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From: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Patents and Nikolas Tesla
Message-ID: <1992Feb4.014956.1772@reed.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 92 01:49:56 GMT
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR
Lines: 42

I was reading Tesla's autobiography "My Inventions" and came across
this paragraph in the introduction. It's a little time slice about the
negative effect of patent monopolies way back at the beginning of the
century, when electricity was just starting to be commercialized.

(if you're asking yourself "who's Tesla?", he was an inventor
contemporary to Edison. He invented alternating current, built the
generator at Niagra Falls, was the true inventor of wireless
communication (not Marconi), and was working on a way to transmit
power to anyone in the world for free. Neat guy.)

From the introduction to "My Inventions", Tesla's autobiography. The
introduction was written by Ben Johnston:

Tesla gradually became something less of a favorite with his peers, in
part because he was a loner that most of them knew only through the
wild stories in the press, and in part because he was inevitably
associated with the career of the "Tesla patents" long after they
became sole property of the Westinghouse Corporation. Many rival
inventors became bitter when they found their progress in alternating
current work blocked at all turns by Westinghouse lawyers determined
to prosecute - some said persecute - every conceivable patent
infringer. The Westinghouse Corporation in the 1890's was weakened by
the high development costs of the polyphase system as well as by the
rollercoaster economics of this period of feverish American
industrialization. Only by playing its trump - the Tesla patents - for
maximum effect could the corporation defeat the monopolistic ambitions
of General Electric. The Westinghouse strategy was successful: the
apparent strength of the patents (even before they were tested in
court) induced General Electric to agree to a "cross-licensing" of
patents with Westinghouse. General Electric became the senior member of
the partnership, but both corporations were freed to produce a
complete line of equipment while smaller competitors were frozen out.
(This arrangement fell by the Sherman Anti-Trust act in 1911, but by
then the electrical duopoly which still dominates the United States
market was well entrenched.) Is is hard not to sympathize with the
frustrations of gifted inventors like William Stanley, who, crushed
in the middle of a corporate showdown, railed at the "patent pool
trust," and reviled the name of Tesla.
-- 
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nelson@reed.edu \/                                    D is for lots of things