On January 5, 1999, Nicholas Bromer received U.S. Patent No. 5,855,098 on a Spiral Patent Office:

The invention was not limited to buildings for a patent office, and applies to any organization that houses archives or ordered collections, the “best example” being the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent notes that “[f]or years, the talk has been that computers will do away with the paper patent collection. However, like “artificial intelligence”, this has not happened despite the computer enthusiasts’ optimism. The patent office will probably depend on its paper collections well into the next century.” This prediction from 1996 turned out to be wrong, so it looks like we may never see a spiral patent office.