The Black Flag - 4

The Black Flag - 4

 The other incident is as follows: "Soon after I had got out the incandescent light I had an

interference in the Patent Office with a man from Wisconsin. He filed an application for a

patent and entered into a conspiracy to `swear back' of the date of my invention, so as to

deprive me of it. Detectives were put on the case, and we found he was a `faker,' and we

took means to break the thing up. Eugene Lewis, of Eaton & Lewis, had this in hand for

me. Several years later this same man attempted to defraud a leading firm of

manufacturing chemists in New York, and was sent to State prison. A short time after

that a syndicate took up a man named Goebel and tried to do the same thing, but again

our detective-work was too much for them. This was along the same line as the attempt

of Drawbaugh to deprive Bell of his telephone. Whenever an invention of large

prospective value comes out, these cases always occur. The lamp patent was sustained in

the New York Federal Court. I thought that was final and would end the matter, but

another Federal judge out in St. Louis did not sustain it. The result is I have never

enjoyed any benefits from my lamp patents, although I fought for many years." The

Goebel case will be referred to later in this chapter.

The original owner of the patents and inventions covering his electric-lighting system, the

Edison Electric Light Company (in which Edison was largely interested as a

stockholder), thus found at the outset that its commercial position was imperilled by the

activity of competitors who had sprung up like mushrooms. It became necessary to take

proper preliminary legal steps to protect the interests which had been acquired at the cost

of so much money and such incessant toil and experiment. During the first few years in

which the business of the introduction of the light was carried on with such strenuous and

concentrated effort, the attention of Edison and his original associates was constantly

focused upon the commercial exploitation and the further development of the system at

home and abroad. The difficult and perplexing situation at that time is thus described by

Major S. B. Eaton:

"The reason for the delay in beginning and pushing suits for infringements of the lamp

patent has never been generally understood. In my official position as president of the

Edison Electric Light Company I became the target, along with Mr. Edison, for censure

from the stockholders and others on account of this delay, and I well remember how deep

the feeling was. In view of the facts that a final injunction on the lamp patent was not

obtained until the life of the patent was near its end, and, next, that no damages in money

were ever paid by the guilty infringers, it has been generally believed that Mr. Edison

sacrificed the interest of his stockholders selfishly when he delayed the prosecution of

patent suits and gave all his time and energies to manufacturing. This belief was the

stronger because the manufacturing enterprises belonged personally to Mr. Edison and

not to his company. But the facts render it easy to dispel this false belief. The Edison

inventions were not only a lamp; they comprised also an entire system of central stations.

Such a thing was new to the world, and the apparatus, as well as the manufacture thereof,

was equally new. Boilers, engines, dynamos, motors, distribution mains, meters, housewiring,

safety-devices, lamps, and lamp-fixtures--all were vital parts of the whole system.

Most of them were utterly novel and unknown to the arts, and all of them required quick,

and, I may say, revolutionary thought and invention. The firm of Babcock & Wilcox gave

aid on the boilers, Armington & Sims undertook the engines, but everything else was

abnormal. No factories in the land would take up the manufacture. I remember, for

instance, our interviews with Messrs. Mitchell, Vance & Co., the leading manufacturers

of house gas-lighting fixtures, such as brackets and chandeliers. They had no faith in

electric lighting, and rejected all our overtures to induce them to take up the new business

of making electric- light fixtures. As regards other parts of the Edison system, notably the

Edison dynamo, no such machines had ever existed; there was no factory in the world

equipped to make them, and, most discouraging of all, the very scientific principles of

their construction were still vague and experimental.