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February 18, 2009
Dental Patent: 1878 - SS White's Elevating Chair
Because the British patents were often applied for as part of establishing precendent for patent applications in other countries, you can find patents awarded to people from many locations, including patents awarded to prominent people from dentistry in the Americas. In this week's example you see a patent for a dental elevating chair awarded to a representative of SS White - Samuel Stockton White, publisher of Dental Cosmos.
Browse more here:
Flickr: Patent-UK-1878-109: http://flickr.com/photos/rosefirerising/tags/patentuk1878109/
Posted by pfa at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)
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 03:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2009
Mendeley--research AND social networking
Do you have a lot of PDFs that you've never gotten around to organizing? Have you ever wondered which article "014529dk6.pdf" really is? Do you want to share papers with colleagues, without emailing them every time you find something of interest? Mendeley is for you!
A relatively new program, still in beta, Mendeley works with Macs, PCs, & the Linux operating system. It lets you manage your papers online, discover research trends, connect with other researchers in your field, and coming soon, learn about the readership of your own publications: how many readers you have, what disciplines they're in, & where they're from.
You can insert citations & create bibliographies in your Word documents using Mendeley, although it is a much less sophisticated system than EndNote, for example. But you can export the information that you collect through Mendeley into other citation management programs, if you wish.
You can also add a public profile & follow other researchers profile updates (think LinkedIn or Facebook)
I've tried this & it's great fun to drop in a group of PDFs into my library & watch the program extract the meta data, creating entries without my having to do a thing--it really is like magic. And, with a few extra keystrokes, I also added the references cited in these papers to my library.
To try Mendeley yourself, follow this link.
Posted by cshannon at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
New Oral Cancer Tests: Crucial or Wasteful?
From today's New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/health/03cancer.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Posted by cshannon at 10:05 AM | Comments (1)