Trademarks

Table of Contents

Introduction to Trademarks

Trademarks, brands, and logos are the words and symbols used to identify and advertise products, and these closely related concepts define the way a company presents its products to the public. This page will present information on registered trademarks, the words and symbols that have been officially recognized by the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO).

Information on brand names and informal trademarks can be found in our page on Brands, and a table of logo images can be found in our page on Tool Logos.

Registered Trademarks

Registered trademarks are words, designs, or images that have been granted trademark status by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office (USPTO). The trademark records maintained by the USPTO are publicly available and can be searched in their online database. In particular, the USPTO TESS system allows structured searching of database fields, and the TSDR system retrieves trademark documents based on the registration (or serial) number.

In a few cases a company may have claimed a particular name or phrase as a registered trademark, but no corresponding registration could be found in the USPTO TESS database. In some of these cases we have been able to locate the trademark using a Google Books search for the published registration in the USPTO Patent Gazette.

In the event that no public record can be found for a claimed mark, it will be included instead in the later section listing informal trademarks.

References and Resources

The information in the registered trademarks table was obtained from the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO) at uspto.gov [External Link]. The specific systems used were the "TESS" database for structured searches and the "TSDR" document retrieval system. Note however that in recent years the USPTO has been deleting historical trademark records from their online database, and these systems are now basically useless for historical research.

Trademark Research using Hathi Trust

For trademark research the best current alternative is to search back issues of the USPTO Official Gazette, which have been digitized by Google Books. If nothing is known about a potential trademark, a starting search for company names or trademark terms can be done using Google Books. (It may help to throw in "gazette" or "trademark" as a search term.)

Once a publication date or registration date is known, specific volumes of the Official Gazette can be searched at the Hathi Trust Digital Library [External Link]. The Hathi Trust provides full text search facilities, but since the back issues are grouped by month, the search will be tedious unless the date or volume are known.

Logo images are from published sources or from photographs of items in the Alloy Artifacts Collection.

Table of Registered Trademarks by Company

In the table below, the "Company" column is generally the entity name that filed the application. In the case of name changes or mergers, trademarks representing the same product line may be listed under different entity names. The "Reg." column gives the 7-digit registration number, with leading zeroes as needed to match the format expected by the USPTO TSDR system. The "First Use" column gives the date of the first public use of the mark, as provided by the company with the application. These dates were generally not subject to validation and may be rough estimates in some cases, especially if the trademark application was filed long after the first use date.

Note that the table is sorted first by company name and then by registration number.