History
In the 17th and 18th centuries, patent examination in France for novelty and utility was performed by the private French Academy under commission from the French government. The Academy sought the input of outside experts in the specific fields of the inventions. Galileo, for example, was consulted when a patent was applied for on a new method of determining longitude by measuring the position of the moon. Galileo’s conclusion was that the method would work in principle, but the measuring techniques were not accurate enough to provide meaningful results. A patent, therefore, was denied.
Read more about this topic: Public Participation In Patent Examination
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)