Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The state of the art is the highest level of development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field, achieved at a particular time. It also applies to the level of development (as of a device, procedure, process, technique, or science) reached at any particular time usually as a result of modern methods. The earliest usage of the term "state of the art" documented by the Oxford English Dictionary dates back to 1910 from an engineering manual by H.H. Suplee titled Gas Turbine. It reads, "In the present state of the art this is all that can be done."In the context of the European and Australian patent law, the term "state of the art" is a concept used in the process of assessing and asserting novelty and inventive step, and is a synonym of the expression "prior art".