“There are a great many Patents of this kind (practically useless, but not appearing so on the face of them) taken out for boilers of steam-engines, and boilers of steam-engines admit of very enormous variety of shape and proportions, without damaging their efficiency. The consequence is, that it is hardly possible at this moment for a man having to scheme a boiler for a new situation or new circumstances to avoid putting his foot in so doing into a trap which somebody has previously set for boilers.... Nearly the whole of the Patents for the boilers of steam-engines at this moment are of no practical value to inventors or to the public; but they are continually getting every man who makes a boiler into a scrape with some patentee, because almost every conceivable form of boiler having been previously patented, and bit of a boiler, one cannot make any sort of boiler without infringing some man’s patent.” He said precisely the same thing of screws. Then Mr. Platt, a well-known machine-maker, said:— “I think that there is scarcely a week, certainly not a month, that passes but what we have a notice of some kind or other of things that we have never heard of in any way, and do not know of in the least, that we are infringing upon them; and the difficulty is to get at any knowledge. We may be now infringing, and may have been infringing for years, and a person may have been watching us all the time, and when he thinks that we have made a sufficient number, he may come down upon us, and there is no record. If a thing is entirely new, there is a record by getting a description; but what I mean by a description is this—A very large number of Patents are now taken out for what is termed a combination of known things for the same purpose, and the descriptions of those Patents are generally so bad that it is impossible to tell the parts that are actually patented. It is only when you come into court, or after making some compromise rather than go to that expense, that you ascertain that fact, and very likely they themselves in many cases do not know the parts that they have actually claimed. It appears to me that, as to that question of combination, the granting of Patents for things to do precisely the same work in the same machine, with the addition, perhaps, of a chain or a couple of bolts, or the form of the lever changed, a straight lever made into a compound one; in matters of that kind it has become a very serious question as to conducting a large business.”