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Just to be clear this isn't the first US patent, just the one assigned #1 in the current numbering system (I think?).

More info on the "first" US Patent. http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2001/01-33.jsp

According to wikipedia there were other almost ~10k patents before, but they were destroyed in a fire and are known as X-Patents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Patents

Google has these too

http://bit.ly/8X7Ydw

I don't mean to add to the noise floor, but is there a reason you generated a bit.ly link for this? This isn't twitter with particularly restrictive character constraints; all it serves is obfuscation as far as I can tell.

I'm genuinely curious what the reasoning is.

Non-bitly: http://google.com/patents/about?id=nrxzAAAAEBAJ

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