US Historical Patent Set
(USHiPS)
This site provides historical patent information for the United States across time, as well as tools to create new US patent datasets. Some of this data will be included in the forthcoming millenial volume of Historical Statistics of the United States which will be published in the traditional print version as well as a CD-ROM format. Patents for other nations, presented in comparable format, can be found on the Johnson-Evenson Patent Set (JEPS) website.
The Wellesley Technology Concordance (WTC)
Since 1976, an international protocol for the classification of patents (the International Patent Classification system or IPC) has been used in most nations, and the Yale Technology Concordance (see the Johnson-Evenson Patent Site) was designed to calculate industries of manufacture and sectors of use from that information. However, for patents granted before 1976, national patent offices assigned only their own version of the patent classification system to each patent application. For comparability with other nations, and consistency across time, the Wellesley Technology Concordance (WTC) was developed as a concordance between the US Patent Classification system (USPC) and the international standard IPC which followed. While the US Patent and Trademark Office has an official concordance, it does not provide the necessary information on probabilities. The Wellesley Technology Concordance (WTC) uses information from over 1,500,000 patents granted in the US between 1975 and 1995 to build a concordance between the USPC and IPC systems, with the probability that any given patent in a particular USPC will fall into a particular IPC. It can therefore be applied to any list of historical US patent data to create lists of patents by IPC for comparison with other nations.
For the academic article introducing the first use of the WTC and an application to the explanation of regional variation in patent activity in the US, read the background research paper
"150 Years of American Invention: Methodology and A First Geographical Application".
Data were collected from the US Patent Office's CASSIS CD-ROMs by Kristine Ishii and Dan Johnson, and are recorded by the granting year for each patent. Programming and calculations were performed by Dan Johnson. Funding was provided by a Wellesley College Faculty Grant.
The most recent version of the WTC is downloadable from this site, along with instructions for its use in a simple format that will run on any system with MS-DOS (or Windows, Win95 or Win98) operating systems. Output is formatted for immediate use in the YTC (assuming the ultimate goal is patent counts by industry of manufacture and sector of use) but are also easily readable as a tabular count of patents by IPC. The only input data required from the user is a list of patent counts by their USPC categories. For help with installation please read the "readme" file included in the zipped package.
Click here to download a zipped file of all WTC data and programs.
(Last update: June 4, 2002)
Historical Series:
All data below are in Excel worksheet input-output tables, and have been calculated using the WTC software available on this webpage and the YTC software available on the Johnson-Evenson Patent Set webpage. Tables are aggregated into 42 industries of manufacture and 50 sectors of use (except summary tables, which present column and row totals only).
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