I think Serven made an error on the patent numbers then The citation you removed is the US Patent Office Database there s no way to link directly to an individual patent there which is the reason I cited the database and included information in the footnote about how to see the patent itself Take a look at 138 it isn t issued to Colt it has nothing to do with guns and it was issued in the wrong year Then take a look at X9430 for a revolver issued to S Colt on Feb 25 1836 For both of those you have to enter the number of the patent you want to see then click the option to see images there are no transcriptions but they have scans of the original documents The link I gave above X Patent discusses the patents that were destroyed Prior to 1837 and the fire that destroyed the patent office s copies of those first patents patents weren t numbered After the fire in 1837 the Patent Office started numbering all new patents beginning at 1 They also started trying to recover extant copies of old patents and numbering them as they found them but beginning with X1 So pre fire 1836 and earlier patents are X series post fire patents don t have the X The patent Colt was issued in 1836 was an X series patent because it was issued before the fire Anything without an X can t be the right patent number for that date When sources conflict we need to go with the primary sources above secondary sources And the actual scans maintained by the Patent Office are about as primary as we can get on this issue