those fields, from offshore mining equipment and pipeline trenchers to 

 seabed storage tanks and jack-up drilling platforms, are included in the 

 patent collection because of their relation to dredging, excavating, off- 

 shore harbors, and seabed foundations. Shipbuilding and loading struc- 

 tures, which fall into the fields of harbor and marine engineering, are 

 not of specific interest to the Corps, but patents on small-craft harbor 

 structures and methods for maintaining harbor navigation are also in the 

 collection. The collection contains piles and pile-driving equipment of 

 all types usable for work in the coastal region, not just those specif- 

 ically used for offshore and harbor structures. 



The collection is already in use at CERC, where researchers have, for 

 example, used the bibliography to locate patents describing the operating 

 principles of specific types of electronic i.'ave gages, information not 

 found in electronics texts or in manufacturers' literature. Requests 

 from inventors and Corps offices for predictions of the behavior of newly 

 patented, but untested, low-cost shore protection methods have been 

 answered by searching the collection for patents on similar designs which 

 had been used in the field. Patent attorneys within the Corps are using 

 the subject index as an aid in searching the Patent Office's collection 

 to determine the possibility of patenting devices developed by the Corps. 

 Planners and designers in the Corps should find the CERC collection of 

 patents useful as a source of data on new options in solving coastal 

 engineering problems. 



II. INFORMATION IN PATENTS 



Patents are issued each Wednesday, and all patents for the week bear 

 the same date of issue. Since 1836, patents have been assigned reference 

 numbers in a common sequence; thus, the four-millionth patent issued re- 

 ceived the number 4-, 000,000. As illustrated in Figure 1, in addition to 

 the patent number, title, date of issue, application number, and date of 

 application, each patent docioment contains the name and address of the 

 inventor and, if the inventor has granted patent rights to a company or 

 another individual, of the assignee. The bulk of the patent consists of 

 the figures and the text, comprising a broad description of the figures 

 and the inventor's ideas, a numbered list of claims which delineate the 

 specific ideas that the patent controls, and, if the patent's application 

 was submitted after 1 January 1967, an abstract briefly summarizing the 

 rest of the text. Corrections of typographical and other minor errors in 

 a patent are noted on a "Certificate of Correction" included in document. 



Each patent is assigned a set of U.S. and international classifica- 

 tion codes used for filing the patent according to precisely defined 

 topics. The U.S. classification system is revised periodically so the 

 classification codes listed in the patent at the time of issue may not 

 be the codes currently assigned to it. The patent codes represent an 

 "original classification" best characterizing the patent, and "cross- 

 reference classifications" which further describe aspects of the patent. 

 The U.S. original classification code is printed on every patent. Pat- 

 ent documents have contained both U.S. cross-reference classification 

 and international codes since December 1968. The Manual of Classifica- 

 tion of Patents (Department of Commerce, Patent and Trademark Office, 



