Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 December 1905 — EDISON'S FIGHT FOR PATENT. [ARTICLE]

EDISON'S FIGHT FOR PATENT.

(talma United States Laws Give Little Protection to Inventors “I happened to be chatting with ffhomas A. Edison, In bis laboratory It Orange, New Jersey, one night while be was working on bis most recent rreation—the intensified dynamo,” says a writer in Success Magazine, “and beard him discuss thoroughly the Injustice that is done inventors in the United States. ‘This very day,’ he said, ‘several of my well known patents expire, and bePonie the property of posterity, which means Tom, Dick, and Harry. The government processes to protect the inventor for seventeen years, and after that time bis creation is no longer his own. But, as a matter of fact, the government does no such thing. It lets any poacher run hi and bring suit, or apply for an Injunction, disputing the inventor’s patent, already granted by the patent office, and in all the courts, pending the long-drawn-out litigation . which follows, the other fellow Is permitted to go on manufacturing and selling the thing he claims to have invented before the real inventor made it. “ ‘Do you see that little lamp there?’ asked Mr. Edison, ns he arose, fulllength, in his ragged old linen duster of the workshop, and he pointed with his pencil to an ordinary incandescent electric light beaming brightly over a draftsman's table. ‘lt was my invention, known as a primary invention, because I took two things, a piece of metal and electricity, and made a third thing out of them—light. Now, I fought fourteen years in the courts for that little lamp, because a Frenchman bobbed up and claimed it after I had secured the patent. During all this litigation I had no protection whatever, and when I won my rights, after fourteen years, there were but three years of the allotted seventeen left for my patent to live. It has now become the property of anybody and everybody. There is no protection given an inventor by the courts or the patent department.’ ”