Is it patentable?

You be the patent examiner.

Case #6 - Patenting a non-obvious feature

Imagine yourself an examiner in simpler times, back when

vegetable peelers were basically glorified knives.

A patent application for a vegetable peeler crosses your desk. It has blades that swivel together. Their edges face each other across a narrow gap, destined to never meet as they rock back and forth.

What obvious reason might there be to modify a peeler this way?

People commonly use this peeler by peeling on a downstroke, recovering on an upstroke, and starting another downstroke. One day, at a peeling bee, I saw an expert at work, deftly peeling on both the upstroke and the downstroke. Evidently, the two blades served a purpose. One peeled on the downstroke. The other peeled on the upstroke. The result: peeling in half the usual time.

This seems like a non-obvious reason to make the invention.

After all, even after years on the market, most people never even think to use such a peeler this way.

But this may not be good enough.

Just as there are many trails up a mountain, there may be many paths leading to an invention. The examiner only has to find one path that is obvious. Even if every path but one is non-obvious, the existence of that obvious path is enough.

The swiveling might be an obvious way to help follow an irregular contour. But you’d still have to explain the two blades facing each other. It’s not all that obvious what obvious reason an examiner might come up with.

You be the examiner: is it patentable?

Disclaimer:

The O&R “Is it patentable?” blog is educational and provides general information about patent law.  It provides no legal advice or conclusions.  O&R uses publicly available information about the products described in these posts and has no relationship with the manufacturers, sellers, or distributors of these products.  Reading this blog and participating in voting on the case studies does not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader and O&R.