. 
’ 
~ 
1828] 
Improved Camera Lucida.—The difli- 
culty of employing the camera lucida in the 
form in which it was presented to the public 
by its inventor, Dr. Wollaston, is well 
known. From Professor Amici, of Modena, 
this ingenious instrument received several 
improvements ; but, in the one which he 
exhibited last year in this country, and 
which, consequently, it was to be supposed, 
was of the best construction, there was a 
double image, which, so long as a concave 
lens was employed in front of the prism, 
could not be gotten rid of. A very skilful 
optician in this country (Robinson, of De- 
yonshire-street, Portland-place), having in- 
vestigated the cause of this, and succeeded in 
the inquiry, set himself to remedy the evil; 
and has now succeeded in producing a mo- 
dification of Wollaston’s camera lucida, as 
improved by Amici, which, for the pur- 
poses for which that instrument is designed, 
cannot be surpassed—the whole practice of 
landscape-drawing being reduced entirely to 
the mechanical operation of tracing. The 
Same ingenious artist is the inventor of the 
Rhodium pens, which, at about one quarter 
of the price of the ruby pens, possess all the 
adyantages of the latter. 
English Patents.—It is amusing enough 
for any person who is not a sufferer by them, 
to attend to the operation and effect of the 
English patent laws. The best examples of 
the effects of them are to be found in a re- 
spectable monthly journal, belonging to one 
of the members of the patent-office, and de- 
voted principally to the description and enu- 
meration of patents. In Newton’s Journal 
for last month, ten new patents are enu- 
erated, of which four may be considerated 
_as identical with others previously granted. 
One for separating the salt from sea-water, 
and thereby rendering it fresh and fit for 
use, by the process of filtration ; another for 
tanning, by a process which has been used 
for many years in the Bank of Ireland for 
sizing, dyeing, and wetting paper ; a third 
person, bearing the. ominous name of 
Wilks, lays “‘ no claim to the exclusive use 
_of coke ovens under steam boilers, for the 
purpose of generating steam therein during 
the process of making coke ; but I claim the 
application of a steam boiler in the construc- 
tion of a coke oven, by making the bottom 
of the boiler form the top of the oven.” The 
idea of combining a coke oven and steam 
boiler had been anticipated, in 1824, by a 
former patentee—a very ingenious gentle- 
man, of the name of De Iongh—and been 
extensively practised with great advantage. 
But the very nice distinction which has been 
drawn (probably by some gentleman learned 
in the law), between the present invention 
id the former, is truly admirable. “ I 
ve,” says Mr. De Iongh, “ placed a coke 
oven under a boiler ;” then says Mr. Wilks, 
“T lay no claim to a coke oven under a 
boiler ;”’ but “J claim a boiler placed over 
a coke oven.” "The fourth was for some an- 
_tique modern improvement in the process of 
Varieties. 
93 
evaporation. A few months since a genius 
obtained a patent for making steel, by com- 
bining iron with carbon!!! Much about 
the same time another laid claim to origi- 
nality in composing brass of zinc and cop- 
per—in particular proportions, it is true ; 
but those proportions were precisely such as 
every experienced artist had been in the 
habit of employing. We will only cite 
one other instance :—a clever and liberal ar- 
tist invented a most useful surgical appa- 
ratus, and obtained a patent to protect his 
right to the sale of it. Unluckily, this wor- 
thy man had nothing but his character and 
talents to support him. A shopkeeper, who 
had been extremely busy in jobbing for a 
body to which John Bull has affixed a most 
offensive name, pirates this invention, under 
the sanction of the leading member of this 
new joint stock knowledge company, who 
engaged that, before he could suffer from 
any legal proceedings of the inventor, he 
(the said acting manager) would find out 
some passage in a foreign work which should 
suffice for upsetting the patent-right. He 
kept his word. An injunction was, in the 
first instance, obtained to stop the sale of his 
protégé’s apparatus, but subsequently with- 
drawn, on the authority of an obsolete 
work, stating that, a certain number of cen- 
turies ago, is was imagined, &c. &c. It is 
easy to say, that, when a patent has been 
granted on improper grounds, it can be 
set aside by legal process ; or that, when a 
patent-right has been infringed, a court of 
justice can award reparation. The expense 
of legal proceedings is an effectual bar to all 
poor claimants;* and who, in his senses, 
will trust the decision of a patent-right to a 
jury unacquainted, as the members gene- 
rally are, with scientific subjects, and with 
‘such innumerable examples, not of their 
misinterpreting the patent-laws—for laws 
which admit of every interpretation can 
never be misconstrued—but of decisions at 
direct variance both with the laws of science 
and the principles of equity. 
Figure of the Earth.—Mr. Ivory’s inves- 
tigations of the figure of the earth have 
been subjects of the highest admiration 
among mathematicians. After having again 
considered all the data which the recent la- 
bours of various experimentalists have sup- 
plied, he observes there cannot be a more 
satisfactory way of proving that the meridian 
of the earth is an ellipsis, than by shewing 
that it coincides with that figure at the 
equator, at the mean latitude of 45°, at the 
parallel of 54°. 44’. where the curvature is 
identical to the equatorial circle and at the 
pole; a task which this emizent philoso- 
pher has accomplished as far as the mea- 
surements in his possession put it in his 
* Which of the poor inventors who submitted 
plans, returned to them as useless, and for which 
patents were afterwards granted to the indivi- 
dual who officially inspected them, would have 
ventured to take legal measures against this late 
inspector, so conspicuous in the bubble-and- 
squeak year of 1825? 
