Sounding Board

The Temporary National Economic (Monopoly) Committee will shortly seek more funds. One way to get them, observers wisecracked after last week's hearings, would be to charge businessmen for the privilege of testifying. No witch-hunt, the hearings turned into a sounding board with advertising value for a number of industries.

The subject was still patents, Philo T. Farnsworth of Farnsworth Television. Inc. related how he discovered the basic principle of television when he was only 14. Dr. William David Coolidge, director of General Electric Co.'s Schenectady research laboratory, sounded off on G. E.'s recent discovery of "invisible" glass (TIME, Jan. 9). Vice-President George Baekeland of Bakelite Corp. got valuable publicity with his announcement that airplane production could be speeded up by making certain structural parts of plastics.

Most significant testimony was that of young Conway Peyton Coe, Commissioner of Patents. Now 41, Patent Lawyer Coe was the youngest man ever to be commissioner when Franklin Roosevelt appointed him five years ago (he says modestly that there were few patent lawyers who were also Democrats). Well-groomed, "black-haired Conway Coe got his first job in the Patent Office when he left Randolph-Macon College in 1918. Studying law on the side, he naturally made patents a specialty, soon became one of the nation's crack patent lawyers, building a tidy practice in Washington.

He supplied the cordial for last week's love feast. Said he: "What we need is not to decrease but to enhance the monopoly called a patent. Genuine protection in that form would be the last surviving bulwark standing between the inventor and the onslaught of mighty and ruthless corporations."

But though holding the patent system largely responsible for the great U. S. fertility of inventions, Commissioner Coe had suggestions for improving the laws. Most important: 1) creation of a single court of patent appeals; 2) reduction from 44 to 20 years of the maximum period "between the filing of an application and the expiration of the resultant patent."

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