n 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