The Black Flag - 7

The Black Flag - 7

 Goebel's claims were not unknown to the Edison Company, for as far back as 1882 they

had been officially brought to its notice coupled with an offer of sale for a few thousand

dollars. A very brief examination into their merits, however, sufficed to demonstrate most

emphatically that Goebel had never made a practical incandescent lamp, nor had he ever

contributed a single idea or device bearing, remotely or directly, on the development of

the art. Edison and his company, therefore, rejected the offer unconditionally and

declined to enter into any arrangements whatever with Goebel. During the prosecution of

the suits in 1893 it transpired that the Goebel claims had also been investigated by the

counsel of the defendant company in the principal litigation already related, but although

every conceivable defence and anticipation had been dragged into the case during the

many years of its progress, the alleged Goebel anticipation was not even touched upon

therein. From this fact it is quite apparent that they placed no credence on its bona fides.

But desperate cases call for desperate remedies. Some of the infringing lampmanufacturing

concerns, which during the long litigation had grown strong and lusty, and

thus far had not been enjoined by the court, now saw injunctions staring them in the face,

and in desperation set up the Goebel so-called anticipation as a defence in the suits

brought against them.

This German watchmaker, Goebel, located in the East Side of New York City, had

undoubtedly been interested, in a desultory kind of way, in simple physical phenomena,

and a few trifling experiments made by him some forty or forty-five years previously

were magnified and distorted into brilliant and all- comprehensive discoveries and

inventions. Avalanches of affidavits of himself, "his sisters and his cousins and his

aunts," practically all persons in ordinary walks of life, and of old friends, contributed a

host of recollections that seemed little short of miraculous in their detailed accounts of

events of a scientific nature that were said to have occurred so many years before.

According to affidavits of Goebel himself and some of his family, nothing that would

anticipate Edison's claim had been omitted from his work, for he (Goebel) claimed to

have employed the all-glass globe, into which were sealed platinum wires carrying a

tenuous carbon filament, from which the occluded gases had been liberated during the

process of high exhaustion. He had even determined upon bamboo as the best material

for filaments. On the face of it he was seemingly gifted with more than human

prescience, for in at least one of his exhibit lamps, said to have been made twenty years

previously, he claimed to have employed processes which Edison and his associates had

only developed by several years of experience in making thousands of lamps!

The Goebel story was told by the affidavits in an ingenuous manner, with a wealth of

simple homely detail that carried on its face an appearance of truth calculated to deceive

the elect, had not the elect been somewhat prepared by their investigation made some

eleven years before.

The story was met by the Edison interests with counter-affidavits, showing its utter

improbabilities and absurdities from the standpoint of men of science and others versed

in the history and practice of the art; also affidavits of other acquaintances and neighbors

of Goebel flatly denying the exhibitions he claimed to have made. The issue thus being

joined, the legal battle raged over different sections of the country. A number of

contumeliously defiant infringers in various cities based fond hopes of immunity upon

the success of this Goebel evidence, but were defeated. The attitude of the courts is well

represented in the opinion of Judge Colt, rendered in a motion for injunction against the

Beacon Vacuum Pump and Electrical Company. The defence alleged the Goebel

anticipation, in support of which it offered in evidence four lamps, Nos. 1, 2, and 3

purporting to have been made before 1854, and No. 4 before 1872. After a very full

review of the facts in the case, and a fair consideration of the defendants' affidavits, Judge

Colt in his opinion goes on to say:

"It is extremely improbable that Henry Goebel constructed a practical incandescent lamp

in 1854. This is manifest from the history of the art for the past fifty years, the electrical

laws which since that time have been discovered as applicable to the incandescent lamp,

the imperfect means which then existed for obtaining a vacuum, the high degree of skill

necessary in the construction of all its parts, and the crude instruments with which Goebel

worked.

"Whether Goebel made the fiddle-bow lamps, 1, 2, and 3, is not necessary to determine.

The weight of evidence on this motion is in the direction that he made these lamp or

lamps similar in general appearance, though it is manifest that few, if any, of the many

witnesses who saw the Goebel lamp could form an accurate judgment of the size of the

filament or burner. But assuming they were made, they do not anticipate the invention of

Edison. At most they were experimental toys used to advertise his telescope, or to flash a

light upon his clock, or to attract customers to his shop. They were crudely constructed,

and their life was brief. They could not be used for domestic purposes. They were in no

proper sense the practical commercial lamp of Edison. The literature of the art is full of

better lamps, all of which are held not to anticipate the Edison patent.