Patent Office Prints-Free

Have you seen art prints that have the patent schematics and diagrams for inventions?  They are cool!  And did you know you can access them for free?  The images are usually low-quality PDFs, but with a few tweaks in your photo editor, you can adjust the resolution and add pixels! (If you have a Mac, you can use Preview to Adjust Size.  You can use apps like Photoshop, Gimp or Paint too-there are plenty of tutorials out there, just search for resizing).  Most of the time pictures for the internet are 72 pixels per inch.  If you want to print them, they need to be about 300 pixels per inch.


If you want to find patent prints, just do a Google image search.  When you find one you like, look for the patent number.  Go to the US Patent Office site and do a search for the patent number.  Look for the button that says Images and click it to get the PDF.

I've been a science educator for over 2 decades, so I really like science-y things.  I grabbed some fun patent images of lab ware and I'm going to put them up in my office. If you wanted large-scale size prints, you could use Staples to do Engineering Prints--they are very inexpensive and perfect for black and white prints.

You could look for prints for :

Musical instruments
Science equipment
Sports gear
Machines
Christmas
Atari 
Sewing
Clocks
Fireman or Police gear
Trains
Camera
Shoes
Bikes

Have fun!