Kim,  Most patents may now be accessed without charge through Google
Patent Search. The main search page is at http://www.google.com/patents
but you may have more success in their "advanced" search page where you
may enter date ranges, etc.:  http://www.google.com/advanced_patent_search

If you don't find exactly what you're looking for, try some different
words -- these are old documents converted via OCR, and there are
misspellings in some of the titles/names/text.

This evolution of searching is interesting to me personally, because
I used to _pay_ to have patent searches done.  Later, I searched the
U.S. Patent Office's on-line database, http://www.uspto.gov/patft/ using
a combination of Classification and brute force.  I even wrote software
to retrieve the images for a date range so that I could browse them
conveniently.  Research has changed!

I also might warn that patent drawings were made for the purpose of
gaining a patent, not necessarily for production.  Therefore there may
be huge changes between patent drawings and actual schematics!

Todd Augsburger
http://www.organettehouse.com/