no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As one
attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age,
as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have
demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the
insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this
tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise,
in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess
over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in
her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the
solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very
presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to
witness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent
litigation.

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during
the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day
argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties
or less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar the
Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata
people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly
in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat
raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish huge
wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and queer black
gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were held to be
necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches stirred and
whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling reporters, the
parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested people, and a jostling
confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a
style on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric
spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free sunlight
outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's Counsel wiped
the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper lip; and into this
atmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylight
filtered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a
double pew to the left of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs
that have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the
would-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....

Holsten had always been