O'Reilly v. Morse
| O'Reilly v. Morse | |
|---|---|
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| Decided January 30, 1854 | |
| Full case name | O'Reilly v. Morse |
| Citations | 56 U.S. 62 (more)
14 L. Ed. 601; 15 HOW 62
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| Holding | |
| An abstract idea is not patent-eligible. | |
| Court membership | |
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| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Taney |
| Dissent | Grier |
O'Reilly v. Morse, also known as The Telegraph Patent Case, is an 1854 decision of the United States Supreme Court that has been highly influential in the development of the law of patent-eligibility in regard to claimed inventions in the field of computer-software related art. It holds, essentially, that an abstract idea, apart from its implementation, is not patent-eligible.
The problem that would-be telegraphers faced in the early 19th century is explained in the Court's opinion:"The great difficulty in their way was the fact that the galvanic current, however strong in the beginning, became gradually weaker as it advanced on the wire; and was not strong enough to produce a mechanical effect, after a certain distance had been traversed.” (See figure at right illustrating problem Court describes.) To send a signal from Baltimore to Washington would require thousands of volts and high currents – not feasible at a time when managing to make a pickled frog’s legs twitch, as Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta did, was the major achievement of the electro-galvanic force.
Samuel Morse’s “plan [was] combining two or more electric or galvanic circuits, with independent batteries for the purpose of overcoming the diminished force of electromagnetism in long circuits.” The concept is illustrated in the figure shown at the right. Morse inserted the relays (or “repeaters” as the opinion terms them) at sufficiently short intervals (say, every 15 to 20 miles) so that the signal was regularly restored to its initial level before noise could swamp it out.
The effect of Morse's use of "repeaters" is shown in the figure at the left, a graph of signal amplitude (with noise) vs. distance. The signal decays between repeaters, but Morse restores the signal to a predetermined level before it falls into the noise. That permits the message to be sent to great distances, which was previously not feasible.
While the case concerned a number of other issues, such as whether Morse was indeed first to invent the telegraph, the issue of lasting importance concerned Morse's eighth claim, which was directed to a method of communicating intelligible information to any distance by means of exploiting the electro-magnetic force:
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