APPENDIX. 255 



thereof, and it is enough if the thing patented is described, and not the steps 

 necessarily antecedent to its production. 



Thus, when the invention claimed is an article, it is not necessary, in order 

 to render the patent void, that the prior publication should also contain a de- 

 scription of the process by which such article was made. 



Unless the earlier printed and published description does exhibit the later 

 patented invention in such a full and intelligible manner as to enable persons 

 skilled in the art to which the invention is related to comprehend it without 

 assistance from the patent, or to make it or repeat the process claimed, it is in- 

 sufficient to invalidate the patent. 



Mr. Justice Strong delivered the opinion of the court. 



A careful examination of the evidence in this case has convinced us that the 

 invention claimed and patented to the plaintiff was anticipated and described in 

 the English provisional specification of John Henry Johnson, left in the ofiBce of 

 the Commissioner of Patents on the 20ih of January, A.D. 1854. That specifi- 

 cation was printed and published in England ofBcially in 1854, and is contained 

 in volume second of a printed publication circulated in this country as early as 

 the year 1856. It is therefore fatal to the validity of the plaintiff's patent if, in 

 fact, it does describe sufficiently the manufacture described and claimed in hia 

 specification. The plaintiff's application at the Patent Office was made on the 

 30th of January, 18i'3. In it he claimed to have invented " a new and useful 

 improvement in corsets." After reciting that previous to his invention it had 

 been customary, in the manufacture of corsets, to weave the material with 

 pocket-like openings or passages running from edge to edge, and adapted to re- 

 ceive the bones, which are inserted to stay the woven fa:bric, and which serve as 

 braces to give shape to and support the figure of the wearer, but that it had 

 been necessary, aCter the insertion of the bones into said pocket-like passages, 

 to secure each one endwise by sewing, he proceeded to mention objections to 

 that mode of making a corset. He specified two only. The first was that it 

 involved much hand labor, and consequent expense, in sewing in the bones, or 

 securing them endwise in the woven passages ; and the second was that the ar- 

 rangement or placement of the bones in the passages had to be determined by 

 hand manipulation, and that it was therefore variable and irregular, such as fre- 

 quently to give to the corset an undesirable shape or appearance near its upper 

 edge. These, objections he proposed to remove, and to produce a corset in 

 which the location or position endwise of the bones shall be predetermined with 

 the accuracy of the jacqaard in the process of weaving the corset stuffs or ma- 

 tarials, thereby effecting the saving of labor and expense in the manufacture. 

 He therefore declared his invention to consist in having the pocket-like openings 

 or passages into which the bones are put closed up near one end, and at that 



point at which it is designed to have the end of each bone located 



Amendments were then made until his present patent was at last granted, dated 

 April 15, 1873. In the specification which accompanies it, the patentee omits 

 what he admitted at first — that prior to his invention it had been customary, in 

 the manufacture of corsets, to weave the material with pocket-like openings or 

 passages running through from edge to edge, and' he makes the further admis- 

 sion that it had been customary to weave the material with such passages all 



