Recovery of The X-Patents
The United States Congress immediately passed a law to aid re-issuing of the missing patents after the fire. About 2,800 such patents have been recovered, and 1,989 are online.
Following the 1836 fire, a serial numbering system was instituted. This system is still in use today. When an earlier patent was recovered and re-issued, the USPTO sometimes gave it a fractional number (e.g. 2960½X, issued on June 2, 1818; 8736¾X, issued on March 27, 1835) to preserve the correct sequence. Most, but not all, fractional patents are X-Patents.
Prior to this, U.S. patents were identified by titles and dates. Since then, all new patents issued are preserved and given a serial patent number started from 1. The recovered patents are also numbered from 1, however, these numbers have an “X” added to them. The X is generally added to the end of the number except for the first patent which has the X in the beginning of the number. Therefore, they are called X-Patents.
The latest X-Patents were recovered in 2004 from the Dartmouth College archives. Of the 14 found, 10 were granted to Samuel Morey including the first known patent for an internal combustion engine.
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