Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 2.djvu/867

 860 FEDERAL r.BPORTEB. �merous aots which he claims to bave Leen anticipations. Some if not most of them were in evidence in the former case, and were held inaufficient to establisli the iuvalidity of the patent. They will require but brief notice. There are eeveral, however, that appear in evidence first now. They will be particularly considered. One of these, and one upon ■which much stress bas been laid in the argument, is described in the testimony of George W. Beardslee. In 1S44, at Loches- ter, New York, he excavated an ordinary well, six feet in diameter, and 12 to 16 feet down to limestone rock of a peculiar formation, and then from two to five feet into the rock. The strata were thick, two or three feet, and without fissures. Finding it diiïicult to blow eut the rock by ordinary blasting he drilled a two-inch hole in the center of the exca- vation, to the depth of four or five feet, without strikiiig the water he anticipated. He then put a charge of powder in a tin case into the hole and fired it by a fuse. When fired the water had risen over the hole, as he says, three or four feet. The resuit of the explosion was, he thinks, to reach a sub- stratum of water for which he was seeking. Before the blast he could bail out the well with a bucket, and afterwards he could not. �It would, we think, be a very unwarranted conclusion to draw from Beardslee 's evidence that his experiment was an anticipation of Eoberts' process. The well was in no sense an artesian well. The cartridge was 13 or 14 inches long, and it was of such a diameter as to fill the hole during its length. It was not arranged in a position having particular reference to the place where the effect of an explosion was desired. It rested on the bottom of the hole, without being suspended. Obviously it was a case of ordinary blasting. The proportion to which the hole was filled with powder, about one-third, is the proportion required and ordinarily adopted in common blasting. 1 Knight's Meclianical Dic- tionary, 295. Plainly the purpose was to blow out the rock above the cartridge into the well. We fail to see the identity of such a process with exploding a torpedo many hundred feet below the surface of the ground, and below the top of ����