Friday, May 30, 2008 Wood block pavement patent case of 1878 By Clint Fabiosa & Andrew Ong I.protect
IN 1848, inventor Samuel Nicholson sought to patent a process for a system of pavement using wooden blocks. In 1878, he filed a lawsuit against the City of Elizabeth, New Jersey alleging infringement on his patent.
Nicholson was testing his new process publicly at the time of the suit. The city alleged that Nicholson’s patent was invalid because the invention lacked novelty, and that he had been publicly using the system for the previous six years, thus constituting an abandonment of his right to a patent.
The lower court ruled in favor of Nicholson, and the defendants appealed.
The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Nicholson and declared that public use of an invention for the purpose of testing and experimenting with it does not create a bar to patentability.
It further ruled that Nicholson had not done anything which would indicate his intent to relinquish his right to patent his invention. He had no other means of testing the pavement other than by allowing the general public to use it, and had supervised the experiment itself. He did not sell or license his invention to any other party.
Although the general public may have derived some incidental benefit from Nicholson’s public testing of this invention, he did not give any sort of general assent for the invention to be used by any other party, and he applied for a patent as soon as he was able to determine that his system of paving was sound.
