Famous Patents That Were Rejected (and Why)

About 60% of every U.S. patent application that ever gets filed is initially rejected. That number stays roughly the same year after year, and it includes some of the most famous would-be inventions in history: perpetual-motion machines, anti-gravity devices, a method for “curing” baldness with electrical current, dozens of attempts at cold fusion. The rejections cluster around a small number of repeating patterns — and once you understand them, you can avoid almost all of them in your own filing.

The 5 reasons the USPTO actually rejects applications

Every rejection an examiner issues has to cite a section of Title 35 of the U.S. Code. In practice, virtually every rejection falls into one of these five buckets:

1. § 102 — anticipation by prior art.Somebody, somewhere, already published, sold, or patented essentially what you’re claiming. This is the single most common rejection. The fix is usually a narrower claim that carves around the prior art.
2. § 103 — obviousness.The combination of features in your claim would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field, given what was already public. This is the hardest rejection to overcome because it’s judgment-based.
3. § 101 — subject-matter eligibility.What you’re trying to patent isn’t a patentable category. Abstract ideas, laws of nature, natural phenomena, and pure mental processes all fail § 101.
4. § 112 — indefiniteness or lack of enablement.The claim language is ambiguous, or your specification doesn’t actually teach somebody how to build the invention.
5. Lack of utility (§ 101 again).The invention doesn’t do what it claims, doesn’t work at all, or has no real-world use. This is where perpetual-motion and anti-gravity applications die.

Importantly, a rejection isn’t the end of an application — it’s an invitation to argue back. Most patents that ultimately issue receive at least one rejection along the way.

10 famous patents (and patent applications) that were rejected

1. The Coca-Cola formula. The Coca-Cola Company has famously never patented its recipe. The reason is strategy, not rejection — a patent expires in 20 years, but a trade secret can last forever as long as nobody else figures it out. If they had filed in 1886, the formula would have been public-domain since 1906.
2. Perpetual motion machines. The USPTO has had a standing internal policy since 1911 that any application claiming to violate the laws of thermodynamics requires a working model. No working model has ever been submitted because none can exist. Hundreds of these applications are filed every year and all are rejected for lack of utility.
3. Cold fusion devices (post-1989). After the Fleischmann-Pons announcement, the USPTO began treating cold-fusion claims with the same working-model requirement as perpetual-motion devices. As of 2026, no general cold-fusion patent has issued; specific narrow applications (e.g. measurement instruments) sometimes do.
4. Anti-gravity vehicles.Most are rejected under § 101 for lack of credible utility. The exception is when the patent describes a specific reactionless propulsion mechanism — those usually fail under § 112 enablement instead, because the applicant can’t describe how to build a working version.
5. The original Apple iPhone slide-to-unlock claim (later invalidated). US 8,046,721 issued in 2011 and was used in the Samsung lawsuits, but most of its broad claims were later invalidated by the Federal Circuit on obviousness grounds in 2015 — Neonode had a similar disclosure from 2002. A useful reminder that “granted” doesn’t mean “safe forever.”
6. Many gene-sequence patents (post-Myriad).The Supreme Court’s 2013 Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics ruling held that naturally occurring DNA sequences are products of nature and therefore not eligible under § 101. Thousands of pending applications were withdrawn or rejected in the following 18 months.
7. The original Bitcoin / blockchain method patent. Filed in 2014 under various names, virtually all broad blockchain method claims are rejected under § 101 as abstract ideas implemented on a generic computer — the same Alice doctrine that kills most software patents. Specific technical implementations (e.g. consensus algorithms with concrete hardware) sometimes pass.
8. Anything you’ve already publicly disclosed for over a year. U.S. law gives you a one-year grace period after public disclosure to file. Miss it and your own publication becomes prior art against you under § 102. This is the single most common self-inflicted rejection.
9. Methods of doing business, pre-1998.Until the Federal Circuit’s State Street Bank decision in 1998, business methods were categorically unpatentable. The window opened, then partially closed again with Bilski (2010) and Alice (2014). Lots of applications got caught on both sides of those rule changes.
10. Living organisms, pre-1980. Until Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980) held that genetically modified bacteria were patentable, applications for living organisms were rejected as products of nature. That ruling opened the door to modern biotech patents — but the reasoning is now narrowed back by Myriad.

The perpetual-motion auto-rejection rule

The USPTO is the only federal agency that, in practice, runs a categorical “we don’t even read these” queue. Any application that claims to produce more energy than it consumes, or that violates the laws of thermodynamics in a verifiable way, gets routed to a senior examiner with the authority to demand a working model before any examination begins. This dates to a 1911 internal policy and is reinforced by the MPEP § 706 guidance on inoperative inventions.

The policy is sound. A patent grants a 20-year monopoly in exchange for a useful disclosure that other people can build on. If the disclosure isn’t useful — if it doesn’t work — there’s no public benefit to the bargain.

The Alice Corp. test that kills most software patents

The Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank ruling created a two-step test for software claims that has rejected an enormous share of subsequent filings:

1. Is the claim directed to an abstract idea (or a law of nature, or a natural phenomenon)? If no, the claim passes. If yes, go to step 2.
2. Does the claim contain an inventive conceptbeyond the abstract idea — a transformation that adds “significantly more” than the idea implemented on a generic computer?

In practice, “a generic computer doing a thing humans already did with pen and paper” almost always fails. “A novel technical architecture that improves how a computer itself works” usually passes. The dividing line is genuinely fuzzy and the same claim can succeed before one examiner and fail before another.

If you’re patenting software, our how to patent an app idea guide walks through how to draft claims that pass the Alice two-step.

What rejected inventors do next — three real recovery paths

• Argue back (the “office action response”). You have three months (extendable to six) to respond to a rejection with arguments and usually claim amendments. Most issued patents went through at least one of these.
• File a continuation or a continuation-in-part. If you want to keep arguing on a narrower set of claims while preserving your priority date, a continuation lets you do that without starting over.
• File a request for continued examination (RCE).Pay a fee, get another round of examination on amended claims. Common after a “final” rejection (which isn’t actually final).

What rejected inventors usually shouldn’t do: refile the exact same application with a different attorney. The examiner sees prior art records, and the file history follows the invention.

Avoid the most common rejection: file a provisional first

Half of all rejections we see in pro se (self-filed) applications are for problems a provisional would have caught — public disclosure timing, unclear claim scope, missing prior-art search. A provisional gives you a year to refine the disclosure with the benefit of feedback before the formal examination clock starts.

File a provisional patent application with LegalZoom →

(Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We use LegalZoom ourselves for straightforward filings; for inventions you suspect may face an obviousness rejection, hire a registered patent attorney.)

Related guides

For the full picture of what gets rejected vs. what gets through:

• The history of patent law — Diamond v. Chakrabarty, Diamond v. Diehr, and Alice are the rulings that defined today’s rejection patterns.
• The most valuable patents ever granted — what made Bell, PageRank, and Lipitor get through review when so many filings don’t.