Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [152]
The competing telegraphs were demonstrated in court, and explained to the judge by Morse and by E. F. Barnes. O’Reilly’s lawyers contended that the Barnes-Zook Columbian was an independent invention that did not violate Morse’s patent. They also assailed the patent. They argued, among other things, that Morse had obtained a French patent for the same invention; that his specifications claimed a monopoly on the “general principle” of electromagnetism; and that he had copied his apparatus from those of Edward Davy and Karl Steinheil. O’Reilly enjoyed and approved his lawyers’ presentation: “Plucked Jackdaw never looked nakeder than did the ‘learned Professor.’”
Judge Monroe rendered his opinion around September 13. It took several hours to read in court and when published ran sixty pages of small type, double columns. He ruled that the French patent had no bearing on the American patent; that the objection to Morse’s claim of a “general principle” was itself too general; and that in its structure and mode of operation the instrument demonstrated by Barnes infringed on Morse, who was the true and only inventor of the telegraph. He awarded Morse an absolute injunction against O’Reilly’s line—“so broad and comprehensive that nothing is left for evasion,” the Frankfort Yeoman commented; “O’Reilly will see he has no means of going on.”
O’Reilly did not blink. He promised to take his case to the Supreme Court, and meanwhile to keep his southern line in operation using some other instrument than the Columbian. In Louisville, the pro-O’Reilly Courier predicted that the judge’s unfair decision would inflame public opinion against Morse’s telegraph: “From one end of this Union to the other the people will speak out on this subject, and this monster can never now be smuggled through Congress. It is dead, dead, dead.” To bring on the outcry, O’Reilly floated stories of high-level conspiracy. He hinted or alleged in print that a “Morse clique” controlled the Patent Office; that Judge Monroe had been appointed by Kendall; that one of Morse’s lawyers, also named Monroe, was the judge’s brother. He howled for the judge to be impeached and demanded an investigation: “a more extraordinary case … has never characterized the history of any invention in art or science.”
Morse had learned from experience that O’Reilly responded to loss by raising the stakes. Still, the nature and ferocity of the attack stunned him. “Every effort of corruption is making, to rob and murder me, (murder I mean my reputation,) for if they can destroy that, they hope to be justified in robbing a thief.” He again felt at a loss what to do. Given the hostility toward him of many newspapers, he could not appeal through the press. Nor was he certain that he could rest on his reputation, preserving a dignified silence.
O’Reilly’s overreaching, however, only increased his losses. He tried to skirt the injunction by strictly applying its definition of Morse’s telegraph as a device for recording long-distance messages. He instructed operators of his Columbian telegraphs in Louisville to make themselves the recorders. They would receive incoming messages by ear and take them down by hand, listening to the click of the iron armature striking the electromagnet. The underlying idea had occurred to Morse at least a decade earlier, and at present many of his own operators could aurally “read” off the clicking magnet whole columns of incoming newsprint. Since the “Columbian” telegraphs no longer recorded long-distance messages, they no longer infringed Morse’s invention. Morse’s counsel fought O’Reilly’s dodge by moving for a writ of attachment, successfully. The court called O’Reilly’s attempt a palpable evasion of the injunction. He could not be located, but E. F. Barnes, his business manager in Louisville, was arrested for contempt and ordered to pay court