The law does not require that a discoverer or inventor, in order to get a patent for a process, must have succeeded in bringing his art to the highest degree of perfection; it is enough if he describes his method with sufficient clearness and precision to enable those skilled in the matter to understand what the process is, and if he points out some practicable way of putting it …

—this Court upheld a patent issued to Alexander Graham Bell even though he had filed his application before constructing a working telephone.

"The effect of that decision was, therefore, that the use of magnetism as a motive power, without regard to the particular process with which it was connected in the patent, could not be claimed, but that its use in that connection could."

Such a conflation risks the introduction of an actual reduction-to-practice requirement into patent law, contrary to more than a century of settled precedent.

If there is to be invention from such a discovery, it must come from the application of the law of nature to a new and useful end.

For example, a rule that broadly-phrased claims cannot constitute patentable processes could call into question our approval of Alexander Graham Bell's famous fifth claim on " `[t] he method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described, by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air …

Literally translated into English as "false in one thing, false in everything," the maxim:(a) prompts logical caution as to the entirety of the position taken by the speaker who, as part of his/her position, misrepresents a certain fact; and, as such,(b) has been adopted into the panoply of policies of American jurisprudence related to the propriety of findings made by the trier of …

There, the issue was whether Alexander Graham Bell's claim could cover both of the methods described in the specification or only the method for which an apparatus was constructed.

The falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus] rule does not necessarily mean that the man who falsifies once is a liar; but it means that justice will not rest on testimony a substantial part of which is proved to be false

The court is of opinion that the claim is too broad, and not warranted by law. In the Telephone cases