Drawbaugh's defeat sent the Bell stock up once more, and brought on a Xerxes' army of opposition which called itself the "Overland Company." Having learned that no one claim-ant could beat Bell in the courts, this company massed the losers together and came forward with a scrap-basket full of patents. Several powerful capitalists undertook to 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, ITNEVER 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 $500,000,000were 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 men were marvellously well mated. Smith was an old-fashioned attorney of the Websterian sort, dignified, ponderous, and impressive. By 1878, when he came in to defend the little Bell Company against the towering Western Union, Smith had become the most noted patent lawyer in Boston.
He was a large, thick-set man, a reminder of Benjamin Franklin, with clean-shaven face, long hair curling at the ends, frock coat, high collar, and beaver hat.
