This collection contains PDFs of Thomas Edison’s 1,093 successful U.S. patent applications. It does not include his many applications that were either rejected by the U.S. Patent office or which he abandoned before they issued.  Each issued patent was given a number by the U.S. Patent Office in order by their issuance. The title of each patent was provided by the inventor to describe the invention being patented.  The primary date used by the Edison Papers is the date of execution. This is the date on which Edison signed the application and is the date closest to the actual inventive activity. The filed date when the application was filed in the U.S. Patent Office. The issued date is the date when, with all fees paid and the Patent Office issued the patent certificate to the inventor. 

There can be considerable differences in time between the various dates associated with a patent.  In his early years Edison did not always have immediate funds to pay the fees involved in an application and in later years he sometimes filed several applications with different execution dates at the same time. Some patents took little time to issue after the initial review by a patent examiner.  In many cases, however, it took months of correspondence and amendment of the application before the patent examiner decided that an invention was sufficiently original to be patented. In a few cases Edison altered the claims from those in the original application and filed a new application to cover the new claims.  The execution date of such a patent can be considerably later than that of the original application even though the patent covers designs from the earlier date. In cases where the examiner determined that another patent application claimed the same invention, an interference was declared, and the parties could provide testimony and exhibits to prove their priority in a hearing before the Examiner-in-Chief.  The decision could be appealed to the Commissioner of Patents, thus further delaying the issuance of a patent.  

Edison also received many patents in countries other than the United States. No complete list exists, but Dyer and Martin's 1910 biography, Edison: His Life and Inventions, contains a compilation of 1,239 non-U.S. patents awarded in 34 countries. Edison's British patents for the years 1872–1880 appear in a bound volume in the Charles Batchelor collection.

This set of Edison's patents has been made available through the generosity of David Kovanen.