was represented by an Admiral and several junior officers), the Bureau of Standards, the Emergency Fleet Corporation and the Department of Commerce. Mr. Flettner told an absorbing story of an inherited and acquired interest in maritime things. The outbreak of the World War found him teaching Physics, from which occupation the German Government summoned him to work which included experimentation on rotating cylinders in wind tunnels at one of the Universities. The principle underlying these experiments is described in Physics books as the Magnus effect. As the result of these experiments rotor ships were designed which functioned very closely according to the predictions made as the result of the experiments. Mr. Flettner also described his current-actuated free rudder, which involved the use of an auxilary rudder to actuate the main rudder of a ship so supported as to make such actuation comparatively easy. This is said to be an improvement over the ordinary rudder where the stresses in a storm are often very great and result in disabling the rudder thereby leaving the ship helpless. One of the attendants at this lecture was Dr. Slosson, Editor of the Science News Bulletin. He has written an article on Mr. Flettner's work as a result of this lecture given under the auspices of the Patent Office Society.

Dr. Slosson opened the series of lectures in the Fall with a discussion of "How Inventive Genius Works' based on biographic studies of scientific inspiration. He told of the apparently sudden birth of quaternions in the mind of Hamilton and of similar occurrences in the lives of Poincaré, Kekule and other mathematicians and scientists. Dr. Slosson expressed the hope that the members of the Patent Office Society would add from their own knowledge some contributions that would help to show the character of the early development of inventions.

On October 22nd, Mr. Robert F. Whitehead talked to the examiners on the very appropriate subject "The Examination of Applications." This lecture was very well

attended and it is believed that the work of the Office has shown the results of this lecture in the more effective examination of applications.

On Friday, November 19, Mr. E. W. James, Chief of the Division of Design of the Bureau of Public Roads gave an illustrated lecture on "The Standardizing of Highway Signs for the Uniform Marking of Highways". This lecture was a continuation of a lecture on the Federal Highway System last year. Mr. James is a forceful and entertaining speaker. He described the work involved in the mass production of signs for highways traversing the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

A series of three lectures was given in November and December by Henry D. Hubbard, Secretary of the Bureau of Standards, entitled respectively "Recent Discoveries Concerning Electrons and Atoms", "How Nature Builds Atoms", and "Atoms and Light Waves".

Mr. Hubbard started with the simplest atomic structure as shown in the Hydrogen atom and showed how the frequency of vibrations shown in the red streamers from the Sun's disk could be accounted for by a study of the possible electronic orbits around the hydrogen nucleus. Mr. Hubbard went on from this simplest atomic structure to the helium atom, the lithium atom, the carbon atom, and lastly the vastly complex and unstable atoms of the radioactive elements. The arrangement of atoms in crystal structure as revealed by the reflection spectra of X-rays was discussed. Many beautiful models were shown including one illustrating the crystal structure of the diamond. One of the most interesting possibilities suggested was the tapping of the store-house of interatomic energy, which is known to be very much greater than the energy obtainable by chemical combination.

As to future lectures before the Patent Office Society, it is hoped by members of the Lecture Committee that one or two prominent patent attorneys will be able to find time from their very busy lives to discuss office actions as seen from the outside. Two promises looking

in this direction have been in the hands of the Committee for some months. The Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Bureau of Mines has agreed to lecture soon on Economic Methods of using Coal. This subject has been recently the subject of an international conference at Pittsburgh. THOMAS C. MAC KAY.

GEORGE LITCH ROBERTS

The Board of Governors of the American Patent Law Association has, on behalf of the Association, written a letter of congratulation to George Litch Roberts, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, which occurred December 30, 1926.

As Mr. Roberts' remarkable career at the Bar will, no doubt, be of interest to many of our readers, we are publishing a short biographical sketch of him, together with his picture.

George Litch Roberts is probably the oldest living representative of the Patent Lawyers of this country, linking the present numerous and widely distributed body of patent lawyers to the era when patent law was in the making. Mr. Roberts is a descendant in direct male line from Thomas Roberts, who landed with the first settlers of New Hampshire in 1630, and was the first governor of the little colony on Dover Point, between the Cocheco and the Piscataqua Rivers. On the distaff side, his genealogy goes back to the Mayflower pilgrim William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth Colony, and to Samuel Lincoln, an early settler in the colony at Hingham, Massachusetts, and equally ancestor of Abraham Lincoln, seven generations removed: Mr. Roberts is therefore cousin in the fifth degree to President Lincoln.

Mr. Roberts, eldest son of Reuben Roberts and Jane Litch Roberts was born in Boston, Massachusetts on

December 30, 1836. He graduated from Weslyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1859, at the head of his class. Returning to Boston in 1862 he entered into the study of the law in the office of the Hon. Benjamin R. Curtis (then in private practice after his resignation from the Supreme Court of the United States) and was admitted to the bar in 1864. After engaging in general practice for three or four years he was retained by defendant in a patent case, Woodman vs. Stimpson, and with Judge Curtis as his senior counsel, briefed and argued that case before the Supreme Court. From that time forward Mr. Roberts was employed in patent causes practically exclusively; his name appears as of counsel in the Supreme Court reports of Stimpson v. Woodman, 10 Wall, 117; Glue Co. v. Upton, 97 U. S. 3; Mathews v. Machine Co., 105 U. S. 54; Manning v. Isinglass & Glue Co., 108 U. S. 462; Flower v. Detroit, 127 U. S. 563; Collins Co. v. Coes, 130 U. S. 56; National Meter Co. v. Yonkers, 149 U. S. 48. When the nation-wide litigation over the Bell Telephone patents began, Mr. Roberts was retained by the Bell Company, and personally conducted the suits brought in Chicago, chief among which was that against American Cushman Telephone Co., 35 Fed. Rep. 734, and, when the government case against the Bell patents was instituted, he took charge of the Bell Company's interests. This case, prepared as to testimony was discontinued by the government, and never came to

court.

Mr. Roberts' contemporaries in the patent bar, sometimes as colleagues and sometimes as opponents, included George Gifford, Charles M. Kellar, George Harding, Edward N. Dickerson, Sr., William Whiting, Chauncey Smith, Causten Browne, Charles Howson, Edmund Wetmore, Frederick H. Betts, Benjamin F. Thurston.

Mr. Roberts enjoys excellent health and vigor in his advanced years; the maintenance of his mental faculty is evidenced by the completion and publication, in 1925 of his philosophical work entitled "Objective Reality".

Another work of his, recently completed, "Patent Criteria", is now under consideration by a law book publisher, and will, if published, offer to the patent lawyers of the United States the results of over fifty years experience in and study of American patent cases.

SUGGESTIONS FOR INCREASED EFFICIENCY IN METHODS OF WORK.

C. H. LANE, Law Examiner.

The validity of a patent depends primarily upon the assistant examiner. Unless he has a clear conception of the exact thing covered by each claim and the breadth or scope of the claim, and unless he exercises skill and judgment in the selection of references no amount of learning in the law or practice can remedy the failure to produce the best references.

The amount of work in the office awaiting action requires speed as well as care. Perhaps some of the following hints may enable the examiners to do more or better work, or both, with no more effort than heretofore. 1. In taking up a case make it a practice to read the claims and try to get their meaning before reading the specification. This will give a true conception of their real scope and meaning, which are apt to be obscured by preconceived ideas if the specification is read first. It also makes defects in the claims stand out more conspicuously, and gives a broad idea of the invention in the light of which the earlier part of the specification can be more intelligently read. Often the reader has no clear understanding of the object and operation of the invention until he has read the entire specification, and to properly criticise the specification it has to be read a second time.