How the search was made, and what its classes mean

1898–1997 · THE METHOD, PRINTED BEFORE THE ROSTER

The sources: The sweep was worked from the Patent Office's own annual lists of patentees — the patentee lists in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for 1898–1919 and the Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office for 1920–1973 — read whole for the city's name in every position the lists print it: inventor's residence, assignee's name, and assignee's seat. Those lists print, for each grant, the inventor, the residence as the patent gives it, the assignee as the patent gives it, the title, the number, and the date; they are the nearest thing the patent system has to a complete annual census of itself. Where a list entry was cut, garbled, or in conflict with another record, the patent's own face or its structured record was read — Google Patents' page texts and the PubChem patent records — and the conflict, where one survived, is printed in the entry. Trademarks are excluded throughout: they are registrations, not patents. Design patents are included and labeled as designs wherever they appear, because the works' footwear designers patented the look of the shoes in the same lists and the same years as the constructions.

The classes: Every entry in this section is carried in one of three classes, and the class is stated or unmistakable in its entry. Class 1, the works' own paper: the assignee as printed is the Mishawaka company itself — the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company before the name change, the Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company after it — whoever the inventor was and wherever he lived. Class 2, the parent channel: the inventor is printed resident in Mishawaka and the assignee as printed is the United States Rubber Company (Uniroyal after the 1961 renaming) — the plant's men patenting directly to the parent. Class 3, residence strength: the inventor is printed resident in Mishawaka and the patent is in the rubber or footwear trade, but the assignee is another firm or no assignee is printed; these count as Mishawaka inventions, labeled at residence strength, and they are never merged into the Class 1 and Class 2 counts. The discipline cuts both ways, and this section applies it against the city as readily as for it: a United States Rubber patent by a New York or New Jersey inventor, with no Mishawaka name on its face, is not a Mishawaka patent and is not in this roster, however Mishawaka the subject sounds; and the two sponge-rubber grants of July 1942 taken out in the Mishawaka company's own name by two New Jersey men are in the roster at Class 1, printed with their New Jersey residences, because the assignee claim is what that class measures.

The name variants: The classic loss point in a century sweep is the assignee's changing name, so the variants searched are printed here in full: Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company; Mishawaka Rubber & Woolen Manufacturing Company; Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company (the lists print the ampersand and the spelled-out form interchangeably, and abbreviate the house as "Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Mfg. Co." in the 1950s lists); Mishawaka Rubber Co., Inc. — the shortened name under which the works' last paper appears in 1962–1963, caught only because the sweep read for the city, not for one corporate styling; United States Rubber Company; Uniroyal, Inc.; Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Company; and Uniroyal Chemical. The company's own paper trail carries the renaming in a primary record: the trademark register of 1924 prints the house as "Mishawaka Woolen Mfg. Co., now by change of name The Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company." The annex firms whose Mishawaka-seated paper the sweep also caught — Beatty Felting Company, the Rubber Regenerating Company, and the George C. Clark Metal Last Company — are carried in their own entry at the end of the roster, at the strength their records earn, and are not counted as the works' paper.

Sources:

1. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents, patentee lists, 1898–1919, and Index of Patents Issued from the United States Patent Office, 1920–1973 — full texts read at the Internet Archive; the sweep's primary source, year by year.
2. Trademark register, 1924 — "Mishawaka Woolen Mfg. Co., now by change of name The Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company," the renaming in a primary record.
3. Google Patents patent pages and PubChem PUG-View patent records — faces and structured inventor/assignee/title records used to pin numbers, dates, and full names where the annual lists' print was cut or garbled; each use is flagged in its entry.