K P wrote:
There are many, many such inventions that drove the industrial age. Many of them are now taken for granted, and many more got absolutely nowhere. Descriptions, such as those in Scientific American, should satisfy those concerned with notability, but a fair description of these devices will still require reference to the originall documents.
I don't think so at all. For one thing the device as eventually used may differ substantially from the patent application, particularly for a large machine. Patent descriptions are not informative in a way that makes them usable by the layman, by which I mean any human not seeking directly to profit off producing the patented item. In addition, it is, for the purposes of producing a Wikipedia article, rather like describing a scientist's work on elucidating a genetic novelty by going to her raw data tables. It's not only not necessary, it will work against you. The implementation of the patent is what succeeds or fails, and the interpretation of the data is what is published or not.
It all depends on the underlying purpose for writing about these things. Realistically, very few of these inventions are likely to ever be mentioned in the forseeable future. Most of them have gone beyond the point where there would be used for anything useful. We no longer have steam railway engines, so any invention designed to improve their operation would now be useless.
Perhaps the best use for these documents is historical. How do otherwise obscure patents enlighten us about the ideas prevailing when a more successful invention was produced? What other things did a more famous inventor design? This will still mean that only a small sampling of the patents will ever be referenced.
The US Patent Office records are fully available on line back to the 1830s. Earlier files are incomplete because of a fire at the patent office. There is no question of referring to private raw data. Scientific disputes over these documents is unlikely.
Ec