Radio Broadcast (Nov 1926-Apr 1927)

22 RADIO BROADCAST NOVEMBER, 1926 A MARCONI MERCURY AND IRON DETECTOR Unless, again, that revolutionary new principle of radio reception is discovered. But such a discovery has never been made in any other developing art, so far as the writer can recall. All kinds of steam engines have been devised since Watt first put steam to work, but they all operate on the principle of the expansion of steam. Numerous kinds of internal combustion engines have been devised, but the principle of the expansion of gases is still the key. An art tends to build up from the foundation of the first discovery, and radio has followed the historical precedent of other inventions. It probably will continue to do so. Finally, it will be observed that the socalled basic patents in radio soon cease to be the controlling factor in the patent structure. Fleming and De Forest are both still living, and their work in tubes made possible everything we mean by the word "radio." The basic De Forest and Fleming patents have expired and yet neither can unrestrictedly manufacture a tube commercially to-day. Two hundred and more patents upon mere details of design and manufacture have taken all commercial value out of their fundamental ideas. This sapping effect of the smaller patents is at once an aid and an obstacle to monopoly. It tends to monopoly because it gives the advantage to the big corporation with a scientific and legal staff. It tends, on the other hand, to prolong the battle in the Patent Office and the battle in the courts, which must be fought to a finish before property rights are finally established. If smaller companies can set up enough interferences in the Patent Office, they can frequently delay the issue of an opposing patent for a long time; and if the contestants are equally matched, as the General Electric Company and the Western Electric Company, in the Langmuir-Arnold "high vacuum" question, the struggle may be prolonged for half a generation. The battle in the courts is likely to be shorter, though two years is about the minimum for a decision in a district court, and five years. is not unusual for the whole course of a case carried on through appeal. Even at the risk of covering familiar ground, it may be well to locate briefly the control of those patents that at the moment seem to be the most important. The General Electric Company owns the patents by Coolidge and Langmuir on tubes, by Langmuir on the grid leak, and by Rice on neutralization. The American " Telephone & Tele graph Company (including Western Electric) owns the patents by Arnold on tubes, Hartley on neutralization, and Lowenstein on the C battery. The Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company owns the patents by Armstrong on regeneration and by Fessenden on the heterodyne principle. The Hammond patents on inventions involved in super-heterodyne sets are licensed exclusively to the R. C. A. and the A. T. & T. Company, but Hammond reserved certain rights in military and naval fields as well as the right to license the United States Government. The Radio Corporation has exclusive licenses under the Telephone Company, Westinghouse, and General Electric patents to sell and use apparatus in certain fields of use, among which is broadcast reception. The apparatus sold by the R. C. A. is made by Westinghouse and General Electric and some by the Wireless Specialty Apparatus Company. Of essential radio patents at the moment, only two are held outside the Radio Corporation. These are Hazeltine's patents on neutralization and Latour's on the common B battery also held in this country by Hazeltine. The R. C. A., however, holds a non-exclusive license under the Latour patents. Perhaps a third might be reckoned in the Schloemilch and Van Bronck (German) patent on the reflex circuit, seized by the Government as alien property during the war and now free to the general public. From all that has been said above, it seems reasonable to conclude that within five years all the essential patents in radio will have been adjudicated in the courts. Under the law of averages, probably five out of six of them will be vested by court order in the Radio Corporation. And as time goes on, the probabilities are that the unrivalled research facilities of the Radio Corporation's constituent companies will place that group in an unapproachable position so far as technical, patented refinements of the essential devices are concerned. If, then, patents are the decisive element in the radio situation, the logic of events points to an eventual leadership of the field by the Radio Corporation, with only a possible one or two much smaller groups operating independently under fewer patents. Whether patents are necessarily the decisive element is another question, too broad for discussion here. It will be treated in the next, and concluding article of this series. AN EARLY EXPERIMENTAL TUNED CIRCUIT Much of the commonly used apparatus of to-day depends in operation on the principles discovered by scientists of many years ago who worked with such crude apparatus as that depicted above. In fact, some people are inclined to believe that many of the comparatively recently granted patents were really covered in all of their essentials by the patents of earlier inventors whose ideas have been somewhat duplicated