THE AFTERMATH
During the 1850s, America’s economy was back on track. Its factories were singing the praises of its great inventors, household names like Morse, Goodyear, and McCormick. These men—not the politicians—had taken America far beyond an agrarian society.
The three great Supreme Court cases concluded, their victors were ready to go down in the annals of history. McCormick, Morse, and Goodyear were just as vital to America as were Madison and Franklin. To memorialize their sacrifices, a tribute was painted on the Capital’s canopy—The Apotheosis of Washington—completed in 1866. It represented the passing of the torch, from Washington to the great innovators who had transformed America. The artist, Constantino Brumidi, made sure nobody would overlook their contribution as he painted his great canopy fresco.
In Brumidi’s masterpiece, Washington makes his heavenly ascent to be crowned as one of the gods, leaving America, his creation, behind. But he doesn’t leave his people alone or helpless. He has already transferred his mantle, not to politicians, but to the great innovators. And to make sure they do not fail, he leaves behind a few gods to oversee the work of inventing.
The fresco shows Washington at the apex, rising to heaven in glory, accompanied by thirteen maidens, symbolizing the original states. Beneath him, six groups of figures line the perimeter of the canopy, representing the six technology areas needed to make America great. Each is presided over by a carefully chosen god, making sure America’s inventive talents will propel it to its Manifest Destiny.
In “Agriculture,” Brumidi highlights McCormick’s reaper, laden with sheaves of wheat, being ridden by Ceres, the goddess of agriculture. “War” depicts a figure representing Armored Freedom banishing a sword, perched over a canon. Missing from these instruments of war is Colt’s revolver, possibly because of Colt’s tarnished reputation. Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, presides over “Science,” glorying over an electric generator and batteries for storing power, while Franklin, Morse, and Fulton watch with an eye of satisfaction. It was this generator that created the power to drive Morse’s telegraph. In “Marine,” Neptune, god of the sea, watches as a naked Venus, goddess of love that was born out of the sea, lays Morse’s transatlantic cable. And representing Goodyear’s rubber-processing invention is “Mechanics,” where Vulcan, god of the forge, stands atop a canon, adjacent an anvil, with a steam ship behind. It is as if Vulcan is lending his name to Goodyear, putting his stamp of approval on the revolutionary vulcanization process.
The fresco was nothing short of complete vindication for Morse. Although the Rotunda was devoid of any of his paintings, the great ceiling masterpiece showed not only the laying of his transatlantic cable, but also included his own a portrait as he inspects the generator used to create his electromagnetic transmissions.
The Supreme Court’s decision brought a huge windfall to Morse. Virtually all U.S. telegraph companies capitulated and paid royalties on Morse’s patent. And in 1857, Congress extended his patent another seven years. By this time, Morse had already made a handsome profit and was clearly not entitled to the extension under existing law. To justify his case, Morse used some creative accounting and calculated a low-balled profit of only $200,000 over the life of his patent. Usually, even this amount was enough to deny the extension, but Congress apparently thought Morse was entitled to a little extra.
It was enough to let Morse live out his days in leisure. Now married to his second cousin (who was twenty-six years younger), the couple had seven children and lived in their mansion, Locust Grove, that overlooked the Hudson River.
Meanwhile, the telegraph business began to consolidate. In 1856, the New York and Mississippi Printing Telegraph Company merged with several other companies to form the Western Union Telegraph company. Then, a decade later, Western Union merged with Morse’s telegraph company, the American Telegraph Company, and proceeded to dominate the U.S. market until the telegraph became obsolete.
In a fitting tribute, Morse sent what would be his farewell telegraph on June 10, 1871. It was the first telegraph to traverse the entire world. A year later, Morse died at the age of eighty.
McCormick also turned out to become one of America’s heroes, though his future was far from certain following his loss to Manny. The reaper market was now wide open. The Supreme Court had spoken—McCormick’s patent didn’t cover every reaper.
What may have surprised McCormick is that even after losing his case against Manny, McCormick’s infringement problems began to wane. Even the hated Hussey was no longer a threat, even though Congress had granted Hussey a patent extension. This was in large part because McCormick managed to beat most of his competition on the basis of performance, not his patents.
Hussey’s business had been in decline ever since his final duel with McCormick at the 1851 industrial exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London—the famed London World’s Fair. As reported in the papers, large crowds gathered on a wet July day to watch as McCormick handily beat the Hussey in a field of green wheat. It was impossible for Hussey to stop the news from spreading. In reporting McCormick’s win, the London Times wrote that “the reaping machine from the United States is the most valuable contribution from abroad, to the stock of our previous knowledge, that we have yet discovered.”
Tired from years of struggling to compete with the likes of McCormick, in 1858 Hussey sold his reaper business and patent for $200,00 and went to work on a steam plough. Two years later, while traveling from Boston to Portland, Maine, the train he was riding ran short of water. When the train stopped to take on additional passengers, a child asked for some water and Hussey volunteered to find her some. As Hussey re-boarded the car the train unexpectedly started, and Hussey was accidentally thrown beneath the wheels, ending his dream for fame.
Despite his loss to Manny, McCormick was smart enough to not stop inventing. If he could improve the reaper, so could others. McCormick knew all too well that patents last only so long. If he wanted to stay one step ahead, he needed more of them. McCormick’s genius was to sense the pulse of innovation and realize that America held significantly more inventive talent than just his own. McCormick’s greatest pool of potential inventors were men just like himself—everyday farmers.
While factories were in the business of blindly mass producing reapers, farmers—the ones who used the reapers—were making thousands of improvements. They preferred new designs from their fellow farmers rather than from a corporate salesman. This put pressure on the manufacturers to incorporate the field-invented designs into their own reapers.
Although most of the improvements were made by poor farmers and small-town mechanics, that didn’t stop them from spending money to file patent applications on their designs. That meant that manufacturers like McCormick couldn’t just willy-nilly copy the most popular reapers of the season. Instead, McCormick sent out “patent scouts” to scour the country for new designs. For those inventions worthy of being commercially implemented, these patent scouts bought up the patents for McCormick, who used the winter months to incorporate the designs into his own machines.
McCormick also put pressure on his mechanics to come up with improvements. When they did, McCormick filed its own patent applications. But unlike the rural farmer who was entitled to royalties for patents used by others, employees were required to assign their patent rights to their employers. And thus started the decline of innovation, when the patent system became the slave to the corporation. Ironically, with this action it was the inventors that now became mechanized, rather than the machinery.
Although McCormick had the resources to fully utilize the patent system for his own benefit (and he tried to do so on many occasions), the patent system had not yet evolved to include all the procedural advantages that would later be used to smash smaller competitors. Instead, reaper technology continued to evolve, moving from the mower to the self-rake reaper, then to the harvester, and finally to the harvester-binder. And McCormick hardly had a monopoly. In the 1860s there were about fifty independent reaper manufacturers, and the country had more than 50,000 operating reapers. This replaced the work of 350,000 men and saved $4,000,000 in wages. Amazingly, these machines harvested 50,000,000 bushels of grain. By the time the Civil War ended, the number of machines had reached 90,000. The field evolved so rapidly that by the twentieth century, the horse-drawn reaper was outmoded by the steam-powered combine that simultaneously cut and threshed the grain. Yet it too borrowed from McCormick’s original design.
For Goodyear, the end of his battle with Day didn’t make life any easier. Ironically, Day became wealthy while Goodyear remained in dire poverty. Day may have been shut out of the shirred goods market, but his factories along the Eastern seaboard kept churning out other rubber products, netting him more than a million dollars and enabling him to set himself up in high style in Manhattan. When Goodyear sought his patent extension in 1858, Day was there to challenge him. To obtain the extension, Goodyear had to prove that he had not realized a fair return on his invention. Although he had grossed $162,894 from licensees over the life of his patent, his expenses gave him a net profit of only $33,000. This was remarkable in that his licensed shoe manufacturers were selling over five million rubber shoes a year.
Day, of course, went on record saying that there was nothing original about Goodyear’s patent, and it was only due to mismanagement that he couldn’t turn a decent profit. He also didn’t believe that Goodyear’s numbers could possibly be accurate.
Even if Goodyear had made enormous profits, he might well have gotten his extension anyway, mostly because the patent office hated Day. Ellsworth had caught Day trying to claim Goodyear’s vulcanization process more than a decade before. The hatred between Day and the patent office escalated in 1849 when Goodyear applied to have his patent reissued. In the five years after his original patent had issued, Goodyear had learned that vulcanization was produced by heating rubber and sulphur, without the need for white lead. Goodyear therefore sought to broaden his patent claims to cover virtually any vulcanization process.
The patent examiner handling Goodyear’s case was none other than Dr. Gale, the same professor who helped Morse develop the telegraph at New York University and who was accused of showing favoritism to Morse when granting Morse’s patent ahead of Bain’s application.
For Day, this was déjà vu. He couldn’t see the justice in letting patent holders continuously broaden their patents, then get patent extensions. Day had a legitimate point. The problem was how he went out about voicing his opinions. Day wrote a public letter claiming that men such as Gale were not fit to work in the patent office or to protect the sacred rights of inventors. If Day hadn’t been such a scoundrel, he might have made headway with his arguments. As it was, the patent office turned against him.
Goodyear was awarded his seven-year extension. Joseph Holt, the new head of the patent office, rendered his decision by recounting Goodyear’s perseverance in the direst of circumstances, reliving his trips to debtor’s prison. Holt overlooked Goodyear’s poor bookkeeping, assuming that with Goodyear’s penury, he couldn’t possibly have profited from his patent. In the end, Holt found that he just couldn’t deny the extension. “I should be false to the generous spirit of the patent laws, and forgetful of the exalted ends which it must ever be the crowning glory of those laws to accomplish.”
The patent term extension was perhaps Goodyear’s most fulfilling moment. Deeply in debt, he desperately needed more royalties. Following his initial victory over Day and the immense success at the 1851 London Exhibition, Goodyear decided to go all out in Paris for the 1854 World’s Fair. Goodyear went extravagant, spending $50,000 to create every kind of rubber article imaginable, from sofas to eyeglasses. His display was so grand that it even captured the attention of Napoleon III, who invited Goodyear to join him on his carriage rides through Paris. Adding to the money drain, Goodyear purchased a home on the Champs-Elysees.
The end result was that Goodyear ran short on cash, landing him in the Clichy Prison in Paris. In a single year, he’d ridden with an emperor and been thrown into jail.
Before returning home, Goodyear put himself through one more lawsuit, this time in England, trying to convince a court that his vulcanization process was stolen by Thomas Hancock, who reverse-engineered some of Goodyear’s rubber samples and then beat Goodyear to the British patent office to patent the idea. Goodyear won the sympathy of the judge but not his verdict. England had a “first to file” rule, and Hancock had beat Goodyear to the patent office.
Though Goodyear returned home in 1858 to the good news of his patent extension, any sense of relief would be short lived. His health was broken, and he resorted to hobbling around on a cane. He died in 1860, $200,000 in debt. Not until years later would his son, Charles Jr., see the financial rewards of Goodyear’s patent. But even then, Charles Jr. was forced to face Day one more time when he applied for a second seven-year extension to his father’s patent. Day testified in opposition, dredging up all his former arguments, and harshly cross examining Charles Jr. But others also opposed the extension, including the railroads and other industries that relied on rubber parts. This time, the patent office denied the request. A twenty-one year monopoly was enough.
Two cases never made it to the Supreme Court—those involving Colt and Singer. Not surprisingly, neither man made Brumidi’s painting. Not including Colt’s revolver in the “War” scene or Singer’s sewing machine in “Mechanics” could only have been an intentional shun. The brash personalities of these two men all but assured their absence from the Capitol’s canopy. Still, Singer and Colt both became millionaires as the sewing machine and revolver industries boomed.
Colt’s brashness continually threw him into the public light. He was an admired figure among the rough-shod men who bought his revolvers, the forty-niners, the Texas gunmen, and all kinds of military officers. But for mainstream America, he was too politically incorrect—a man with a secret bastard son and an insane brother, a radical on the slavery issue (saying that it was an inefficient use of labor). His image was further tarnished in 1854 when Colt tried to get a second patent term extension, which had already been extended in 1849. All told, Colt was trying to get 28 years of patent life. Allegations were raised that he tried to bribe members of Congress with a $15,000 slush fund managed by his patent attorney, Edward Dickerson. Colt was eventually exonerated, but his patent wasn’t extended. And Colt never changed his ways. A few years later, Colt again offered $50,000 to a lobbyist in an effort to secure a reissue of an important patent relating to a rack and gear-loading lever that he wanted to include in his revolvers.
Colt never shunned scandal. If anything, he sought it. The publicity it created only helped him sell more revolvers. A Congressional investigation could only work to his benefit.
And the orders came pouring in. He quickly outgrew his small armory in New Haven, Connecticut, where he manufactured the firearms that were rushed to the front lines of the Mexican war. After another temporary move, Colt built his dream factory, a gigantic plant in Hartford that housed operations for the Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. Some estimated that Colt spent in excess of $400,00 on the facility. Capped with a blue dome, it became a famed landmark, changing the skyline of Hartford.
The now-famous Colt revolver patent finally expired on October 24, 1856, and Colt faced stiff competition from the likes of Massachusetts Arms, Remington, and Eli Whitney, Jr. But Colt managed to stay ahead, mostly because of his skilled workers and high-tech factory. In his South Meadows armory, Colt demanded hard work and perfection, driving his machinists ten hours a day, enough to churn out 150 finished revolvers a day by 1857. If his men weren’t clocked in by seven, they were locked out until noon with no pay. As an employer, Colt was stern, yet fair, even building his workers homes in a nearby compound that also included a library and community center.
The same year that Colt’s patent expired, Colt decided to set his wild, bachelor life aside and marry Elizabeth Hart Jarvis. Like most things in which Colt had his hand, the wedding was completely overboard. Colt hired a steam ship to take him to the ceremony. Following the wedding, the newlyweds left for a six-month honeymoon in Europe, being the special guest of Russia’s Czar Alexander II at his coronation. Of course, Colt always kept business at the forefront. He left the coronation having landed a contract to set up an armory in Russia.
If Colt knew how to do one thing, it was spend money. His factory was taking in more than a quarter million dollars a year, charging $24 for every revolver. Ironically, Colt had lost this same amount after his patent had been granted in 1845. Now, opportunities for making money were virtually endless, especially when hostilities began brewing between the North and South. Colt accelerated production and began running his factory night and day. Under the Militia Act, Colt was required to provide arms to any state who requested an order as long as the U.S. Army’s Ordinance Department approved them. And so he did, freely selling to the Southern states, even though Colt was a great proponent of the North and the abolitionist movement.
Colt’s death in January 1862 prevented him from cashing in on Civil War sales, though his wife certainly did, becoming the richest widow in New England. With the additional sales during the war, a year later Colt’s Armory was selling enough firearms to net the company millions of dollars.
The scandals surrounding Colt paled in comparison to those Singer brought onto himself. With the Great Sewing Machine Combination, Singer no longer had to worry about being harassed by patent infringement cases, although he did have to pay into the Combination longer when Congress granted Howe a seven-year patent term extension. Singer devoted less and less time to his business, and more and more time tending to his complicated personal life.
During his lifetime Singer was reported to have had six common law or legal marriages, some at the same time. In 1860, his two most recent families both lived in New York City. For these, Singer took on different names and pretended he knew nothing about Isaac Singer or the sewing machine. Singer’s luck ran out one day when he decided to take a carriage ride with one wife, Mary McGonigal, down Fifth Avenue and just happened to pass Mary Sponsler, Singer’s other New York wife. Upon seeing Singer with another family, Sponsler threw a tantrum in the middle of Fifth Avenue, driving Singer’s uncontrollable temper into a rage. Singer waited for her at their home, intent on beating her into submission—or at least making sure she’d never breathe a word about what she’d seen. When Sponsler’s daughter came to her mother’s defense, Singer beat her instead, leaving her unconscious.
To avoid prosecution, Singer fled to Europe, where he wooed another bride-to-be, Isabella, who eventually bore him six more children. In 1863, Singer returned with Isabella to New York, where they married—only after Singer’s bribes and threats of violence convinced Catherine to grant Singer a divorce. While he was there, Singer turned over the reins of his sewing machine operations to Clark, who formed the Singer Manufacturing Company, virtually ending Singer’s association with the company that bore his name.
Singer quickly discovered that New York society wanted no part of him or his new bride. He returned to Paris, then to a seaside resort near Devon until he passed on July 23, 1875.
Clark, following Singer’s advice, dominated the sewing machine market by targeting home sales. He did this by reducing the weight of the sewing machine from over a hundred pounds to a weight that could be easily lifted by a woman. Clark also latched onto McCormick’s financing strategy and offered a machine for $5 down and $3 per month for 16 months. When the patent pool expired in 1877, Singer had captured half the U.S. market, selling over 250,000 machines a year.