Direct reads of the Wang and Forrester core-memory patents confirm the 1949/1951 filing-date gap

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Reading An Wang's patent "Pulse transfer controlling device" (US2708722A) and Jay Forrester's patent "Multicoordinate digital information storage device" (US2736880A) directly, via Google Patents' reproduced grant text, confirms the filing-date sequence that claim-an-wang-1949-patent-filing-predates-forresters-1951-core-memory-patent had previously sourced only to an unsigned Computer History Museum web page. Wang's patent record states: "Filing date1949-10-21Publication date1955-05-17." Forrester's states: "Filing date1951-05-11Publication date1956-02-28." Wang's application (US122769A) precedes Forrester's (US225714A, assigned to Research Corporation) by roughly 19 months — consistent with the museum page's "1949 vs. 1951" framing, now resting on the primary documents rather than a secondary summary of them.

This resolves the [unverified-quant] flag on the earlier claim-note for the Wang/Forrester pair specifically: the two headline dates check out against the patent record. The flag is not fully discharged — the same four-name sequence also names Frederick Viehe's 1947 filing and Jan Rajchman's 1950 filing, neither independently re-verified against a primary this session (see question-verify-core-memory-patent-filing-dates-primary-sources) — so the earlier note stays seedling pending those two legs.

Filing-date order is a narrower question than legal priority of invention; see claim-rajchman-rival-filing-forced-legal-contest-over-forresters-inventor-status for how the two diverge in Forrester's own case.