The next morning I was received by Mr. Fowler, the accomplished chief examiner in the class of steam-engines, with his usual extreme courtesy. He told me that he felt very sorry at finding himself obliged to reject my application, but the very precedents cited in the application itself left him no alternative. “However,” he added, “if you have anything new to present I shall be most happy to receive it.” In reply I handed to him the specification which had already done duty so ineffectively with the expert and in which I had not changed a syllable. He read it through with fixed attention, and the instant he finished he exclaimed: “Why, Mr. Porter, it is perfectly obvious that you are entitled to this reissue, and the cases cited in the application have nothing to do with it; but why was not this presented to me in the first place?” I told him I had prepared it for that purpose and placed it in the hands of the expert, who, after reading it, returned it to me, saying it would be of no use to him. Mr. Fowler instantly asked me if I had prepared any claims. I told him I had, because I could not get any one to prepare them for me; but it was a new business to me, and I had asked the advice of the expert about them, who, after reading them, returned them to me without any suggestion, merely remarking: “If you get these allowed you will be doing very well.” The moment Mr. Fowler glanced at them he exclaimed: “Oh, Mr. Porter, we cannot allow any such claims as these; they are functional claims, which the Patent Office never allows.” Then, evidently seeing my helpless condition in the hands of a traitor, he instantly added: “I shall be occupied this morning, but if you will call at three o’clock I will have two claims prepared for you which will be allowed.” So the expert had let me go to Washington with claims that he knew could not be allowed, and sure that my errand would be fruitless. But he did not imagine that the examiner would see through his treachery and thwart it. At three o’clock our interview was brief; as I entered Mr. Fowler’s room he handed me a paper, saying: “These have been allowed; you will receive the reissue in the course of three or four days, and it will appear in next week’s Gazette. Good afternoon.”
I suppose that I never looked on a countenance expressing more amazement than did that of Mr. Merrick when next morning I handed him the copy of the claims and told him my brief story. He said he could hardly believe his senses. Taking the paper, he started for Mr. Townsend’s office, and in the course of an hour all the parties in interest had been apprised of my easy triumph. The reissue arrived as promised, was placed in the expert’s hands, and a meeting was called to receive his report. I thought my troubles were all over; the case was an absolutely simple one, there was no pretense that the invention was not new, and he must report in its favor, no matter how reluctant he might be to do so. What was my amazement and fury when he quietly stated to the meeting that he had no report to make; that the case involved very serious questions which would require much time for their consideration; that the granting of the patent was nothing—it was the business of the Patent Office to grant patents, not to refuse them, but whether or not they would be sustained by the courts was entirely another matter, about which in this case he had very grave doubts.
I now did what I never did before or since, and what no good business man, who is accustomed to accomplish his purposes, ever allows himself to do: I, who always prided myself on being destitute of such a thing, lost my temper. And not only my temper, but, like Tam O’Shanter, I lost my reason altogether. Already driven frantic by the frightful condition of affairs at the works, which had been protracted over three months by this man’s machinations, and which he threatened to continue indefinitely while he should endeavor to find some means to accomplish his purpose of wrecking my business, without an instant for reflection I shouted, regardless of all proprieties: “You rascal! What was the Patent Office doing a week ago when you reported to these gentlemen that this reissue had been refused, that the decision was final and the case was hopeless; what were they doing then, I would like to know? Were they granting patents or refusing them? The fact is, you are either a traitor or know nothing about your business, and you may hang on either horn of the dilemma you like,” and I sat down, having in these few seconds done myself and my case more harm than anybody else could have done in a lifetime. I did not reflect that I could not have the sympathy of my audience; they knew nothing of the state of affairs at the works—this they had been kept in ignorance of,—nor of the consistent course of treachery which this man had been following. All they could see was that I had used outrageous language, for which they could not imagine any justification, toward an eminent patent lawyer who enjoyed their confidence, and they naturally supposed that was my usual way of doing business. The chairman coldly informed me that the lawyer was their patent adviser and nothing whatever could be done until his report on the reissue should be received. I had entered the room expecting to receive the congratulations of every one on the bold coup by which I had saved my business. I left it unnoticed by any one. The reader will not be much surprised to learn that it was months before we heard from him again—months more of frantic helplessness.
About the first of August I called at the expert’s office and was informed that he had gone on his vacation and would be absent about six weeks, and the case could not be taken up until his return. In my desperation I called upon Mr. Townsend and made to him a clean breast of our helpless condition, and offered to pledge all our stock as security for a loan of the money necessary to buy a few of the most indispensable tools. He replied to me: “Suppose the report of the expert shall be adverse and the enterprise be abandoned, what do you think your security will be worth?”
I succeeded in saving one order from the wreck in rather a singular manner. This was an order from Mr. Lewis, of Cincinnati, the projector of the cottonseed-oil business, for an 18×30-inch engine to drive the machinery of their first oil-mill at Houston, Texas. I had built in Newark an engine of the same size for Senator Jones of Nevada, to drive an ice-making plant which he was establishing in the city of New Orleans. Word came to me sometime that spring that this enterprise had proved a failure, the work had been abandoned, and the engine, their only asset of value, was for sale. I instantly bought it and sent a man down to transport it to Houston and erect it there. Mr. Lewis wrote me from Cincinnati an indignant letter at my sending him a second-hand engine. I replied to him, stating first it was my only possible way of filling his order at all, as I did not know when we should be able to build an engine in our new works, and, second, that it was a new engine, having been run only a few weeks, long enough to show its excellent condition and not so long as engines are often run in public exhibitions, from which they are always sold as new. Mr. Lewis gracefully accepted my explanation, and the engine was in readiness for them to grind the coming cottonseed crop. The next summer we had a call from the agent of that mill, who had come North during their idle interval, while they were waiting for their next crop, to make his report at Cincinnati, and had come out of his way to tell us of the wonderful manner in which that engine had carried them through their first season, which he concluded by saying: “That is the engine for the cottonseed-oil business.” After he had gone I said to Mr. Merrick: “That is an old story to me; everybody says that is the engine for their business, whatever their business may happen to be.”
What did I do with myself during that six months? Well, I was not altogether idle. First I found all the drawers in the drawing-office filled with piles of old drawings which Mr. Merrick ordered to be preserved and which we piled up on the floor of the unoccupied third story. Out of the contemplation of that confused heap I evolved a new system of making and keeping mechanical drawings, which I described in the following paper, read the next year before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers:
“The system of making and keeping drawings now in use at the works of the Southwark Foundry and Machine Company in Philadelphia has been found so satisfactory in its operation that it seems worthy of being communicated to the profession.
“The method in common use is to devote a separate drawer to the drawings of each machine or each group or class of machines. The idea of this system is keeping together all drawings relating to the same subject-matter. Every draftsman is acquainted with its practical working. It is necessary to make the drawing of a machine and of its separate parts on sheets of different sizes. The drawer in which all these are kept must be large enough to accommodate the largest sheets. The smaller ones cannot be located in the drawer, and as these find their way to one side or to the back, and several of the smallest lie side by side in one course, any arrangement of the sheets in the drawer is out of the question.
“The operation of finding a drawing consists in turning the contents of the drawer all up until it is discovered. In this way the smaller sheets get out of sight or doubled up, and the larger ones are torn. No amount of care can prevent confusion.
“In the system now proposed the idea of keeping together drawings relating to the same machine, or of classifying them according to subjects in any way, is abandoned, and in place of it is substituted the plan of keeping together all drawings that are made on sheets of the same size, without regard to the subject of them. Nine sizes of sheets were settled upon as sufficient to meet our requirements, and on a sheet that will trim to one of these sizes every drawing must be made. They are distinguished by the first nine letters of the alphabet. Size A is the antiquarian sheet trimmed, and the smaller sizes will cut from this sheet, without waste, as follows: