The world's biggest collection of new ideas, products and designs - including those in your city and state- is literally at your fingertips.

The U.S. Patent Office has run a full-text database of the abstract and summary of every patent issued since Jan. 1, 1994. It is free and on the Internet, waiting for you to discover your area's inventors.

We rummaged through this database to see how Tennessee compared to the rest of the country. We also wanted to see what inventions were coming from our area and look at who's doing the inventing.

A few searches and a little legwork made this an easy weekend project that could be done in any city in the United States.

We stumbled on the site maintained by Internet Multicasting Service when surfing the 'net. We tried calling IMS to get the whole database directly, but it was not willing to pass it along. We probably could have received the database straight from the patent office, but because we were on deadline, we opted to use IMS's searcher and bolster our findings with summary numbers from patent office officials. Internet Multicasting stopped the service Oct. 1. The U.S. Patent Office announced it will open its own searchable site on Nov. 9.

Getting local patents

The IMS database used WAIS search criteria, which means you have a few more options than the standard Boolean set. We found the most useful are the wildcard and ADJacent operators. Here's how we used them to get all our local patents:

We searched all the patents in each year (you have to search 1994 and 1995 separately) using Inventor ADJ State: ADJ TN (There is a "field search" option, but we did not find it to be helpful). That's when we hit our first snag. IMS only allows you to retrieve 150 hits at a time.

Because there were more than 150 patents in the state for each year, we were not getting a complete list. At this point, we faced a choice: select by city (by adding AND Inventor ADJ City ADJ Nashville, for example) or divide the database by date. We decided to do the latter, gathering each month's new issues one at a time.

The issue date was in YYYYMMDD format, so we used wildcards. For example, we added Issue ADJ Date: ADJ 199409* to our query to get all the patents issued in Tennessee in September 1994. Because the answer "page" gave us the total hits, we also had an easy count of patents by month in the state.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to save those patents to disk. We ended up opening every one of them and using Netscape's SAVE AS command to save them to a directory. We used original file names (which were the patent numbers).

Click tip

A tip: We also saved the answer "pages" in their original HTML code and pasted them together in one long document using Word for Windows 6.0c (with the free Internet Assistant add-on). We could look at the answer pages, and if we needed to look at the patent itself, we could still click on the link and go directly to the patent.

Leaving the file names as the patent numbers also let us check the number of each type of patent. Invention patents are just numbers. Design patents start with "D," plant patents start with "PP," patent reissues are labeled "RE" and statutory patents start with "H." A quick count in our directory gave totals.

The patent texts themselves were clean, chock full of information and up-to-date. We found some in our collection were issued less than a week prior to our search. They included the date when the original application was made, giving us a quick count on how long the patenting process took. They also included an abstract and summary that explain the invention in reasonably clear English, and the name and address of every inventor.

This meant that, with a little phone book work, we interviewed a pile of folks with interesting inventions. Their descriptions of how they got their ideas and their patents added color and life to our story.

About the only thing we wanted that was not in the database were the illustrations that went with each application. The descriptions of what the illustrations depicted were entered, but the pictures themselves were not included.

Overall numbers

For overall numbers, we decided that hunting through the IMS database would take too long, so we called the patent office directly. They sent us a list of how many patents of each type each state received in 1990 through 1994 (The most recent numbers at sub-state level, unfortunately, are from 1992).

We plugged the 1990 and 1994 numbers into a spreadsheet with the state population estimates from those years to see which states won out in patents per capita. Then we asked a few patent experts to help us interpret those numbers.

We included a sidebar on how to get your own patent, a where-to-call box on a local inventors' group and a list of some recent Nashville inventions. The result was a nice, well-rounded package with local inventors in a national context.

Heather Newman can be reached at (615) 259-8075, or send e-mail to hnewman@tennessean.com.