| Monty Hyams (1918-2013): Patent Information Pioneer | home | intro | derwent | personal | downloads | links |
Long-distance travel commences
Now I could afford to stop abstracting in person, I was free to travel, establishing relationships around the world for the supply of information.
Heathrow Airport was little more than a collection of huts, while UK to Japan in those days was a multi-hop trek via Tehran, Delhi, Rangoon, Hong Kong.....I was usually the only passenger who stayed the full journey.
In Tokyo I signed up with an agency to represent us, a deal that proved long-lasting. There were trips to North America too, where many of our customers were.
Moscow wasn't too far, but at the height of the 'Cold War' there were other difficulties. When I made my first trip, in 1960, I had to report daily to the British Embassy and my movements were monitored by both governments. (Of course it was all perfectly innocent -- patents are non-secret information, that's their whole point!)
The trouble for the Russians was that a man, not yet famous, called Robert Maxwell was messing things up. He'd landed a contract to translate their journal of USSR Patents and Inventions, had attracted subscribers and taken their money, but was nearly two years behind in actually producing anything!
Once the patents people in Moscow realised I had no connection with Maxwell and didn't operate at all like him, I took over that relationship and more besides.
So that's how, by 1963 my company, Derwent, no longer so little, had amassed so much patents information from around the world. But it was all held in printed booklets, shelf after shelf of them. How to find the information you needed?
By customer demand, we created a retrieval system for our cumulated data about pharmaceuticals. That first initiative, Farmdoc, was then supplemented and consolidated into what became known as Derwent World Patents Index.
Monty overviews some challenges of the early days of search and retrieval. Here.
(If
you prefer to skip the mildly technical side of
things, proceed straight on to Here.)
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