John McLean

“ So it is void, if such invention has been known to any person in this country. The instruction says, if Conner's invention 'had been forgotten or abandoned,' it was no obstacle to Fitzgerald's right. Can a thing be forgotten or abandoned that was never known? If known before Fitzgerald's invention, it is fatal to it. By whom must it have been forgotten? By the inventor, or the public, or both? And how must it have been abandoned? When an invention is abandoned, it is said to be given up to the public, and this is the sense in which the term abandonment is used in the patent law. ”

“ The invention is the question, and not the manner in which the inventor used it. The safe was constructed at the foundery, and must have been known to the hands there employed. How can it be ascertained that Fitzgerald was not informed by some of these hands of the structure of Conner's safe, or by some one of the many hundreds who had seen it in his counting-house in the city of New York? It was to guard against this, which is rarely if ever susceptible of proof, that the act is express,-if the thing patented was known before, the patent is void. ”

“ A foreign patent for the same thing, or a description of the thing in a foreign publication, is as effectual to avoid the patent as if the patentee had seen the prior invention. Notice to him is not important. The law is adopted on a settled public policy, which, while it is just to inventors, protects the rights of the public. Any other basis would open the door for endless frauds, by pretended inventors, without the probability of detection. ”