o pay the
expenses of this adventure. Wires were strung; stock was sold; and the
enterprise looked for a time so genuine that when the Bell lawyers asked
for an injunction against it, they were refused. This was as hard a blow
as the Bell people received in their eleven years of litigation; and
the Bell stock tumbled thirty-five points in a few days. Infringing
companies sprang up like gourds in the night. And all went merrily with
the promoters until the Overland Company was thrown out of court, as
having no evidence, except "the refuse and dregs of former cases--the
heel-taps found in the glasses at the end of the frolic."

But even after this defeat for the claimants, the frolic was not wholly
ended. They next planned to get through politics what they could not get
through law; they induced the Government to bring suit for the annulment
of the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate move, and enabled the
promoters of paper companies to sell stock for several years longer. The
whole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to Drawbaugh. Every battle was
re-fought; and in the end, of course, the Government officials learned
that they were being used to pull telephone chestnuts out of the fire.
The case was allowed to die a natural death, and was informally dropped
in 1896.

In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen lawsuits that were of
national interest, and five that were carried to the Supreme Court in
Washington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other lawsuits
of various natures; and with the exception of two trivial contract
suits, IT NEVER LOST A CASE.

Its experience is an unanswerable indictment of our system of protecting
inventors. No inventor had ever a clearer title than Bell. The Patent
Office itself, in 1884, made an eighteen-months' investigation of all
telephone patents, and reported: "It is to Bell that the world owes the
possession of the speaking telephone." Yet his patent was continuously
under fire, and never at any time secure. Stock companies whose paper
capital totalled more than $500,000,000 were organized to break it down;
and from first to last the success of the telephone was based much
less upon the monopoly of patents than upon the building up of a well
organized business.

Fortunately for Bell and the men who upheld him, they were defended by
two master-lawyers who have seldom, if ever, had an equal for team work
and efficiency--Chauncy Smith and James J. Storrow. These two me