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February 05, 2009
Dental Patent #1: 1876, Dental Articulators
We are beginning a new series which we hope you will enjoy. Some years ago the Dentistry Library had the opportunity to acquire a collection of historic dental patents covering the late 1800s through the early 1900s. The collection is intriguing for several reasons. Most important, the collection includes copies of patents award to such notables of dental history as Claudius Ash, Samuel S. White, and William Taggart.
The collection is of patents from the United Kingdom, but includes a great many American inventors. The reason for this is that it was more difficult to gain patents in the USA, so a common strategy was to first apply for a UK or European continental patent, and to use that patent to establish precedence in the American patent application process. You can find patents from New York, Florida, South Carolina as well as Austria, France and of course England.
The variety of careers represented is also curious. Many of the dental patents actually came not from dentists, but from engineers, jewelers, and people who identified themselves as Gentlemen or Gentlelady.
We have a partial finding aid available:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfa/pro/dentalpatents/
Currently we are seeking support to complete the finding aid and find new ways to make this unusual collection more available to the public. As we begin this process, for the next few weeks we will highlight one patent per week, illustrating some of the more interesting aspects of the collection.
Our first highlighted patent is the earliest one in the collection, from 1876 on dental articulators.
AUTHOR: Davidson, George Gensee.
CLASS: Dental Articulators.
ADDRESS: 415 Old Kent Road, Lambeth, UK
PROFESSION: Dentist
TITLE: Improvements in the Construction of Dental Articulators
APPLICATION DATE: January 5, 1876
AWARD DATE: April 19, 1876
ACCESS NUMBER: PATENT-UK-1876-45
Here is an image of the key innovation.
Here are other images from this patent.
Let us know what you think of this project. You can send email to the Health Science Libraries at hslibraries@umich.edu, or add comments to this blogpost or the images in Flickr. We look forward to your feedback.
Posted by pfa at February 5, 2009 03:27 PM
Comments
This is quite an interesting post on dental history and dental articulators. Thanks for sharing.
Vaughan Dentist
Posted by: vaughandental@hotmail.com at June 14, 2010 11:36 AM
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