Milestone In Patent History

On May 11th inventors Saravana B. Kumar and Jason S. Diedering, 4C Medical Technologies, Inc. in Maple Grove, Minnesota, were granted patent number 11 million, for a utility patent that provides a new method for delivering, positioning, and/or repositioning a collapsible and expandable stent frame in a patient’s heart. Eleven million is a lot of patents, but even more have been issued. Before the Patent Act of 1836 patents were not numbered, and only identifiable by the name of the patentee and the date of issue. They became known as “X-patents” after Patent No. 1 was granted to Senator John Ruggles on July 13, 1836, for a traction wheel for steam locomotives—the first patent issued under the new law, which officially assigned patent numbers. Shortly after the law was enacted, a fire at the Patent Office destroyed most of the records of X-patents. Efforts to reconstruct those records still continue. Patent number 1,000,000 was granted in 1900. The total reached 5,000,000 in the late 1970s. Patent 11 million comes three years after the USPTO issued patent number 10 million in 2018.