In another thread people are questioning whether or not we can cover non political related issues in OD without starting a sub forum. I'll start with something that is not political albeit probably some legal opinions involved:


In college I did a Research Paper on the Selden Patent. I don't have much time, but I think I can give a condensed summary here. Once I got into it, I found it fascinating as did my professor.

The Selden Patent was the patent for the automobile. Selden was a patent attorney and tinkerer. He read the various mechanical and invention journals of the day and it was obvious that the invention of the horseless carriage was inevitable. In the 1870's or so, he drew up the patent papers for the automobile with very general drawings of the carriage, the transmission apparatus and the engine and submitted to the patent office with intentional loop holes.

By submitting with the loop holes, he got in the front of the line, but did not want the patent approved until the right time, so that his seventeen years did not expire too early. Every time the patent office sent it back, he corrected one loop hole and inserted another.

A bicycle company owner, I think Columbia Bicycle Company was approached by an inventor, I think Duryea. It appeared that the machine could be developed and built for profit. The Columbia owner sent his attorneys to Washington to see if there was a patent on such a machine. They of course, discovered the Selden patent which by that time had been cleaned up and approved.

Columbia's attorneys brought Selden back to discuss it. They came up with an organization of auto manufacturers. To abide by the patent, the auto maker would have to join the organization and pay royalties on each unit produced.

When Henry Ford started, he knew enough to go join the organization so that he could produce cars legally. Problem was, because of his desire to build an affodable car as opposed to expensive cars, he was considered to be a crack pot. When he came to the organization, they basically laughed at him and wouldn't welcome him to their organization.

He went back to Dearborn, ignored them and started building cars knowing that he had given them every chance to collect royalties from him. Once the Model T came along and took the world by storm, Henry became a success beyond any other auto maker. THAT is when Selden came knocking on Henry's door insisting that he pay royalties on every car he had ever built.

Problem for Selden was that Henry could hire more attorneys with his coffee money than Selden had ever seen in the same room. Selden made the mistake of taking ol' Henry to court. The case at least as of my college years was the biggest patent case in US history.

It turned out that once Henry and his people started getting into the details of Selden's patent, they learned that it was for a vehicle with a two cycle engine. It took awhile to educate the court on the difference, but Henry finally won his case.

This resulted in Seldens organization being forced to return all royalties to all auto makers so Selden, of course, went bankrupt.

This is a very fast and brief description and the names and dates may be wrong after 40 years of this all setting in the back of my mind.

I hope you find it as fascinating as my professor and I did.

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Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

I'm assuming that the loop holes were intentional in order to delay the approval of the patent thus giving him more time?

Never cared for Ford as a person (from what I have read) but he did completely change the face of transportation and the assembly process.

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His thugs changed the faces of a few union supporters back in the Thirtie's, but I digress.

I recall doing some reading on the Selden issue many years ago. One thing that I always wondered about the patent process is the application of the patent protection based on design specifics vs. application of the protection based on design concept. If Selden went so far as to provide automobile patent drawings that included the transmission design, for example, wouldn't the patent protection of the entire horseless carriage concept be negated if a competitor had some material changes to the transmission design of his version of a horseless carriage?

Conversely, would I have had a valid patent infringement claim against Selden/Ford if I had previously patented a concept for a horse-drawn carriage that employed a similar type of frame and had the same number of wheels?

That's right David. He kept putting loop holes in to get it sent back to him for correction while keeping HIS patent as first in line. Then at a certain point he decided that someone building a car was coming soon, so he cleaned it up and let it go through.

I was in a huge hurry when I wrote the thumb nail in the original post, so I'm sorry I was not more clear.

You are correct about Henry. I stumbled on a book about him when I was in junior high school and it was intriguing. I have done lots of reading about him since, which is what led to my having the idea of the Selden patent for a Research Paper.

The guy was anti-sematic, a bad parent, stubborn and a zillion other bad traits, but he is (correctly IMHO) credited with putting America on wheels. He was probably even better with his production and manufacturing skills than he was with auto innovation itself.

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2001 SLK 320 six speed manual
2014 Porsche Cayenne six speed manual

Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

I do remember that he did indeed submit drawings, but remember, he was an experienced and clever patent attorney. The fact that he did, was his undoing, since he locked his patent into a two cycle engine. I used the example of the transmission, but I don't remember how much detail there was about that part. As I recall, he never even built a car. I remember a picture, but as I recall the picture was more or less bogus and since I was doing this research some 80 years after his patent filings, who knows when the picture was made.

I think his drawings and specs were intentionally vague for obvious reasons.

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2001 SLK 320 six speed manual
2014 Porsche Cayenne six speed manual

Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

that makes me laugh

I believe in the end the judge asked seldon to make a car using his drawings. He did but it had so little power it would barely move itself on level ground. I believe it had a no compression engine.

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..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

It's Bush's fault...

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Are you sure?

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It is Bush's fault!

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

Positive...Robby Bush punched me in the humerus when I was 4. Since then, I've had a really twisted sense of humor...

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I don't remember about the judge making him build a car, but it might very well be true. With the internet, there is, of course, massively more information available than even in the really good libraries of 1973. I went to the SMU, TCU, & UTA libraries and read everything I could find at the time, which wasn't much by internet standards.

I hope to spend some time googling and seeing what I can find, but right now, much of my free time is taken working on my instrument rating.

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2014 Porsche Cayenne six speed manual

Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

I believe FORD built a car according to Selden's drawings to demonstrate to the Court that it was not a practical machine.

Ford is a difficult man to either like, or dislike. He was so inconsistent that it makes it difficult to peg him. People say he was an anti-Semite. Yet he hired Jews all the time, and couldn't understand why they were upset with him. The group he really hated were "Bankers"--the fact that many Bankers were also Jews allowed people to label him as antisemitic--that his permitting the publication of "the oracles" especially without a copyright so that they could be forever reprinted and distributed.
The $5 day came about simply because Mr. Ford reasoned that his adoption of mass production had benefited the Ford Motor Company, and benefited the purchaser, but had not benefited the employees of Ford. That, and he saw it as a means to reduce Monday and Friday absenteeism.
He hired Harry Bennett, and Harry hired thugs, former boxers and criminals. Harry ran FoMoCo by saying, " Mr Ford said he wants to do this-______", Since no one else, including Edsel, had much access to Mr. Ford, he got away with it. The famous " Battle of the Overpass" created such bad publicity that the family forced Henry to give in to the Unions-finally.
Mr. Ford also hired some pretty tough guys as managers. He disliked giving people titles and job descriptions, and would often hire 2 or more men and give them ( verbally) the same job just to see who would emerge as the stronger.
"Enigmatic" may be the best one word description of the man who "put America, and the world, on wheels."

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This is taken from a book titled "American Automobile Album" by William H. McGaughey. This book was published by E. P. Dutton & Co. in 1954.....

Selden's patent covered any automobile powered by a gasoline engine.....

"A shrewd Rochester attorney, George B. Selden, saw an European model gasoline engine at Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. He soon filed a patent application for a gasoline engine, nursed it along for years. In 1903, a group of car manufacturers, licensed to use gasoline engines, sued Ford for patent infringements, and a long, fierce legal battle began."

"Not until December 24,1906 did Selden officially enter the automobile business, by incorporating the Selden Motor Vehicle Company. He announced plans to build at East Rochester, New York, a touring car to sell for about $5,000 and, in time, to add a line of commercial vehicles. Throughout 1906 an odd situation prevailed; inventor Selden was unable to manufacture under his own patent. The Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, controlling the Selden patent, had ruled that no license should be granted until the applicant had demonstrated his ability to manufacture automobiles of the standard required and had actually sold some of them. The license, refused when the Selden company was in its promotional stage, finally was granted near the year-end."

"In 1908 Selden and his sons built a model which they demonstrated for the court. Selden's patent was ruled invalid in 1911. A diary entry revealed that years before he'd scorned the four-cycle Otto engine as "that damn Dutch engine" in favor of the two-cycle Brayton engine, which only one car being made in 1911 was using."

Please note that the text of this book says the patent was ruled invalid while the blurb that goes with the picture of Selden says the patent was ruled valid but was not infringed by Ford.

Whatever.... The end result was that Ford did not have to pay Selden so everyone else stopped paying as well.

Attached Thumbnails

   

Mercedes Benz invented the first automobile in 1886

Here are some early models I photographed at the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart a couple of weeks ago

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