lephone exchanges all over the Continent,
and some of them became wealthy. It was among this crowd in London that
Bernard Shaw was employed before he became famous. The chalk telephone
was finally discarded in favor of the Bell receiver--the latter being
more simple and cheaper. Extensive litigation with new-comers followed.
My carbon-transmitter patent was sustained, and preserved the monopoly
of the telephone in England for many years. Bell's patent was not
sustained by the courts. Sir Richard Webster, now Chief-Justice of
England, was my counsel, and sustained all of my patents in England for
many years. Webster has a marvellous capacity for understanding things
scientific; and his address before the courts was lucidity itself. His
brain is highly organized. My experience with the legal fraternity is
that scientific subjects are distasteful to them, and it is rare in this
country, on account of the system of trying patent suits, for a judge
really to reach the meat of the controversy, and inventors scarcely ever
get a decision squarely and entirely in their favor. The fault rests, in
my judgment, almost wholly with the system under which testimony to the
extent of thousands of pages bearing on all conceivable subjects, many
of them having no possible connection with the invention in dispute,
is presented to an over-worked judge in an hour or two of argument
supported by several hundred pages of briefs; and the judge is supposed
to extract some essence of justice from this mass of conflicting, blind,
and misleading statements. It is a human impossibility, no matter how
able and fair-minded the judge may be. In England the case is different.
There the judges are face to face with the experts and other witnesses.
They get the testimony first-hand and only so much as they need, and
there are no long-winded briefs and arguments, and the case is decided
then and there, a few months perhaps after suit is brought, instead of
many years afterward, as in this country. And in England, when a case is
once finally decided it is settled for the whole country, while here it
is not so. Here a patent having once been sustained, say, in Boston,
may have to be litigated all over again in New York, and again in
Philadelphia, and so on for all the Federal circuits. Furthermore, it
seems to me that scientific disputes should be decided by some
court containing at least one or two scientific men--men capable of
comprehending the significance