Gould v. Schawlow
Court of Customs and Patent Appeals
363 F.2d 908 (1966)
Schawlow (respondent) filed a laser-component patent application in July 1958, and Gould (appellant) filed a competing application in April 1959, making Gould the junior party in the resulting interference proceeding; Gould presented his own testimony, his wife's testimony, and a detailed laboratory notebook documenting well over a thousand hours of research toward reducing the invention to practice, but the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences found a specific three-month period during the critical timeframe where instances of diligence went unaccounted for, and denied Gould priority.
Whether unaccounted-for lapses in diligence during the critical period defeat a junior filer's claim to priority in an interference proceeding under 35 U.S.C. section 102(g).