Was George Baldwin Selden a Patent Troll?
Looking into the question of who invented the automobile, we came across an interesting article on Wikipedia -- not authoritative, mind you, but interesting nonetheless to students of automotive history and patent attorneys.
George B. Selden (September 14, 1846 in Clarkson, New York – January 17, 1922 in Rochester, New York) was a patent lawyer and inventor who was granted a U.S. patent for an automobile in 1895.
The idea of a horseless carriage was in the air during George's youth, but its practicality was uncertain. In 1859, his father, Judge Henry R. Selden, a prominent Republican attorney most noted for defending Susan B. Anthony, moved to Rochester, New York, where George briefly attended the University of Rochester before dropping out to enlist in the Sixth U.S. Cavalry, Union Army. This was not to the liking of his father who after pulling some strings and having some earnest discussions with his son managed to have him released from duty and enrolled in Yale. George did not do well at Yale in his law studies, preferring the technical studies offered by the Sheffield Scientific School, but did manage to finish his course of study and pass the New York bar 1871 and joined his father's practice.
He married shortly thereafter to Clara Drake Woodruff, by whom he had 4 children. He continued his hobby of inventing in a workshop in his father's basement, inventing a typewriter and a hoop making machine.
For a time, Selden represented photography pioneer George Eastman in patent matters.
Inspired by the mammoth internal combustion engine invented by George Brayton displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, Selden began working on a smaller lighter version, succeeding by 1878, some eight years before the public introduction of the Benz Patent Motorwagen in Europe, in producing a one-cylinder, 400-pound version which featured an enclosed crankshaft with the help of Rochester machinist, Frank H. Clement and his assistant William Gomm. He filed for a patent on May 8, 1879. His application included not only the engine but its use in a 4 wheeled car. He then filed a series of amendments to his application which stretched out the legal process resulting in a delay of 16 years before the patent US patent 549160 pdf was granted on November 5, 1895.
Shortly thereafter the fledgling American auto industry began its first efforts and George Selden, despite never having gone into production with a working model of an automobile, had a credible claim to have patented an automobile in 1895. In 1899 he sold his patent rights to William C. Whitney, who proposed manufacturing electric-powered taxicabs as the Electric Vehicle Company, EVC, for a royalty of $15 per car with a minimum annual payment of $5,000. Whitney and Selden then worked together to collect royalties from other budding automobile manufacturers. He was initially successful, negotiating a 0.75% royalty on all cars sold by the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, the ALAM. He began his own car company in Rochester under the name, Selden Motor Vehicle Company.
However, Henry Ford, owner of the Ford Motor Company, founded in Detroit, Michigan in 1903, and four other car makers resolved to contest the patent infringement suit filed by Selden and EVC. The legal fight lasted eight years, generating a case record of 14,000 pages. The case was heavily publicized in the newspapers of the day, and ended in a victory for Selden. In his decision, the judge wrote that the patent covered any automobile propelled by an engine powered by gasoline vapor. Posting a bond of $350,000, Ford appealed, and on January 10, 1911 won his case based on an argument that the engine used in automobiles was not based on George Brayton's engine, the Brayton engine which Selden had improved, but on the Otto engine.
This stunning defeat, with only 1 year left to run on the patent, destroyed Selden's income stream. He focused production of his car company on trucks, renaming his company the Selden Truck Sales Corporation. It survived in that form until 1930 when it was purchased by the Bethlehem Truck Company. Selden suffered a stroke in 1921 and died at 78 on January 17, 1922. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. It is estimated he received several hundred thousand dollars in royalties.
Do you think George Selden was a "patent troll"?
I was also wondering if this story might make a good movie, like Flash of Genius, and how ironic it is that no movie was made of Selden's "invention of the automobile" back in 1895. Was it not around that time Edison invented the motion picture? Or was that Lumière? Nevermind.
"The cinema is an invention without a future" - Louis Lumière
Electric vehicles enjoyed success into the 1920s with production peaking in 1912. [See The History of Electric Vehicles.] That's one year after Henry Ford won his suit against the folks who controlled the Selden patent, who coincidentally were the electric car people. Hmmmm. The electric car people, unlike Henry Ford, were not working to drive down production costs. They controlled the Selden patent. The price of the less efficiently produced electric vehicles continued to rise. In 1912, an electric roadster sold for $1,750, while a gasoline car sold for $650. The discovery of Texas crude oil (Spindletop) reduced the price of gasoline so that it was affordable to the average consumer.
[ http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/03/stem-cells-and-electric-cars.html ; even more detail in IPT.]
LB Ebert wrote in an article titled "Looking Backward" in Intellectual Property Today in June 2001:
The beginning of the decision reads: "The subject is most important; the interests involved, of great magnitude; the record phenomenally long; and the questions presented, complex." The decision continued: "During this long time the [. . . ] art made marked advances along different lines, and when, in [. . . ], the patent was granted, it disclosed nothing new. Others had then made the patentee's discovery and had reduced it to practice in ignorance of what he had done. While he withheld his patent, the public learned from independent inventors all that it could teach. For the monopoly granted by his patent he had nothing to offer in return. The public gained absolutely nothing from his invention, what-ever it was. From the point of view of public interest it were even better that the patent had never been granted."
The patent in question is not to a business method, nor even to such a thing as BT's claim to a hyperlink. It is not a patent to Lemelson. The patent in question is US 549,160 issued in 1895 to a Rochester lawyer named George B. Selden and the decision in question is Columbia Motor Car Co. v. C. A. Duerr, 184 F. 893 (CA 2 1911), which found, among other things, that Henry Ford's cars did not fall within the scope of the patent, mainly because Ford's cars employed an engine different from that disclosed in the '160 patent.
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