of an invention and the difficulties of
its accomplishment--if justice is ever to be given to an inventor. And
I think, also, that this court should have the power to summon before it
and examine any recognized expert in the special art, who might be able
to testify to FACTS for or against the patent, instead of trying
to gather the truth from the tedious essays of hired experts, whose
depositions are really nothing but sworn arguments. The real gist of
patent suits is generally very simple, and I have no doubt that any
judge of fair intelligence, assisted by one or more scientific advisers,
could in a couple of days at the most examine all the necessary
witnesses; hear all the necessary arguments, and actually decide an
ordinary patent suit in a way that would more nearly be just, than
can now be done at an expenditure of a hundred times as much money and
months and years of preparation. And I have no doubt that the time taken
by the court would be enormously less, because if a judge attempts to
read the bulky records and briefs, that work alone would require several
days.

"Acting as judges, inventors would not be very apt to correctly decide
a complicated law point; and on the other hand, it is hard to see how a
lawyer can decide a complicated scientific point rightly. Some inventors
complain of our Patent Office, but my own experience with the Patent
Office is that the examiners are fair-minded and intelligent, and when
they refuse a patent they are generally right; but I think the whole
trouble lies with the system in vogue in the Federal courts for trying
patent suits, and in the fact, which cannot be disputed, that the
Federal judges, with but few exceptions, do not comprehend complicated
scientific questions. To secure uniformity in the several Federal
circuits and correct errors, it has been proposed to establish a central
court of patent appeals in Washington. This I believe in; but this court
should also contain at least two scientific men, who would not be blind
to the sophistry of paid experts. [7] Men whose inventions would have
created wealth of millions have been ruined and prevented from making
any money whereby they could continue their careers as creators of
wealth for the general good, just because the experts befuddled the
judge by their misleading statements."

[Footnote 7: As an illustration of the perplexing nature of
expert evidence in patent cases, the reader will probably be