The Distribution of Invention in Electronics

Once again shortly after the publication of the final set of UK Patents for 1977 on December 28th last year Patintel were able to summarise the numbers of patents published in each of the seventy sections which are used in their classification system covering the whole field of electronics, instruments, control and associated technologies. Many interesting features emerge from a perusal of Table I which provides the numbers in all of the sections for each of the last three years. The most outstanding characteristic, however, continues to be the remarkable similarity of the numbers of patents published in the various sections in each year. One would, of course, expect some consistency as some of the subject sectors are of much greater importance in advancing technology than others. Nevertheless, even the most ardent supporter of human consistency and those with the greatest faith in the regularity of such statistics can hardly fail to be impressed by the close similarity of some of the figures which emerge.