Elmore bulletin. [volume] (Rocky Bar, Idaho) 1889-1906, 1893-03-18
ELECTRICITY N LAW.
seoints Asort Inventions rhas Have op~a-
eli New FteIds Of IitlnntIon.

Ell New Fields Of Litigation.
One 81 TIDE effects Of the rapid lntroduo-
sicn ~ electrical inventions during the
last quarter OF CENTURY has been 10 open
up entirely nr@ Belds Of litigation tor thu
lawyer aud new questions for the bench
This In general way is true Of every new
creation u industrial property, but with
.lcctricity many VI the problems TO he
solved are quite novel. and judge has
often to 20 wide Of practice or precedent
before be can determine the legal princi-
pie proper 10 apply IN the ease before him.
Thus, Tor instance, Ia Pennsylvania the
question has been adtudicated upon wheth-
or local electric light company was a
manufacturing concern. The court says
II Is not. aud yet all that it does IL TO make
current for sale.
A similar point Is that raised as TO the
durability OF electric current. The law
officers OF the treasury SAY IL is intangible,
and therefore pays no duty; yet IL can be
measured to the minutest fraction. The
Western Union company has had many
| fight ms 10 whether pole lines had any right
on the public highway, and Massachusetts
say they have, as transporting message il
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 the abstruse doctrine
that telephone speech can only he trans
mitted by an undulatory current, that a
make aud break current would not do IL,
and that other devices are simply juggle
to get around Bells patent. In electric
lighting millions OF Investments have hung
on a ''fllament," and on the exact meaning
that the courts might attach to the word.
Among late legal fights In one that prob
ably tho United States supreme court will
have To settle-namely. whether the tele-
phone companies or the electric railway
companies have right to use the earth Us a
'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 n remedy in metallic circuits, aud that
Z no one electrical interest anyhow can ''own
the earth" Already this dispute has crop
ped up in nearly score Of states, and the
increasing number and magnitude of ths
electric roads renders IL more and more
a important. In the meantime, the tele
I phone companies ms far as possible arr
\ putting their metallic circuits in. with
= marked improvement in the service.
New questions thus crop up every day
Q In the use, for example, of the alternative
z currents now becoming so common not q
: little has depended on the patentability ol
? the principle of transforming the current
9 and on whether "A step up" was equiya
!. lent to step down"-in other words
d whether raising the voltage and decreasing
Z the amperenge was simple and inevitabl,
: converse to decreasing the volts and rails
9 ing the amperes. Another point arounl
O which legal controversy has gathered is thu
Z fine one as to where ''low" potential end
and high" potential begins.-Pittsburs
It Dispatch.