Differ Over Tesla Meters

U. S. Court in One Circuit Upholds His Patents, in Another Does Not.

Judge Cult, in the United States Circuit Court for the First Judicial district, which includes Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, handed down a decision Thursday. in the case of the Westinghouse Electric Manufacturing Company against the Stanley Instrument Company of Great Barrington, Mass. The suit was brought to restrain the Stanley company in principal business, manufacturing electric meters, which, it was alleged, Nikola Tesla had invented and the patents on which the Westinghouse Company owns. 

The decision was in favor of the Stanley Company, the court holding that the plaintiffs had not satisfactorily established Tesla's priority of invention over that of an Italian of the name of Galileo Ferraris Tesla asserted that he had, in April, 1887 taken out letters patent on a meter of the particular "phase" of the one in litigation. The Stanley company asserted that he had simply patented in this country the device of the Italian inventor.

Several years ago Tesla's laboratory took fire and all the records of earlier inventions were destroyed. Therefore direct proof of the plaintiff's contention was wanting. On the proof which was adduced before Judge Cult, however, the Westinghouse company won a similar suit in a Western circuit, and a similar suit is now pending in Pennsylvania.

The decision has no bearing whatever on the transmission-of-power invention, the greatest of all Tesla's inventions and one of the greatest of any age, all claims against which have been decided in Tesla's favor.