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A good way to get an idea of how a patent looks and reads is to send 5 cents in coin to the Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D. C., with the request that a copy of patent No. 814,942 be mailed to you.
While Your Patent is Pending.—In a month or six weeks after your application has been sent in to the patent office your patent attorney will receive an official reply, or action as it is called, and don’t be surprised and don’t let it worry you if you find that all your claims have been rejected by the examiner.
He will state his reasons in his letter for the rejection and give references, which are usually other patents, to show that some other inventor has anticipated you and that your claims are neither new nor novel.
Your patent attorney must then either amend the claims, that is reword and change them if you and he think the examiner is right, or else in your letter of amendment, you must show the examiner where and why he is wrong. At any rate you must satisfy his objections.
By the time your amended application reaches the examiner and he again acts on it he will have dug up a lot more of references from the archives of the patent office; and then you and your patent attorney can go all over the amending process again.
After having gone through with this sort of thing a dozen or more times and covering one or more years—I have just had a patent allowed that had been pending for nearly seven years—you and your patent attorney and every one else that may be interested with you will be sore unto death over the delays—that is everybody except the patent examiner and he thrives upon the inventor’s discontent.