2009-06-15

Nikola Tesla continued....

Marconi v. U.S. had begun as an action to recover licensing fees from the government for its use of certain radio equipment during World War 1. Although Marconi Wireless had ceased to exist after 1919, its patents and other property having been absorbed by RCA, it reserved the right to pursue this litigation. The legal ghost that Marconi Wireless had become won a victory in the U.S. Court of Claims to the tune of $42,984.93, but only by the thinnest edge: survival of a single claim among the many in the patent. The government appealed to the Supreme Court.

In the course of its eighty–page decision, the Court found it necessary to rule on many points of law, procedure, and fact, including the facts, or history, of radio development. Its consideration relied heavily on what it named a radio communication system with "two tuned circuits each at the transmitter and receiver, all four tuned to the same frequency," by which it meant tuned antenna (output / input) and oscillator (signal / detector) circuits coupled by transformers in each piece of equipment. But this should not be confused with the four circuits of a later, more sophisticated Tesla patent (No. 723,188), in which two different frequencies are transmitted and received–to eliminate a degree of noise and (though the Patent Office contested the claim) to allow greater privacy of transmission.

A majority of the Court found, after tracing the lineage of radio through Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Tesla, and Crookes, the basic Marconi patent (No. 763,772, filed Nov. 1900) used nothing not already included in Tesla's earlier patent No. 645,576 (filed Sept. 1897), except for the presence in Marconi's design of an inductively tuneable antenna. (And the antenna element under discussion-Lodge's patent, No. 609,104-was bought from Lodge by Marconi.) The Court went on to note that Stone's radio patent (No. 714,756) completely anticipated Marconi's, antenna included. Stone, by the way, had always credited Tesla with the first basic, workable design, saying of his own patent it was "practically the same as that employed by Tesla" –but with the valuable refinements of a tuneable antenna and design adjustments to "swamp" parasitic oscillations in the transmitter.

Even the patent history of Marconi No. 763,772 showed serious blemishes: it had been rejected outright by the Patent Office and was only wrangled into being by persistent renewal and argument of Marconi's lawyers. With the facts thus marshaled, and observing that no amount of commercial success could save Marconi's patent, the Court held it invalid.

The decision was stunning, especially in view of the ease with which the Marconi patent had prevailed in earlier suits. In a 1914 case one federal judge found singular value in Marconi's use of a ground connection, and heaped praises on him as the indubitable inventor of radio. Nearly thirty years later, writing in dissent of Marconi v. U.S., justice Frankfurter would credit only Marconi with having the "flash," the stroke of genius, that unites disparate elements into a fundamentally new process or device. Yet he could not identify wherein Marconi's patent differed from those that had come before.

More than one judge has lamented the court's role as scientific referee, for it often has little in resources or temperament to give the job an assured performance. Utterly specious notions persisted for years, in and out of court, over such things as a ground connection-chaff thrown into the proceedings by lawyers hoping to add technical mystery and confusion. (There is a ground in all of Tesla's patent specifications, and in everyone else's equipment, too.)

Slowly, perhaps a little grudgingly, writers of scientific history have enlarged their paragraphs on the development of radio, giving Tesla the credit he is due. Surely, as the patents show, if that all–unifying "flash" came to any man, it was Nikola Tesla.

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