Journal of the Society of Arts : Volume XLIX, No. 2527 [‎701v] (28/36)

44°
JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF ARTS.
[. /pril 26, 1901.
country would be recognised by all the Courts.
In considering these suggestions the follow
ing points should not be lost sight of:—
1. Patents, taken out under the present
English law, have as often been upheld in
Courts of Law as patents granted after a strict
examination in other countries.
2. Inventions are not so much matters of
sudden inspiration as the result of patient
investigation of what has been done before in
the same subject, and of careful experimenting
based on a sound knowledge of natural laws,
combined with a common sense imagination.
3. Improvements very rarely imply radical
alterations in existing methods or apparatus ;
they generally proceed by small steps, most of
which are soon superseded.
4. The real value of an invention can only be
ascertained by its practical commercial applica
tion ; and it is for this that the Crown originally
exercised the prerogative of granting monopo
lies by Letters Patent.
DISCUSSION.
Mr. John Imray said that one point connected
with the preliminary examination for the granting
of patents had never been put properly before the
public, viz., the abuse of the system as practised by
the 'examiners in Germany, the United States, and
other countries. If the examinations were confined to
a simple question of novelty no great harm might be
done and good might result, but, unfortunately, nine-
tenths of the objections were not of that character.
Not a week passed but twelve or twenty such
objections came before him from America, Germany,
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Austria. In all these
countries the examiners, instead of confining them
selves to questions of novelty or anticipation, looked
almost entirely to the question of invention to settle
in their own minds whether the subject involved
invention or not. In his mind, a judgment as to an
invention was the same thing as a judgment on the
flavour of a wine or anything else. Perhaps the
greatest abuse of all was that the examiners, when
they could not find any direct anticipation, searched
through possibly a dozen patents, taking out one
feature from one and another from another, and saying
that the in\ention was not a combination, but a mere
aggregation of all the things, and on that ground
refused it. Although there might be many old things,
the man that put them together in such a w r ay as to
make them useful was certainly entitled to be con
sidered an inventor. Another serious difficulty was
that out of all the prior specifications which were
quoted as anticipations, more than three-fourths were
utterly useless, and had never been worked. Many
patents were refused on the ground of prior specifica
tions, which described utterly useless things. He had
several such instances before him at the present
moment. If a set of examiners could be obtained
who were free from the inclination to form their own
judgment as to questions of invention or non-inven
tion, free from the tendency to pile together things
picked out from different sources, and free also
to judge of the merit of the prior anticipations
brought forward, some such sort of examination would
be of great use not only to inventors, but to the
public at large, but until a scheme could be formed
by which examiners could be prevented from launch
ing out into devious paths examination was of no use.
Mr. Lloyd Wise said Mr. Siemens had referred
to his (Mr. Wise’s) scheme for preliminary examina
tion of applications for patents. He first men
tioned that scheme 30 years ago to that most
distinguished patent lawyer, the father of the
Chairman, by whom he was invited to co-operate in
pfomoting changes in the Patent-law, the result being
seen in the Select Committee’s Reports of 1871-2
and in the Act of 1883 . If he did not misunderstand
the recommendations of the Departmental Committee,
that committee approved of his scheme. He had
discussed it with many men who were qualified to
form an opinion, and where the scheme had been
objected to, he had generally found that the objections
had arisen from some misapprehension. Mr. Imray
had pointed out the difficulties which arose under
examination systems, owing to the examiners citing
things which were practically unworkable. No
objection could arise under that head in the proposed
scheme, because the examiner would not have the
power of refusing the patent, and if the applicant,
after considering what was cited, thought fit
to ignore it, the worst that could happen w’ould
be an endorsement on the specification. He was
afraid the reader of the paper viewed the
question of Patent-law reform from a manufacturer’s
point of view. A man of small means who went
with a patent specification in his hands, bearing an
official endorsement, as distinguished from an embodi
ment in the specification itself of a statement in his
own language of the state of the art, to a capitalist or a
manufacturer would have a very poor chance of coming
to satisfactory terms. An official endorsement would be
liable to be regarded as a blot. What did Mr. Siemens
do when he took out a patent under the advice of
Messrs. Abel and Imray? He, in his specification
stated generally, according to his knowledge at the
time, what had been proposed more or less in the
same direction, aud then he set forth wherein what he
sought to claim differed from what had been proposed.
Even when that w r as done, occasionally he found that
there was something more previously known which
involved a further disclaiming statement in order to
to obtain a clear patent. That was exactly the
practice he suggested—that a man, having applied
for a patent more or less in the dark, should
be informed by the Patent-office of anything
that was found, and should then be allowed