The Reconstructed Patent Registry

of Mandate Palestine (1924-1948)

Methodology

Michael Birnhack, Mandate Palestine’s Reconstructed Patent Registry (1924-1948) (Tel Aviv University, 2025), available at https://en-law.tau.ac.il/MandatePalestineIP

The following describes the process of reconstructing the registry. Users should pay attention to several cautionary notes, marked with a  sign.

The raw data is available here, for your free academic uses:

Highlights

• During the Mandate period, 4395 applications were submitted.
• The Reconstructed Registry contains data for 3557 applications (full data for 3483, and partial data for the remainder). 838 applications are missing.
• Of the 3557 applications, 3150 applications were granted a patent, and quite likely about 300 more.
• Of the 3557 applications, 3087 were handled by the British PTO, and 395 were reviewed by the Israeli PTO, after May 1948.
• 838 applications did not become patents, either for substantive rejection, not paying fees, discontinued due to the War in 1939, or were lost in the Ottoman-British and the British-Israeli transitions.
• The oldest patent was an invention by Karl Werner, Application #0008, for “Improvements in or relating to motors, pumps, compressors and the like.” The application was filed in July 1912, probably to the Ottoman regime, and then re-registered in Palestine, probably under the 1919 Notice, but was not re-published in the Official gazette.
• The first 15 applications were re-registrations of applications submitted prior to the entering into force of the Patent Ordinance on January 1, 1925, either under the Ottoman government (until 1918) or the British government (1918-1925).
• The first local application under the British, 1924 Ordinance, Application #0016, was submitted on 20 January 1925, by George Krell of Oklahoma, USA, for “Improvements in clamping device.”
• The dataset reveals the application and registration dates, the applicant’s name and national identity, their agents when relevant, and the patent itself.

Caution in searching!

 There may have been more patents registered under Ottoman law that were not reregistered under the British system.

 The reconstructed patent registry contains data for all applications that were filed during the Mandate and reviewed by the British and Israeli Registrars. 838 more applications are missing (more on that, below).

Sources

Registration is an obvious starting point for patent history research. However, for Mandate Palestine, the original British registration that survived was partial. The Reconstructed Patent Registry is based on the integration of several sources:

First, we received a dataset from the Israeli Patent and Trademark Office (IL-PTO), relating to most of the patents (“PTO Dataset”). The PTO Dataset contains meta-data but does not include all data about them. For example, the date of application was not registered.

Second, the IL-PTO provided us with more than 3000 patent applications, corresponding to the meta-data, but not fully congruent (“PTO Database”). We retrieved the remaining patents from their site. Retrieval was done manually, and by and an automated macro designed to download the files in the remaining requests. The code was generated using a macro tool (AutoHotKey).

 

Third, we collected all published patent applications from the British Official Gazette (OG) (renamed the Palestine Gazette (PG) in August 1932), supplemented by Israeli publications (1948-1951). The OG and PG were published weekly, with some deviations from this orderly schedule, throughout the duration of the Mandate. The OG and PG, appearing in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, contained various official matters: drafts of legislation, appointments, land acquisition notices, and much more, as well as trademark applications, notices, and corrections. Almost the entire corpus of the Gazette is stored at TAU Law Library. It is now also available online, on a commercial subscribers’ service (Nevo) for Hebrew searches and at the Yale Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL) for English searches.

The task was labor-intensive and presented some challenges. The following paragraphs detail how we resolved most of these issues.

Data Extraction

We manually examined every page of the English versions of the OG and PG published during the Mandate, searching for notices about patent applications. The earliest OG publication that included patent applications was on 1 January 1926, one year after the entry into force of the Patent and Designs Ordinance. The last PG with patent applications appeared on March 25, 1948; the latest publication of a patent submitted during the Mandate that was published in the Israeli Official Gazette (“Reshumot”) on 16 August 1951 (application #4288). On the rare occasion that a publication was missing, we searched for the Hebrew version. To our knowledge, we reviewed all OG and PG publications, and none are missing.

We extracted as much data as possible from each application. Team members double-checked each other’s data extraction to achieve accuracy. The extracted data included details about the applicant (or applicants), their location, the type of the applicant (individual or a company), date of application, seal date (and the comparison of the latter two dates enables to review the duration of the patent examination), whether the patent registered was based on a British patent (per section 24 of the Ordinance) or on a foreign application (per section 51 of the Ordinance) and whether there was a patent agent.

 Note: The published data may be incomplete. For example, many patent applications did not include the patent agent’s name. This means that either there was no such agent, and the applicant acted on their own behalf, or that the data were not recorded or published. Thus, the absence of data in a particular field should be taken cautiously.

The Palestine British Patent Office published numerous technical notices over the years, mostly with corrections and additional information about registered marks. Such notices included, for example new addresses of the patent agent and notices about the removal of applications or of patents for non-payment, for example. We documented all these notices.

Additional Data

We analyzed the data to add further layers about the applicants’ nationality and gender, and about the applications, to determine whether they were for a product or a process, and what was the field of the invention. None of these categories were required by the law, but may be valuable for researchers (applicants’ identities), and facilitate easier searchers.

As for nationality, we focused on the 1793 local applications, i.e., those in which at least one of the applicants indicated a local address (all non-locals are classified as “foreigners”).

We then examined these local applications, to figure out the applicants’ nationality. We applied several lexical criteria. First, the name: “Gershon Korn” (#4236) indicates a Jewish applicant, whereas “Abdallah Yonis Mohammad Radwan” (#3318) indicates an Arab name. Second, place was applied in case of doubt, e.g., for Jamil Bichara Saikali (#3617), although the name is quite indicative, the location listed was Ramallah. 90 applicants are unknown.

As for gender, we identified 2162 male applicants (recall that for some applications there were more several applicants), 62 female applicants, and 2 remained unidentified.

We classified all applications (local and foreign) according to the field of invention. This classification was not included in the original application, nor did the Patent Office classify the fields. Our classification is thus our own, and subject to mistakes or other classifications. We identified 25 main fields of invention. For many applications, we listed more than one field.

Similarly, we classified the inventions as to whether they claimed a product or a process. This too is our subjective judgement. In some cases, applications were clear about this, but in others, it was our reading of the applications.

Integration

We integrated the data we extracted with the PTO Dataset and the actual patents from the PTO Database.

The data contained some inconsistencies: For example, applicants’ names were spelled in multiple versions, with or without abbreviations, e.g., ‘Limited” and “Ltd.” We grouped these together, but when the names were different, we retained the data in their original form, e.g., “American Cyanamid Co.”, “American Cyanamid & Chemical Corp”.

We compared names of applicants and of patent agents in the patent dataset to similar names in the Reconstructed Trademark Registry. Where we were confident that they referred to the same person or entity, we unified the spelling.

When countries were listed in different forms, e.g., <Netherlands>, and <Holland>, we grouped them together under one heading (Netherlands, in this example).

Integrating the three sources exposed some challenges and points to interesting research questions.

Pre-1925 Patents 

The British Administration acknowledged the continuity of patents registered before the entry into force of the 1924 Ordinance, on 1 January 1925. The legal basis for these applications was prior law, namely the Ottoman Law, or foreign-based patents. As no Ottoman registrations were found, we have only partial data regarding Palestinian Ottoman Patents.

In September 1919, the British military administration, the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (South; OETA South), issued a Notice allowing owners of Ottoman patents [more accurately, patents applications submitted under Ottoman Law] to provisionally reregister their patents with the British administration.[1] The patent owner had to lodge a sworn declaration that the grant had previously been made, include a copy of the application, and pay a fee. Later, section 54 of the 1924 Patent Ordinance allowed an Ottoman Patent owner, registered until 1 January 1918, to reregister the patent within a year from the entry into force of the Ordinance, namely until 1 January 1926.

The British did not republish the reregistered Ottoman patents. The data about these patents are included in the reconstructed registry, but they do not contain the patents themselves, and for most, some data is missing.

The first 15 applications were not published in the OG. The PTO dataset indicates that their dates preceded the entry into force of the Patent Ordinance, in January 1925. The oldest application we have data for (#0008) was a patent from 1912, submitted by Karl Werner of Germany, for “Improvements in or relating to motors, pumps, compressors and the like."

The application that received the first number (#0001) was first submitted on 13 April 1917, probably under the Ottoman regime, and was re-registered in Mandate Palestine under the 1919 Notice. It was an invention by Frank Henry Dutton of South Africa, for “Improvements in connection with light railways.”

• Ottoman applications: Three applications had a date prior to the British conquest of the region (#0001, #0006, #0008). We are confident that applications #0002, #0003, #0004 were also submitted prior to the British conquest, by detracting 16 years from the listed expiration data, but do not have direct data.
• British applications 1918-1925: Eight more applications were submitted in 1919-1923, namely, after the British took over and before the Patent Ordinance took effect (#0005, #0007, #0009, #0010, #0011, #0013, #0014, #0015).
• Two applications are missing altogether (#0002 – for which we have only a removal date, and #0012).
• These 15 applications were likely re-registered based on the 1919 British Notice.
• Note that some applications filed in Mandate Palestine after 1 January 1925 bear an earlier priority date, e.g., #0026, which was first filed in the USA, on 13 August 1923, and then filed in Palestine on 20 August 1925.

 Note! More patents may have been registered under Ottoman law but not reregistered under the British system.

1925-1948 Applications

Discontinued Applications

Of the 4395 applications submitted during the Mandate, the PTO dataset contained data about 3557 applications. The gap of 838 applications refers to discontinued applications.

A “discontinued application” indicates a registry number for which no application was found in the British or Israeli official publications. For example, there is data about application #0145, but none about #0144 and #0146.

Discontinued applications were indeed submitted and were assigned numbers, but for various reasons, did not proceed. One explanation is that the applicant halted the submission himself (or more rarely, herself), such as by not paying the fees or not providing required documents. While we have no external confirmation for this hypothesis, it has a statutory anchor.[2]

Another possible explanation for the discontinuation of applications concerns applications submitted close to WWII: The Patents, Designs, Copyright and Trade Marks (Emergency) Ordinance of December 1939 halted some applications. Under this Ordinance, the Registrar received the power to suspend any proceedings.[3] However, the PG publications do not include any notices of such suspensions.

Yet another possible explanation is more mundane: that documents were lost in the transitions from the Ottoman to the British and from the British to the Israeli regimes.

Sorting the applications by their numbers in order to discern how many applications were missing each year turned out to be challenging, as there were three parallel channels to submit local applications. One, was a direct, first application in Palestine: 2509 such applications resulted in patents. A second channel was to rely on prior grant of a patent in the UK: 272 British patents were registered as Mandate patents. The duration of protection commenced according to the British registration. A third channel was to rely on prior registration in other countries which were party to an international convention. 848 such applications were filed in Palestine. Note that 175 of these were by British applicants, who preferred this channel to the UK channel. For these too, the date listed is the priority date, rather than that of local registration.

Nevertheless, discontinued applications are scattered throughout the years. Thus, the sorting ruled out the possibility that we may have missed an OG or PG publication or that the British made some systemic change or error in their registration system.

The dataset thus includes 3557 applications.

 Note! Thus, the Reconstructed Patent Registry encompasses data only for applications reviewed by the Registrar and not for abandoned or suspended applications.