Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [164]
Through a farcical combination of circumstances that only the self-annihilating force of Smith’s vengefulness could have brought into being, Jackson’s letters became the object of a three-way struggle—Smith, his lawyer, and Morse against each other. The bizarrely tangled series of events, to merely outline them, began when Smith refused to pay his lawyer’s fees, calling them extortionate. In return, his lawyer refused to release Jackson’s letters for use in the injunction trial. With record-setting gall, Smith insisted that Morse pay the fees, since the suit against Hugh Downing was in defense of his patent. Morse replied that he could hardly be expected to compensate a lawyer he had not employed. But that was a moot point. In disgust, Smith’s lawyer insisted on having his money from Smith, not Morse. Only then, he told Morse, would he return Jackson’s letters: “I will not permit you to pay his bill.” Morse was left in a weird stranglehold: Smith demanding that he pay fees to a lawyer who would not accept them.
Smith threatened to break the impasse by unleashing what he called “war to the knife and the knife to the hilt.” He brutally informed Morse that during the upcoming trial he would not challenge Jackson. No, he would take Jackson’s side. He would expose Morse’s “hitherto supposed well founded patented rights.” He would show that Morse had stumbled on to his telegraph by guesswork, being otherwise limited—quite as Jackson had always said—by “a profound ignorance of the laws of Electro-Magnetism, by ignorance of the science of conducting agencies, by ignorance of what men of true learning had previously developed and established.” Morse really knew only one thing well: how to hoodwink his associates. “I think,” he told Morse, “we may all begin to see now the end of telegraph glory.”
Smith v. Downing was heard at a U.S. district court in Boston by a judge named Woodbury. With his patent being tested, Morse attended the trial. Jackson’s letters to him were submitted before the court, an arrangement having been made to take copies of the originals. Wood-bury spent more than three months reaching his decision, which he announced in October 1850. He noted that the case was difficult. Determining whether House’s printing telegraph infringed Morse’s patent, he said, involved scientific ideas not well understood except by the few who had devotedly studied them. Here Woodbury echoed a growing concern in the legal profession that few judges, much less juries, were qualified to hear such cases of intellectual property. Sensibly, he declared it unnecessary to resolve the byzantine conflict between Morse and Jackson in order to settle the main issue. That he did by denying Smith an injunction to prevent his competitor from using House’s system. In essence he ruled that Morse was entitled to his machinery and to his code but not to an exclusive application of electromagnetism to convey intelligence.
Whether the decision hurt or helped the self-destructive Smith is debatable. But it outraged Morse, who believed that Smith had sabotaged his own case for the sake of revenge. Since it seemed obvious to him that House’s telegraph infringed “the principle, and essence” of his own, he also suspected that in trying to do him in, Smith may have reached the judge. “I can come to no other conclusion than that [Woodbury] is either corrupt and has been bribed in some way, or that he has exhibited a profoundness of ignorance of the nature of the subject.” Smith being engaged in ongoing battle with the Associated Press, many newspapers applauded the outcome: “For the interest of Dr. Morse, we are sorry,” the Herald wrote, “and are glad that Fog Smith, a most troublesome personage, is effectually