Patents on Duty

If a research worker for an industrial corporation conceives and patents a new device or process, the corporation usually gets it. But if a U. S. soldier designs a bullet or a U. S. sailor a boatswain's whistle, it is his to sell to the Government.

This principle, formulated by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1870 when it ruled that the Army could not confiscate from Major Henry Hopkins Sibley his design for an Army tent, was upheld last week by Justice Wendell Holmes Stafford of the District of Columbia Supreme Court, who directed the Government to pay Rear-Admiral Bradley Allen Fiske, retired, $198,500 or $500 each for 397 naval airplanes now using a torpedo-discharging device originally Fiske-designed, Fiske-patented.*

In 1911 Admiral Fiske suggested that torpedoes be shot from airplanes, was ignored, went ahead on his own, a year later took out a patent. Though the British adopted a similar device during the War, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels twice turned down the Fiske invention. In 1921 Rear-Admiral Fiske, retired, saw a photograph of a U. S. Navy plane dropping a torpedo. Said he: "It was clear to me that the Government had deliberately taken my patent for its own use."

In 1926 he sued. Rear-Admiral William Adger Moffett, as chief of the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics, was made the defendant. The Government claimed the invention because it had been perfected while the inventor was on active duty, because he had been educated at the U. S. Naval Academy at Government expense. Justice Stafford held that the Sibley case had closed to question the right of service men to take out patents. Hoping perhaps to overthrow the Sibley precedent as well as escape paying the Fiske damages, the Government prepared to appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court.

*Other Fiske inventions include the naval telescope sight, now in worldwide use, radio control for steering ships, submarine detecting apparatus, many others, most of which he sold to private concerns, which in turn sold them to the government.