OneGuyFromBarlick

BAGLADY

Every patent shall contain a short title or description of the invention... and a grant to the patentee... for the term of seventeen years, of the exclusive right to make, use and vend the said invention or discovery throughout the United States. From the US Patent Act, July 8, 1870.

This omnibus legislation (which also covered copyright) consolidated and rationalized previous laws. Inter alia, it also laid down rules for cases involving patent disputes, and it’s one reason the 1870s decade saw so many such cases. One of the earliest suits was brought (in September 1870) by Margaret Knight against Charles Annan, concerning Annan’s patent for a machine which made flat-bottomed paper bags. Knight claimed that Annan had stolen her idea, and she won the case. The invention was hers, US Patent #116482, and she underlined the victory by patenting an “improved” machine in 1879, US#220925. Those numbers are significant in themselves, but the language Annan used in his defense have also provoked interest. Did he argue that Knight could not have invented the machine because, so to speak, she was a she? On that question, the jury is still out. But if that was Annan’s argument, the judge decided that Miss Knight, undeniably a ‘she, her’. had the better of it. Margaret Eloise Knight was born in Maine on February 14, 1838. Hers was a poor family, made poorer still when the father died, and Margaret (and her two brothers) left school as soon as they could (at 12) to work in the mills. She’d already displayed an inventive streak, and early on, at the cotton mill, she invented a safety device after witnessing a personal injury accident. Exactly what that was is now lost to legend. Plagued by bad health, she worked a variety of jobs (including making daguerreotypes) before fetching up at a paper mill, which was where she invented her machine for making flat-bottomed, rectangular paper bags. After Margaret won the case against Charles (who was a machinist at the same factory), she won an award from no less a she than Queen Victoria. Then Margaret sold her patent. And that became her modus vivendi. Though endlessly inventive (she would take out 30 patents), the wolf was ever at her door. Still inventing, the wolf still at her door, Margaret Knight died in 1914. A local paper celebrated her as “a female Edison.” Margaret might have appreciated the irony. As she herself once put it, “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had a good a chance as a boy.” ©

STEINWAY

Build to a standard, not to a price. Henry Engelhard Steinway.

In percentage terms the 1850s decade saw the USA’s greatest influx of immigrants. Well over a million of them were Germans. It’s easy to see them as radicals fleeing the conservative reaction that followed the failure of the 1848 revolutions. Here in Missouri, in the winter of 1860-61, these “Forty-Eighters” led the St. Louis mob that forced the secessionist state legislature to abandon its plan to leave the union. They’d already seen a ‘jünker’ aristocracy in action in Germany, and would not succumb to another one in Missouri. One of them, General Franz Sigel (1824-1902) still stands mounted guard in Forest Park. Another, Carl Schurz (1829-1906) would in the US Senate be the conscience of Republican radicalism. But there was another German immigrant (in 1850, to New York City, whose politics are less easily defined. He came in as Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, but soon decided that “Henry Steinway” would be a better fit, for he came to America to do business. He was born in Germany on February 15, 1797. We see signs of radicalism in his early youth when, only 15, he joined the Schwarze Shar (“black flock”), an irregular unit formed under the duke of Brunswick to fight the Napoleonic invasion, but as an adult he would cultivate a different radicalism as an independent craftsman, impatient of the restrictive rules of the German guilds and frustrated by the tariffs that enriched German principalities but made paupers of the citizens. Of course, Henry Steinway made pianos. And his pianos were revolutionary in design and distinctive in tone, thanks largely to their iron frame. Steinway’s pianos acculturated well in his brave new world, a continental market free of tariffs. It was also populated with a rising middle class prosperous enough to include “parlors” in their new houses and ambitious enough to think music a perfect accompaniment to their rising status. Steinway left his oldest son, Christian Friedrich (possibly named after the Duke of Brunswick) to run the piano business in Germany, but founded a new company, Steinway & Sons, which set the gold standard of American piano manufacture. In 1871 Henry died. Soon his fourth son, William, took over. Like his father, William built great pianos and was involved in many other ventures, notably in public transport. William died in 1896, and it only remained for that old German radical, Senator Carl Schurz, to deliver his most famous funeral oration. In that, Schurz defined Steinway’s greatness as “blending in himself the best traits of the American character with the best of the German.” The funeral took place in New York’s Liederkranz Hall. For decades, St. Louis’s “circle of song” was located on South Grand Avenue. It has since been replaced by a supermarket, a very “American” destiny. But on North Grand, Steinway pianos still grace the stage of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. ©