Excerpt from Men of Achievement: Inventors
With the many and superb tools now at our service, of which our fathers knew comparatively nothing - steam, electricity, the telegraph, tele phone, phonograph, and the camera - we and our descendants ought to accomplish even greater wonders than these./ As invention thus rises in the scale of importance to humanity, the history of the pioneers and, to the shame of mankind be it said, the martyrs of the art, becomes of in tense interest. In the annals of hero-worship the inventor of the perfecting press ought to stand before the great general, and Elias Howe should rank before Napoleon. Whitney, Howe, Morse, and Goodyear, to mention but a few of our Americans, contributed thousands of millions of dollars to the nation's wealth and received com paratively nothing in return. Their history sug gests as pertinent the inquiry whether our patent laws do not need a radical change. The bur den and cost of proving that an invention de serves no protection ought to fall upon who ever infringes a patent granted by the Govern ment. At present it is all the other way.
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