bbles. To bait the Bell Company became almost a
national sport. Any sort of claimant, with any sort of wild tale of
prior invention, could find a speculator to support him. On they came,
a motley array, "some in rags, some on nags, and some in velvet gowns."
One of them claimed to have done wonders with an iron hoop and a file
in 1867; a second had a marvellous table with glass legs; a third swore
that he had made a telephone in 1860, but did not know what it was until
he saw Bell's patent; and a fourth told a vivid story of having heard
a bullfrog croak via a telegraph wire which was strung into a certain
cellar in Racine, in 1851.

This comic opera phase came to a head in the famous Drawbaugh case,
which lasted for nearly four years, and filled ten thousand pages with
its evidence. Having failed on Reis, the German, the opponents of Bell
now brought forward an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, and
opened up a noisy newspaper campaign. To secure public sympathy for
Drawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a complete telephone and
switchboard before 1876, but was in such "utter and abject poverty" that
he could not get himself a patent. Five hundred witnesses were examined;
and such a general turmoil was aroused that the Bell lawyers were
compelled to take the attack seriously, and to fight back with every
pound of ammunition they possessed.

The fact about Drawbaugh is that he was a mechanic in a country village
near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not inventive; and
loved to display his mechanical skill before the farmers and villagers.
He was a subscriber to The Scientific American; and it had become the
fixed habit of his life to copy other people's inventions and exhibit
them as his own. He was a trailer of inventors. More than forty
instances of this imitative habit were shown at the trial, and he
was severely scored by the judge, who accused him of "deliberately
falsifying the facts." His ruling passion of imitation, apparently, was
not diminished by the loss of his telephone claims, as he came to public
view again in 1903 as a trailer of Marconi.

Drawbaugh's defeat sent the Bell stock up once more, and brought on a
Xerxes' army of opposition which called itself the "Overland Company."
Having learned that no one claim-ant could beat Bell in the courts, this
company massed the losers together and came forward with a scrap-basket
full of patents. Several powerful capitalists undertook t