page_title: Hotchkiss v. Greenwood
section_title: Dissenting opinion
hierarchical_section_title: Hotchkiss v. Greenwood / Supreme Court ruling / Dissenting opinion
caption_attribution_description: English: Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Navy, 23 May 1831 - 30 June 1834
context_page_description: Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248, was a United States Supreme Court decision credited with introducing into United States patent law the concept of non-obviousness as a patentability requirement, as well as stating the applicable legal standard for determining its presence or absence in a claimed invention.
  The test of the Hotchkiss case may be described as: whether, at the time the claimed invention was made, the differences between the features of the claimed invention and the things that persons skilled in the relevant art already knew were such that it would have been within the level of skill of an ordinary artisan in that art to combine those known features to make the claimed invention.
  More specifically, as stated in the Hotchkiss opinion, itself:
  Unless more ingenuity and skill. .. were required. .. than were possessed by an ordinary mechanic acquainted with the business, there was an absence of that degree of skill and ingenuity which constitute essential elements of every invention. In other words, the improvement is the work of the skillful mechanic, not that of the inventor.
context_section_description: Justice Woodbury disagreed. He focused on the last aspect of the rejected charge. The patentees sought an instruction that "if the said knob of clay or porcelain so attached were an article better and cheaper than the knob theretofore manufactured of metal or other materials, the patent was valid." He considered the "ordinary mechanic" test incorrect for determining whether the claimed invention was patentable, "whereas in my view the true test of its being patentable was, if the invention was new, and better and cheaper than what preceded it." If the new device
  was in truth better and cheaper than what had preceded it for this purpose, it would surely be an improvement. It would be neither frivolous nor useless, and under all the circumstances it is manifest that the skill necessary to construct it, on which both the court below and the Court here rely, is an immaterial inquiry, or it is entirely subordinate to the question whether the invention was not cheaper and better.
  Woodbury concluded: "And why is not he a benefactor to the community, and to be encouraged by protection, who invents a use of so cheap an earth as clay for knobs, or in a new form or combination, by which the community are largely gainers?"
caption: Justice Levi Woodbury
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