The process involves using the German Patent Office website Depatis. This is how you do it:
1. Go to
https://depatisnet.dpma.de/DepatisNe...witchToLang=en
This gives you the following page:
2. Insert the patent number where indicated. For British patents this must have GB in front of the number, no spaces, no commas. For American patents, the same but prefix with US, and for German patents prefix with DE. In the above example I have inserted GB208341 for Frank Clarke's Titan patent.
3. Click the search button where indicated, and this will give you the following page (if the search has been successful):
4. Click on the PDF icon to get the first page of the patent.
5. You can scroll the whole document one page at a time, and can only download one page at a time.
I have an apology to make, as I should have said that the search only works back into the 1800's for American and German patents. For British patents,
unfortunately it only goes back to about 1920.
If anyone knows a good way of accessing online the very early British patents, I would love to hear about it.
(In principle you should be able to get British patents back to 1890 using Espacenet, but I have not had any luck with this.)
Good luck,
John