Seneca Falls Star patent

The tailstock leg of my Seneca Falls Star lathe says "Design Patent Nov. 5, 1895 (IIRC). The SF brochure mentions that the treadle mechanism was patented and I thought that the referenced date might be for that mechanism. I have spent some time searching with Google Patents using various search terms including the date, but have not located the relevant documents. Has anyone located this patent?

My 9" Star is missing all of the foot motor parts and I am considering restoring it to foot power. The patent would be helpful in this project.

TIA
Carl

Hi lathehand,

I found your pat. It is for the design of the leg.
D24856

Rob

Rob: How did you find that?? I searched on the date of issue and Seneca Falls Manufacturing Company and did not turn that one up. I believe that the letter "D" indicates that it is a design patent, but I do not know if that is searched differently by Google. Following your lead I searched on Henry Darling and William Runge and located other Seneca Falls patents but nothing on the foot motor. I'll keep on looking.

Thanks
Carl

Hi lathehand,

I kept it simple. I typed in the date Nov. 5, 1895 and looked through all the pat. for 1895. I found it in less than 5 min. The D does stand for design. I don't think Seneca Falls holds a pat. for treadle/foot power for a lathe. They may have used a pat. by some other person. I also searched Seneca Falls Manufacturing and found many pat., but none for a treadle/foot power. I also searched treadle lathe and foot lathe. I found many pat., but none by Seneca Falls.
Rob

Hi Rob and Carl

I notice that you have both done extensive searches for info on the
treadle for Carl’s lathe, and my input may be a day late and a dollar short,
but here goes…
If you check for connections between the following names, you will find them in some instances, as either the Inventor, Assignee or Witness to some of each other’s patents.
Henry Darling
Adelbert Davis
Frederick Hammer
Ansel Ball
Seneca Falls Manufacturing
This leads to my thinking that Treadle Patent # 320996 by Ansel Ball and witnessed by Adelbert Davis may be worth a look at, as having a connection your lathe. Further to this, the date of that patent, June 30 1885 is cast into the bed on the lathe pictured on the www.lathes.co.uk site and I could find no other patents for lathes issued on that date.
Some of the patents with the common connections are…
389061 – 555092 – 320996 – D24856
Just a bit of guess work on my part, but I enjoy these “Patent Puzzles”.
And some more info that you may already know –
Design patents, which gave very little protection, were more for artistic shapes or patterns, could be issued within a few months of the application date, and allowed the item to marked as "Patented", while the regular patents could take a number of years to be released, and only allowed marking the item "Patent Applied For". Also patents were issued in batches every 7 days, regardless if it fell on a Sunday or even Christmas Day.

Regards
Art

Thats some good info Art. I hope it helps Carl. I have not seen Carl's lathe so I don't know what vintage it is. My search was not that extensive. I was just trying to find what Carl could not. I also like "Patent Puzzles".

Rob

Robert Lang said:

Thats some good info Art. I hope it helps Carl. I have not seen Carl's lathe so I don't know what vintage it is. My search was not that extensive. I was just trying to find what Carl could not. I also like "Patent Puzzles".

Rob

Click to expand...

Thanks Rob - I hope so too.

And before someone spots my error in the following line from my post,
I thought that I had better correct it!!!

"Also patents were issued in batches every 7 days, regardless if it fell on a Sunday or even Christmas Day."

If my calculations are right, every seventh day should be a Tuesday -
"Never Never On A Sunday". But that still leaves Chrismas <g>.

Regards
Art

When searching for a design patent on Google, you have to omit the "D-" and just use the numerical portion of the number. That's been my experience, anyway.
Andy

Andy FitzGibbon said:

When searching for a design patent on Google, you have to omit the "D-" and just use the numerical portion of the number. That's been my experience, anyway.
Andy

Click to expand...

Hi Andy

Sorry - that will not work. Google (and all other search methods) require the "D' to distinguish Design patents from regular patents.

D24856 - Design for a leg for a lathe.
24856 - Machine for stoning cherries.

Some search methods may even require a "0" after the "D' to pad the number to the correct length.
Remember when using Google Patent Search, to search again for any patents you find with spelling errors on key search words, (using the miss- spelling) in case some patents are indexed with that spelling.
The large number of spelling errors are a problem when using Google, but when you OCR some 7 million multi page patents at the speed required to get the job done, it's a wonder it works at all - My hats off to them!
If you find a patent with skewed pages or missing drawings, try "pat2pdf.org" to get the patent in it's correct undamaged version.

Regards
Art

Gentlemen: Thanks a lot, especially t2b1r3. I glanced briefly at the patents referenced and the first, 320996, may be the one that I am looking for. The list of names on the patents will be helpful as I only had three of them previously. Won't have time to do it right away, it's been a bit wet and windy here and I have some storm related things to take care of.

Carl

Had some time today and did my homework. First thing that I learned was the info I sought was almost in plain sight: Tony's lathe site had a list of patent dates plus a nice set of photos of an early Star. I somehow had missed both of those - I guess partly because it's been several months since I looked there.

I've improved my search techniques and here is what I have so far:

Treadle: 320996 Ansell Ball
Apron: 409456 Henry Darling
Leg: D24856 Henry Darling
Toolpost: 555092 Fredrick Hammer
Journal Box: 558262 Henry Darling

# 320996 is the patent that I was looking for. Tony notes that the treadle design was not by Seneca Falls. I found a connection between the two: Ansell Ball assigned the treadle patent to Adelbert Davis. Henry Darling's journal box patent was assigned to Seneca Falls Manufacturing Company and witnessed by Adelbert Davis. A very brief Google search has not turned up a history of the company and its officers so I cannot confirm my guess that Adelbert Davis was a company officer/proprietor.

Thanks for the help on the Patent Puzzles!
Carl

t2b1r3 said:

Hi Andy

Sorry - that will not work. Google (and all other search methods) require the "D' to distinguish Design patents from regular patents.

D24856 - Design for a leg for a lathe.
24856 - Machine for stoning cherries.

Click to expand...

When I had this problem, I was using a hyphen between the "D" and the number, because that's the way the patent was cast into the item I was searching for (a toothpick dispenser). So, I tried it again. If I leave the hyphen out, the patent comes up weather or not the "D" is added to the number. So, it actually does work- but when the "D" is left off, you also get a couple pages of unrelated patents.
Andy