Someone asked me a question the other day I didn’t know the answer to…I’ll pose it to my readers:
Q. Older patent drawings tend to include the inventor’s/patent attorney’s signature thereon. Why and when did this practice stop?
Anyone have the answer to this piece of patent practice history?
Related posts:
In India, this is still a practice.
Inventors have to put there signatures on every sheet of drawings.
It’s a bit before my time, but the change seems to correspond to the change from the old patent format (with a full-page drawing on the first page) to the newer version with the bibliographic information on the top of the first page and a reduced representative figure underneath. That happened around 1971, and I think it also represented the introduction of computer typesetting – those patents in the “new” format without signatures are on the USPTO database in full-text, those with signatures are not.