[CHAPTER VI]
THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS
IN 1848 Cyrus McCormick's original patent expired. He applied to have it extended, and at once there began one of the most extraordinary legal wars ever known in the history of the Patent Office. It continued with very little cessation until 1865. It enlisted on one side or the other the ablest lawyers of that period—such giants of the bar as Lincoln, Stanton, Seward, Douglas, Harding, Watson, Dickerson, and Reverdy Johnson. The tide of battle rolled from court to court until the final clash came in the chamber of the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress. It was perhaps the most Titanic effort that any American inventor has ever made to protect his rights and to carry out the purpose of the Patent Law.
McCormick had strong reasons for believing that his patent should be extended. He was asking for no more than the Patent Office, on other occasions, had granted to other inventors. A patent was supposed to protect an inventor for fourteen years, and he had lost half of this time in making a better machine, and in finding out the best way to carry on the business. He had received from all sources nearly $24,000, and most of it had been swallowed up in expenses. He was still a poor man in 1848. He was no more than on the threshold of prosperity. And his peculiar difficulty, which gave him a special claim upon the Patent Commissioners, was the shortness of the harvest season. He had only three or four weeks in each year in which he could make experiments.
For eight years McCormick's claim was tossed back and forth like a tennis ball between the Patent Office and Congress. This delay threw the door wide open to competition. A score of manufacturers built factories and began to make McCormick Reapers, with trifling variations and under other names. If McCormick had won his case, they would have had to pay him a royalty of $25 on each machine. Consequently, they combined against him. They hired lawyers and lobbyists, secured petitions from farmers, and raised a hue and cry that one man was "trying to impose a tax of $500,000 a year upon the starving millions of the world."
One firm of lawyers in Cincinnati sent a letter to these manufacturers in 1850, saying that, "McCormick can be beaten in the Patent Office, and must be beaten now or never. If funds are furnished us, we shall surely beat him; but if they are not furnished us, he will as certainly beat us. Please, therefore, take hold and help us to beat the common enemy. The subscriptions have ranged from $100 to $1,000.... Send in also to Patent Office hundreds of remonstrances like this: We oppose the extension of C. H. McCormick's patent. He has made money enough off of the farmer."
Towards the end of this famous case, the anti-McCormick lobby at the Capitol became so rabid that Senator Brown, of Mississippi, made an indignant protest on the floor of the Senate. He said: "Why, Mr. President, if it were not for the people out of doors, people without inventive genius, people without the genius to invent a mouse-trap or a fly-killer, who are pirating on the great invention of McCormick, there would never have been an hour's delay in granting all that he asks. I know, and I state here, in the face of the American Senate and the world, that these men have beset me at every corner of the street with their papers and their affidavits—men who have no claim to the ear of the country, men who have rendered it no service, but who have invested their paltry dollars in the production of a machine which sprang from the mind of another man; and who now, for their own gain, employ lawyers to draw cunning affidavits, to devise cunning schemes, and to put on foot all sorts of machinery to defeat McCormick."
What worried McCormick most was not this consolidation of competitors, but the fact that a few farmers had signed petitions of protest against his claim. This was "the most unkindest cut of all." But he made no attack upon them. Manufacturers he would fight, and inventors and lawyers and judges—any one and every one, if need be, except farmers. "How can the farmers be against me?" he asked in amazement. "They save the price of the Reaper in a single harvest."
McCormick lost his suit, as he did a second time in 1859, and a third time in 1861. Not one of his patents was at any time renewed. Up to 1858 he had received $40,000 in royalties, but it had cost him $90,000 in litigation. From first to last he did not get one dollar of net profit from the protection of the Patent Office.