Utility Patent Applications

Broadly speaking, a patent application has two parts the specification and claims.

Specification

The specification is the written description of the invention and the drawings.  In  your spec, you have to describe your invention in enough detail that someone of ordinary skill in the art could use that information to make and use your invention.  The invention has to work as describes also.  This is why you could never patent a time machine or a perpetual motion machine unless you had actually invented one.

Optional to the core requirements of your specification is a description of prior art.  In this section, you can describe previous attempts (often previous patents) to solve the problem you’re trying to solve.

Claims

Let’s start from the end point.  When you get a patent, your property right extends to what you have claimed in your patent.