Fort Worth gazette. [volume] (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1891-1898, 1891-05-25
ELECTRICITY IN LAW.
Points About Inventions That Have Open
ed New Fields of Litigation.

ed New Fields of Litigation.
One of the effects of the rapid introduce
ton of electrical inventions during the
last quarter of Il century has been TO open
up entirely new fields of litigation for the
lawyer and new questions for the bench
This in a general way is true of every new
creation of industrial property, but with
electricity many of the problems TO be
solved are quite novel, and a judge has
often to go wide of practice or precedent
before he can determine the legal princi-
pie proper to apply in the case before him.
Thus Tor instance, in Pennsylvania the
question has been adiudicated upon wheth-
er a local electric light company was a
manufacturing concern. The court says
it is not, and yet all that it does is TO make
current for sale.
y similar point is that raised as TO the
durability of electric current. The law
officers of the treasury say it is intangible,
and therefore pays no duty: yet it can be
measured 10 the mnutest fraction. The
Western Union company has had many a
fight as 10 whether pole lines had any right
on the public highway, and Massachusetts
say they have, as transporting message is
part OF the work of intercourse, for which
roads are laid out and maintained.
The American Bell Telephone company
for years spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars in defending tSe abstruse doctrine
that telephone speech can only he trans
mitted by an undulatory current, that
make and break current would not do it,
and that other devices ara simply iuggle
to get around Bells patent. In electric
lighting millions OF investments have hung
on ''tilament,' and on the exact meaning
that the courts might attach TO the word.
Among late legal fights is one that prob
ably the [ nited States supreme court will
have to settle-namely, whether the tele-
phone companies or the electric railway
companies have right to use the earth rs
return" circuit. The telephone people
claim that the leakage from the railway
throws their service out of gear and rem
ders the instruments useless. The railway
people reply that their telephone friends
have 4 remedy in metallic circuits and that
no one electrical interest anyhow can ''own
the earth" Already this dispute has crop
ped up in nearly a score of states, and the
increasing number and magnitude of the
electric roads renders it more and more
important. in the meantime, the tele-
phone companies as far as possible are
putting their metallic circuits in, with q
marked improvement in the service.
New questions thus crop up every day.
In the use, for example, of the alternative
currents now becoming so common not q
little has depended on the patentability of
the principle of Transforming the current,
and on whether step up" was equiva-
lent to a step down"-in other words,
whether raising the voltage and decreasing
the ampereage was simple and inevitable
converse to decreasing the volts and rails
ing the amperes. Another point around
which legal controversy has gathered is the
fine one rs to where low potential ends
and high potential begins.-Pittsburg
Dispatch.