Vocabulary:

On various pieces from Germany you may find a marking which states either 'Dep.', 'Depon.' or 'Deponirt'. After some fruitless research through the German Patent Office, I got some help from Mr. Wolfgang Pfaller, who has a great German page on patent history under wolfgang-pfaller.de. With his help I was able to find out that the abbreviation 'Depon.' is the short form of the word 'deponirt', which today is written as 'deponiert'. It was not related with German patent history itself, but rather with the trademark history. In a book from 1891 it is stated for example that a registered product should have the words gesetzlich deponirt written, stamped or incised on its surface.

The various parts of the German state had their own laws for protecting manufacturer rights. In parts of Prussia (to the left of the river Rhine) for example, they had a law until 1840 which based on the old French laws from 1811, so 'deponirt' had the same meaning as the French 'déposer', which means 'deposited' or 'to deposit'. This simply declared that the product was protected by law because the respective claim of ownership of the design or trademark had been verified through the local authorities and had been archived there for further reference. It was simply a very basic form of a copyright notice. It took the German state up until 1874 to officially introduce the so-called 'Reichs-Markengesetz', a law which united and simplified the various forms of registration used in different parts of Germany.