492 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1057 



Like many inventors, Weston has been 

 engaged extensively in patent litigation. 

 To uphold some of his rights, he had to 

 spend on one set of patents nearly $400,000, 

 a large amount of money for anybody, but 

 as he told me, he begrudges less the money 

 it cost him than all his valuable time it 

 required — a greater loss to an inventor 

 thus distracted from his work. What is 

 worse, most of this litigation was so long- 

 winded that when finally he established his 

 rights, has patents had aged so much that 

 they had lost, in the meantime, most, if 

 not all, of their seventeen years' terms of 

 limited existence. And here I want to 

 point out something very significant. In 

 the early periods of his work, between 1873 

 and 1886, Weston took out over three 

 hundred patents. Since then, he has taken 

 considerably less, and of late, he has taken 

 out very few patents — after he became 

 wiser to the tricks of patent infringers. 

 Formerly, as soon as he published his dis- 

 coveries or his inventions, in his patent 

 specifications, he was so much troubled 

 with patent pirates that instead of being 

 able to attend to the development of his 

 inventions, he was occupied in patent liti- 

 gation. As an act of self-preservation, he 

 has had to adopt new tactics. He now 

 keeps his work secret as long as possible, 

 and in the meantime, spends his money for 

 tools and equipment for manufacturing his 

 inventions. In some instances, this prep- 

 aration takes several years. Then by the 

 time he sends any new type of instruments 

 into the world, and others start copying, 

 he has already in preparation so many 

 further improvements that pretty soon the 

 next instrument comes out which super- 

 sedes the prior edition. He had to utilize 

 these tactics since he found how imprac- 

 tical it was to rely on his patent rights for 

 protection. That inventors should have to 

 proceed in this way is certainly not a recom- 



mendation for our patent system; it kills 

 the very purpose for which our funda- 

 mental patent law was created, namely, the 

 prompt publication of new and useful in- 

 ventions. 



L. H. Baekeland 



NOTE ON THE DEBITS OF FREELY FALL- 

 ING BODIES 



In No. 975, Vol. XXXVIH., N.S. (Septem- 

 ber 5, 1913), of this journal, I gave a semi- 

 popular account of an investigation on " The 

 orbits of freely falling bodies " published in 

 Nos. 651, 652 of the Astronomical Journal, 

 August 4, 1913. Soon after the appearance of 

 these papers several correspondents challenged 

 the result I derived for the meridional devia- 

 tion of the falling body, all of them maintain- 

 ing that this deviation is toward the equator 

 instead of away from it, as I had concluded. 

 Being preoccupied with affairs somewhat re- 

 mote from the fields of mathematical physics, 

 I have not been able to give this apparent 

 discrepancy adequate attention, although its 

 origin was indicated in an informal communi- 

 cation to the Philosophical Society of Wash- 

 ington in April, 1914. 



In the meantime, two noteworthy contribu- 

 tions to the already extensive literature of this 

 subject have been published by Professor F. E. 

 Moulton^ and by Professor Wm. H. Roever,^ 

 respectively. These contributions are not only 

 important for originality of methods and for 

 painstaking attention, especially to mathe- 

 matical details, but they may seem to the 

 casual reader to have exhausted the subject by 

 demonstrating in the most approved mathe- 

 matical fashion of our day that the postulates 



1 ' ' The Deviations of Falling Bodies, ' ' Annals 

 of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 

 184-94, June, 1914. This investigation is specially 

 remarkable in that but one kind of latitude is 

 used. It is likewise remarkable in that no ex- 

 plicit statement is made as to which of the vari- 

 ous latitudes (astronomic, geocentric, geodetic or 

 reduced) is used. 



2 "Deviations of Falling Bodies," Astronomical 

 Journal, Nos. 670-672, pp. 177-201, January 22, 

 1915. 



