Interesting padlock. US patents take their date from the Patents Bulletin, habitually published on Tuesdays. Occasionally, such as over the Christmas holiday period or for other administrative reasons, publication was delayed and the backlog was published the following Tuesday. However, there were no patents issued for 23 February 1871 since it was a Thursday, so that can’t be the actual patent date.
I thought it might be a ‘Patent Pending’ date but the ‘antique-padlocks.com’ website clearly shows the same lock with that date as ‘Pat’d’.
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Occasionally, patentees have been known to ‘jump the gun’, using the date they were informed their application had been successful although not yet published in the bulletin and I suspect that’s the case here.
The actual application for this padlock design was made on 10 December 1870, and it was granted on 29 August 1871 as patent number 118473. It was granted to Hermon Nelsen of Jerome, New York although the actual signature looks more like ‘Herman Nelsen’. Probably, this is a typo error in the print and ‘Herman’ is more likely to be the correct spelling.
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