Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Baldwin's Patent Model of a Flexible Beam Locomotive - ca 1842” — 40 records examined, 23 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-03 09:40 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Baldwin's Patent Model of a Flexible Beam Locomotive - ca 1842
Artist not stated in the record · ca 1842

Allen Cut-Off Valve, Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1842

"Lighthall's Improved Horizontal and Beam Engine," Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1838

1838 Kimball's Patent Model of a Loom Let-Off and Take-Up
Artist not stated in the record · 1838-05-30

1838 Mason's Patent Model of a Speeder for Roving Cotton
Artist not stated in the record · 1838-05-04

Patent Model for a Sheet-Feed Apparatus
Baldwin, David · ca 1856

Patent Model for a Double-Ended Press
Northrup, Joel G. · ca 1842

Lighthall Half-Beam Marine Engine, Patent Model
Artist not stated in the record · 1849

1840 Baldwin's Patent Model of a Loom Shuttle
Artist not stated in the record · 1840-01-31

Patent Model for an Ellipsographic Copying Machine
Carpenter, Luman · ca 1842

William W. Wythes Cyclo-Ellipto-Pantograph Patent Model
Wythes, William W. · 1858

Patent Model of a Machine for Casting Printers' Leads
Goodale, John · ca 1874
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3895011 matched · 40 examined · 23 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-03 09:40 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.