Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/443

and as this bill threatened to largely reduce their prospective incomes, it required wise planning to keep the outgo within the estimated income in order to avoid bankruptcy. The first step taken was to suspend night service in some places. In turn the citizens, the great majority of whom had never patronized the telephone company, exhibited an utter disregard for the rights of others by cutting down the telephone poles. A large number of exchanges and over one hundred toll stations in Indiana were closed, and all improvements and extensions ceased.

Fortunately for all concerned, there was a golden lining to the dark cloud that overhung the telephone field in 1885, in this that no less than six important decisions were rendered in favor of Bell interests. Five of these were judicial, being handed down in the United States circuit courts in the respective districts, and one was the important decision rendered by Commissioner Butterworth of the Patent Office.

It may be recalled that on October 23, 1884, the examiners-in-chief in the United States Patent Office, after a very thorough and complete investigation of certain interference claims involving the invention of the telephone, and after each claimant had had his rights fully presented in lengthy arguments, decided that

Bell is the only one of the contestants having patents. Bell is not only a patentee, but it is to him that the world owes the possession of the speaking telephone.

Earlier in 1884 the examiner of interferences had rendered a similar decision, after eighteen months of thorough investigation. This decision was exceedingly elaborate, making a printed volume of over three hundred pages, and reviewing the law and the evidence, including every fact and phase with great care. From this decision the claimants appealed to the examiners-in-chief, as stated, and from their decision to the commissioner of patents. After a seven days hearing the commissioner decided that

Bell discovered, and his patent showed that a certain combination of magnet, diaphragm and armature, when arranged in a specified connection with other specified parts, constituted an apparatus which would transmit articulate speech. Up to this time no one else had done this, or had known it. The combination was the result of his conception and the outgrowth of his theory, and the apparatus, being a materialization of that conception and in conformity to that theory, was his original invention.

In January, 1885, Judge Butler, in the United States Circuit Court, District of Pennsylvania, in granting the motion of the parent Bell company for an injunction, decided that

upon full and patient examination of everything submitted to us, we believe that the alleged new matter is but the refuse and dregs of the former cases—if I might be allowed the use of so homely an illustration, I would say, but the heel taps found in the glasses at the end of the frolic.

In March, 1885, Judge Wallace, in the United States Circuit Court, Northern District of New York, in granting the request for an injunc-