How Bert Beat the Bureaucrats

No one believed Inventor Bert N. Adams in 1939 when he came out of his Queens Village, L.I., kitchen with a battery that seemed to revolutionize the original electrical "pile" devised by Alessandro Volta in 1796. Inventor Adams ultimately won a U.S. patent--and then the U.S. Government itself copied and repatented his battery without paying Adams a dime. Last week the Supreme Court not only agreed that Adams' battery met the U.S. patent test of being new, useful and "nonobvious"; by a vote of 7 to 1, the court also made clear that Adams' patent had been infringed during years of plain and fancy Government hornswoggling.

Primary Accident. A lonely tinkerer in the style of the Edison era, Adams has supported his yen for inventing by toiling at a lengthy catalogue of jobs--cowboy, barber, auto mechanic, house painter, merchant seaman, research director for a vacuum cleaner company. His pre-war kitchen triumph was a primary (nonrechargeable) battery that delivered an even level of electricity over long periods of time. Until then familiar primary batteries delivered electricity at a declining rate until they wore out; their charge drained off even when not in use; and they rapidly deteriorated when subjected to extreme temperatures.

Adams' battery consisted of a lightweight container, one electrode made of magnesium and another of cuprous chloride. It could be stored indefinitely and activated by simply pouring in fresh or salt water. While cooking up some cuprous chloride on his wife's stove, Adams accidentally dropped cigarette ashes into the brew--and vastly improved it. Moreover, when his battery was connected to a load, a chemical reaction took place that produced heat. As a result, the battery worked surprisingly well at temperatures as low as -65DEGF.

Expert Accident. In wartime 1942, Adams decided that his revolutionary battery had all sorts of potential military uses. When he offered it to the Army, though, every available expert rejected his idea as unvoltaic and unworkable. Indeed, no one yet knows exactly why the Adams battery works. But without ever telling the inventor, the Government secretly confirmed his claims and ordered at least 1,000,000 similar batteries. One version is used in meteorological balloons operating at temperatures that would freeze conventional batteries. Another version, activated by salt water, powers signal lights in the survival gear of military aviators.

Adams got his patent in 1943; the Government got its own in 1953, based on the slight improvements of two army scientists. Adams finally got mad, and with the aid of an anonymous benefactor whom he credits with putting up $200,000 to fight the case, he went into the U.S. Court of Claims in 1960 and charged patent infringement. Fighting back, the Government cited older patents that used all of Adams' basic ingredients; an expert tried to build a battery according to the key (1880) patent, however, and the thing exploded. In the end, the court found that Adams was the first to create a workable, nonobvious battery out of the familiar ingredients. The Court of Claims ruled that the Government had clearly infringed Adams' patent.

Sweet Victory. When the Government appealed to the Supreme Court, Adams' New York lawyer, John Reilly, impressed the Justices during oral argument by pouring water into an Adams-rigged glass bowl while he went on talking. Electric lights connected to the battery popped on ten minutes later. When Justice Tom C. Clark read the decision last week, he fondly recalled that Lawyer Reilly "demonstrated it right here, right in the courtroom."

For Adams, who is now 66 and lives in Yuma, Ariz., the next step is getting the Government to fork over damages --a complex legal process that may take months or years. No one yet knows how much he will collect; besides, he is ailing and may have little chance to spend it like the tycoon he might have been. Just his court victory over the bureaucrats, though, is mighty sweet to Tinkerer Adams.

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