On 9 January 1980, the European Patent Office announced the first grants of European patents in the European Patent Bulletin 1980/01.
At the top of that very first list was EP 0 000 010 for a “Device for the temporary storage of coins of various denominations”, commonly regarded as the first European patent.
What makes this milestone even more interesting is that the patent for the first published European patent application, EP 0 000 001, was granted later on 7 January 1981. European patent publication numbers do not reflect the order of grant. They correspond to the publication numbers assigned to European patent applications when they were first published.
This first grant mattered because it marked the point where the European patent system became operational in practice. It demonstrated a single examination and grant procedure that could support protection across multiple European states. It strengthened legal certainty, reduced duplicated national work, and helped inventions scale beyond one country from the outset.
A small publication number, a large inflection point in European innovation history.
| Country | Kind | No. | Published | Title | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EP | Patent | EP 0 000 010 B1 | 09.01.1980 | Device for the temporary storage of coins of various denominations |
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Last updated on 12 January 2026