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ramriot t1_iyf2ms9 wrote

Reply to comment by Scottland83 in TIL The inventor of the television was a 15 year old farm boy who got the idea for scanning an image in rows from the back and forth motion of plowing a field. by chapstickninja

Certainly the pantelegraph of the 1860's was conceptually a scanning device to output a serial transmission. One could argue by the same logic that taking words in lines on a page, converting & transmitting them as telegraph code serially & assembling the output back into words on a page is the same concept, something Morse & others were doing in the 1840's.

In the end all discovery is seeing a little further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Which means we acknowledge what went before but also acknowledge the thing that makes something patentable i.e.

  1. Patentable subject matter, i.e., a kind of subject-matter eligible for patent protection
  2. Novel (i.e. at least some aspect of it must be new)
  3. Non-obvious (in United States patent law) or involve an inventive step (in European patent law)
  4. Useful (in U.S. patent law) or be susceptible of industrial application (in European patent law[1])
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