ically the same view of the Goebel story as was
taken by Judge Colt, and the injunctions asked in behalf of the Edison
interests were granted on all applications except one in St. Louis,
Missouri, in proceedings instituted against a strong local concern of
that city.

Thus, at the eleventh hour in the life of this important patent, after
a long period of costly litigation, Edison and his associates were
compelled to assume the defensive against a claimant whose utterly
baseless pretensions had already been thoroughly investigated and
rejected years before by every interested party, and ultimately, on
examination by the courts, pronounced legally untenable, if not indeed
actually fraudulent. Irritating as it was to be forced into the
position of combating a proposition so well known to be preposterous and
insincere, there was nothing else to do but to fight this fabrication
with all the strenuous and deadly earnestness that would have been
brought to bear on a really meritorious defence. Not only did this
Goebel episode divert for a long time the energies of the Edison
interests from activities in other directions, but the cost of
overcoming the extravagantly absurd claims ran up into hundreds of
thousands of dollars.

Another quotation from Major Eaton is of interest in this connection:

"Now a word about the Goebel case. I took personal charge of running
down this man and his pretensions in the section of the city where
he lived and among his old neighbors. They were a typical East Side
lot--ignorant, generally stupid, incapable of long memory, but ready to
oblige a neighbor and to turn an easy dollar by putting a cross-mark at
the bottom of a forthcoming friendly affidavit. I can say in all truth
and justice that their testimony was utterly false, and that the lawyers
who took it must have known it.

"The Goebel case emphasizes two defects in the court procedure in patent
cases. One is that they may be spun out almost interminably, even,
possibly, to the end of the life of the patent; the other is that the
judge who decides the case does not see the witnesses. That adverse
decision at St. Louis would never have been made if the court could
have seen the men who swore for Goebel. When I met Mr. F. P. Fish on
his return from St. Louis, after he had argued the Edison side, he felt
keenly that disadvantage, to say nothing of the hopeless difficulty of
educating the court."

In the earliest days of the art, when it w