History of Science and Technology 

ARTICLES and More

• Compendex (1884+)-- A huge interdisciplinary engineering database, with 9 million+ citations from 5,000 engineering journals

• Inspec Archive [Science Abstracts] (1898-1969) -- This is the early part of the main database for citations to articles in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, and computing and control engineering

PATENTS

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1790+)
[For help with patents, go to Government Publications, Maps, and Law (GPML) Library on A-level]

• A patent is granted to an inventor by the U.S. Government "to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the [U.S.] or importing the invention into [U.S.]" for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention when the patent is granted.
  
  
• Information about all U.S. patents (including utility, design, reissue, plant patents and SIR documents)
  
  
• From January 1976 to the present: Full searchable text, including inventor's name, the patent's title, and the assignee's name; the abstract; the full description of the invention; and the claims.
  
  
• From 1790 to December 1975: Only the patent number and the current patent classification are in the text display and can be searched only by those fields. However, this also has a link to full-page images of each page of the patent

• Not included: Information from Certificates of Correction and Reexaminations; but these can be found as pages attached to the full-page images of the original patent

SPECIAL COLLECTION

• Atomic Energy Collection (Oregon State University) -- This collection contains more than 3,000 items on the development of nuclear technologies in the 20th century.
  
  
• The collection includes the first published account of the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Henri Becquerel; materials concerning the congressional hearings of J. Robert Oppenheimer; declassified government reports; and cultural aspects of the atomic age through fictional works, poetry, drama, and music.