan of the printed patent linked from Google Patents (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d3/0e/ad/211a5c2ba03418/US2524035.pdf, 1-bit, 300 dpi, fourteen pages). Its first three 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 forty claims (pages 1 to 11, columns 1 to 21) are transcribed in full, word for word from the scan, followed by the certificate of correction printed on the last page: the text of Google Patents served as a base, an OCR made for this poster (RapidOCR) was compared with it by script, every disagreement was settled on the scan, and every line was then read against the page images; five passages missing or misplaced in the Google text (among them the where-list of equation 1 and the start of the description of the drawings) were taken from the RapidOCR text and read on the scan. The equations (1) to (6), their where-lists and the fraction 80/62 are set in TeX or with sub- and superscripts from the scan (the print writes the base of the exponentials in (4a), (4b) and (5) as an epsilon, kept here); the table of operating data is set as a table. The printed heading (“Patented Oct. 3, 1950” / “2,524,035” / “UNITED STATES PATENT OFFICE” / “2,524,035” / “THREE-ELECTRODE CIRCUIT ELEMENT UTILIZING SEMICONDUCTIVE MATERIALS” / “John Bardeen, Summit, and Walter H. Brattain, Morristown, N. J., assignors to Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated, New York, N. Y., a corporation of New York” / “Application June 17, 1948, Serial No. 33,466” / “40 Claims.”, and a classification number) is set in the header of the poster, without the classification and the place of the assignee. 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 “first-named” keep their own); the running heads, column numbers and line numbers of the margins are dropped; the bold type of the reference numerals is not kept; primes and seconds are prime signs, minus signs are minus signs, and the fractions 1/8, 1/4, 1/32 and 1/2 are set with a superscript and a subscript. The spelling of the print is kept, including “there ar no actual acceptor impurities”, “pointed at the contact and electrolytically”, “fixed charges of one side”, “these carriers increases”, “the analogies among the circuits is”, “restivity”, “emmitter” and “boriborate”; the three corrections of the certificate (column 6, line 54; column 8, line 73; column 17, line 51) are not applied to the text, since the certificate itself is reproduced at the end. In claim 28 a mark after “variations” reads as a period on the scan and is kept as such. The caption of the drawings is not a period text: it was written for this poster from the specification.

Rights

US Patent 2,524,035 was granted on 3 October 1950 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 authors are not nationals of a member state (Bardeen and Brattain were US nationals, Wikidata Q949 and Q184577), 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.)