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Thomas Edison was widely known as the world's most prolific inventor.〔(Thomas Alva Edison Biography at Rutgers University )〕〔 He held a total of 1,093 U.S. patents (1,084 utility patents and 9 design patents).〔List of Edison patents〕 In 2003, he was passed by Japanese inventor Shunpei Yamazaki.〔 On February 26, 2008, Yamazaki was passed by Australian inventor Kia Silverbrook.〔(The True Inventor ) Basson-Booyens website〕 Prolific inventors with 200 or more worldwide utility patent families are shown in the following table. In many cases, this number is also the number of U.S. utility patents granted. A patent family is a set of patents filed in various countries to protect a single invention. This table was current . The columns are defined as follows: * Inventor: The name of the inventor. * # of Patent Families: This is the number of families of utility patents that have been issued. In many cases above, it is also the number of issued U.S. utility patents. There is a direct correspondence between the number of patent families and the number of unique patented inventions. Conversely, the total number of worldwide patents does not correspond closely to the number of inventions, as each separate invention must be filed as a separate patent in each country for which patent protection is sought. Only utility patents (or the international equivalent) are listed, as a utility patent is a patent for an invention. Not all patents are for inventions. Other patent types are: design patents for the ornamental design of an object; plant patents for plant varieties; and reissue patents, where a correction is made to an already granted patent. This list does not include patent applications (patents pending) as there is no guarantee that a patent application actually describes a novel invention until the patent is granted. * # of INPADOC patents: This is the worldwide number of patents of all types (utility, design, plant, etc.) This includes patent applications, and duplication of the same patent in multiple countries, so is usually an overestimate of the total number of inventions. This data is primarily from INPADOC, an international patent collection produced and maintained by the European Patent Office (EPO). For some inventors active before computer records were available, the total number of patents is not available (NA). * Country: This is the country of birth or upbringing of the inventor, where known. If unknown, this is the country of residence identified in the inventor's patent filings. * Active: The first and last year in which an inventor received a patent issuance, except when activity was prior to digital records, in which case year of birth (b) and death (d) may be substituted. If an inventor's first year is 1976 or a few years after, there may be activity prior to this; earlier dates are not present in the primary source, and would require a secondary source. * Main fields of invention: These are the main areas that the inventor is or was active in. ==Threshold for inclusion== As the average number of patents per inventor is around 3, some sources define prolific inventors as five times above the average (in terms of patents), leading to a threshold of 15 patents.〔(''Prolific Inventors: Who are They and Where do They Locate?'' International Centre for Economic Research Working Paper No. 14/2010 )〕 However, this table currently has an arbitrary cut-off limit for inclusion of 200 patent families. This is purely for practical reasons – there are 119 inventors throughout history with more than 200 utility patent families, but tens of thousands of inventors with more than 15 patents. The threshold of 200 patents means that some famous prolific inventors such as Nikola Tesla are not included in this list, as Tesla had 111 patents.〔List of Nikola Tesla patents〕〔(Jim Bieberich's Complete Nikola Tesla U.S. Patent Collection )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「List of prolific inventors」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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