Events

Susan B. Anthony walked into a barbershop serving as a voter registration office in Rochester, New York, on November 1, 1872, and demanded to be registered. When the inspectors hesitated, she read aloud the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that no state shall abridge the privileges of citizens and threatened to sue anyone who turned her away. The inspectors, uncertain of the law, registered her. Four days later, she voted in the presidential election. Anthony was arrested two weeks later at her home. The charge was "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully" voting without having a lawful right. The arrest was precisely what Anthony wanted. She intended to use the trial as a platform to argue that the Constitution already guaranteed women the right to vote and that no additional amendment was needed. Before the trial, Anthony toured Monroe County, delivering her speech "Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" at every venue that would have her. She argued that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause, combined with the Fifteenth Amendment's prohibition on denying the vote based on race, logically extended suffrage to all citizens. The prosecution, alarmed by her effectiveness, moved the trial to Ontario County to secure a less sympathetic jury. The trial, held in June 1873, was a judicial travesty. Judge Ward Hunt, a recent Grant appointee, refused to let Anthony testify, directed the jury to find her guilty without deliberation, and denied a motion for a new trial. He fined her $100. Anthony refused to pay, and the government never attempted to collect, denying her the chance to appeal to a higher court. The case failed legally but succeeded politically, galvanizing the suffrage movement and keeping the question of women's voting rights in public discourse for the next 48 years until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.

George Baldwin Selden received U.S. Patent No. 549,160 on November 5, 1895, for a "road engine" powered by an internal combustion motor, and then spent sixteen years trying to collect royalties from every automobile manufacturer in America. Selden, a patent attorney from Rochester, New York, had filed the original application in 1879 but deliberately delayed its approval through amendments and continuations, keeping the patent pending while the automotive industry developed around it. Selden had never built a working automobile. His patent described a lightweight internal combustion engine mounted on a carriage, a concept that existed primarily on paper. The engine design was based on the Brayton cycle, already outdated by the time the patent was granted. Nevertheless, the patent's broad language appeared to cover virtually any gasoline-powered vehicle, and established manufacturers formed the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers in 1903, agreeing to pay Selden royalties in exchange for using his patent as a barrier against new competitors. Henry Ford refused to pay. Ford, whose application to join the ALAM had been rejected, challenged the patent in 1903, beginning a legal battle that lasted eight years. Ford's team argued that the patent was invalid because it described a Brayton-cycle engine while all practical automobiles used the superior Otto-cycle engine. In 1911, a federal appeals court agreed, ruling that Selden's patent applied only to vehicles using the specific engine type he had described, which no manufacturer actually used. The ruling demolished the patent licensing system and opened the American automobile industry to unrestricted competition. Ford, who had continued manufacturing throughout the litigation, emerged as a folk hero. The case established lasting precedents about the limits of patent scope and the dangers of overly broad claims, principles that continue to shape intellectual property law.