Larry,

Use of the US Paent Office records is a fantastic tool that has been 
little-used by historic archaeologists. Even though great effort has been 
made to scan ALL the US Patents and place them online for free access, they 
continue to be gratly under-utilized. Perhaps the user-unfriendly 
search-engine attached to the USPO website has discouraged folks (true, 
there is a steep learning curve for the novitiate, but certainly worthwhile 
if you're going to be dealing with more than a couple of difficult to 
identify historic American artifacts each year).

The new Google "Patents" search engine is a wonderful new tool for the 
historic archaeologist ... very powerful and simple to use (even has an 
advanced interface that allows the adept to burrow-in to the specific 
information he wants without having to browse thru hundreds of hits returned 
by the simple interface).

I suggest going to Google Patents (see under "more" on the Google home page) 
and looking at US Patent 442,336 "carbon electrode and method of making the 
same" issued 9 Dec 1890, which describes in detail the method of 
manufacturing of these electrodes. One of the standard recitals in patents 
is to describe the "current art" so the examiner will know that the inventor 
has truly 'invented' something new worth patenting.

Also see:

272,017 - 13 Feb 1883 "carbon electrode for electric lamps"
330,247 - 10 Nov 1885 - "carbon electrode for electrolytical purposes"
375,034 - 20 Dec 1887 - "carbon electrode for galvanic batteries" [assigened 
to the Hub Carbon Company, Kennebunk, Maine]
450,105 -  7 Apr 1891 - "carbon electrode for electric batteries"

Bob Skiles, RPA
~~~~~~~~
Pleistocene extinctions? Clovis kaput? It was the bolide, stupid!

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "McKee, Larry (Nashville,TN-US)" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 10:39 AM
Subject: Carbon electrode rods - ID sources