This article examines a patenting conflict between the Halliburton Oil Well and Cementing Company and an independent inventor named Cranford Walker. It argues that Halliburton’s effort to lower the barriers to entry into the oil well depth measurement industry facilitated the re-emergence of materiality as a pre-condition for the patent eligibility of inventive processes. In 1941, Walker sued Halliburton for infringement of three of his patents, and Halliburton responded with an aggressive defense aimed at invalidating them. Over the next five years, the courts handling this conflict adopted very narrow legal theories developed during the Second Industrial Revolution to assess the patent eligibility of inventions that involved mental steps—processes such as mathematical computations, which people can perform in their minds. The resulting legal precedent cleared the path for Halliburton’s short-term industrial goals and continued to shape patent law for the rest of the century.

本文探讨了哈里伯顿油井和固井公司与一位名叫克兰福德沃克的独立发明人之间的专利冲突。它认为，哈里伯顿为降低进入油井深度测量行业的壁垒所做的努力促进了重要性的重新出现，作为发明过程专利资格的先决条件。1941 年，Walker 起诉 Halliburton 侵犯了他的三项专利，而 Halliburton 以积极的辩护回应，旨在使这些专利无效。在接下来的五年里，处理这一冲突的法院采用了第二次工业革命期间发展起来的非常狭隘的法律理论来评估涉及思维步骤的发明的专利资格——人们可以在脑海中进行数学计算等过程。