BY FRANK T. SNYDER

HENRY FORD'S FIRST PATENT SUIT

(Ed. Note) Henry Ford is rightfully renowned for winning the Selden patent suit and breaking the stronghold that the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers was attempting to put on the industry. Obscured by time, however, is this true story of a patent suit which Ford Motor Company lost. Old Cars is proud to present this story which has been exhaustively researched by Mr. Snyder and never published before.

Automotive history has made little note of Frederic W. Ball, but his transmission developments were pivotal in the fortunes of a better known name, one Henry Ford. Mr. Ball was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1867, attended Cooper Union and Wright's Business College, and, upon completing his education, became an apprentice machinist in the shop of Ball and Hewell where his father was an active partner.

Once his apprenticeship was completed, Frederic Ball and his father bought out the Hewell interests and changed the name of the company to G.M. Ball and Son. By 1898 the younger Ball owned the business outright and changed its name to the New York Gear Works.

The company was doing quite well manufacturing transmission gears, but Mr. Ball's experimenting nature led him to produce an all-spur gear planetary reverse. Initial patent for this development was granted on April 9, 1901 with additional patents gained in 1903 and 1904. Thus the New York Gear Works, through Frederic Ball's inventive genius, owned the basic patents on the planetary spur type reverse gear. A company catalog produced circa 1910 stated "we are the oldest manufacturers of the all-Spur Planetary Reverse Gear, being the inventors and the first to construct and operate a successful Reverse Gear of the planetary type..."

Mr. Ball got on the burgeoning automotive bandwagon in late 1901 and built a car of his own design. In December, 1902 he introduced a 4-passenger rear entrance tonneau touring car to the market. It was styled after the Panhard of the period with a wheel base of 80 inches and the then-accepted standard tread of 56 inches. The car used 28 x 3 1/2" Goodrich tires and was powered by a 2-cylinder vertical engine of 5 x 6 bore and stroke. Normal operating speed of the engine was 800 rpm and maximum horsepower was achieved at 1000 rpm. The Ball car was water cooled by a radiating coil of 24 fluted copper tubes mounted below the frame and the water was circulated by a chain-driven rotary pump. A reserve supply of five gallons of water was carried in a tank mounted on the dashboard under the hood. Transmission was, of course, the Ball patented planetary type with two speeds forward and one reverse. Final drive was by chains to the rear wheels.

During the next few months five cars were built and sold. The quality of operation of the Ball transmission did not go unnoticed by other auto builders of the day and by the end of 1904 Ball's transmission was being copied by a number of auto manufacturers whose cars employed planetary drive.

This activity didn't go unnoticed by Mr. Ball either. He decided that imitation was the sincerest form of plagiarism and brought suit against John Wanamaker as agent for the Ford Motor Company. At that time Wanamaker was the largest Ford dealer in the world, selling the cars in his successful department stored in Philadelphia and New York. The suit alleged infringement of patent number 671,747 covering the Ball Transmission Gear as made by The New York Gear Works. This patent claimed construction and operation of the Ball planetary was... "in combination, a rotary driving shaft having a gear wheel fixed thereto, a concentric power transmitting sleeve loosely mounted on the shaft, and having a gear wheel fixed thereto, a pair of drums concentric with the driving shaft, a secondary shaft mounted in one of said drums and having two gear wheels fixed to rotate together in one of the said drums, one of the gear wheels intermeshing with the gear wheel on the driving shaft, an intermediate gear wheel in said drum for connecting the second gear wheel on the secondary shaft with the gear wheel on the loose sleeve, a gear wheel fixed to the other drum concentric with the driving shaft, a gear wheel located in said drum and fixed to rotate with the said gear wheels on the secondary shaft and a pair of intermediate gear wheels located in said last named drum for connecting the gear wheel upon the secondary shaft with the gear wheel carried by the drum whereby when one of the drums is held stationary the drive shaft will rotate the sleeve in one direction and when the other of the drums is held stationary the driving shaft will rotate the sleeve in the reverse direction, substantially as set forth."

Legalisms and exhaustive descriptions aside, (the judge in the case must have had a good grasp of mechanics and engineering to understand the charges) what is described here is, in essence, not only the Ball planetary transmission but also the Ford planetary and countless other of the time.

If the New York Gear Works was successful in its suit against Ford, it planned to institute proceeding against all the other companies then using planetary transmissions in their cars. New York Gear claimed that their patents were the basic ones covering the application of a reversing gear to a planetary transmission.

And they won the suit! The courts ruled that their claim against John Wanamaker and Ford Motor Company was legitimate and that Ball's patents were basic, covering all spur-gear reversing type planetary transmissions.

On December 11, 1905, James Couzins, representing Ford Motor Company and Frederic J. Ball, representing New York Gear Works signed a contract permitting Ford Motor Company to manufacture and use the Ball spur-gear reversing planetary transmission in their automobiles at a royalty cost of $1.00 for each transmission they built or used.

Frederic Ball continued to own and operate the New York Gear Works until 1917 when he sold the assets of the company and retired. At the time of retirement his transmission, developed in New York Gear's small shops at the turn of the century, was in use in hundreds of thousands of Ford cars throughout the world.

Frederic J. Ball. His decision to sue John Wanamaker and Henry Ford was only the beginning of a series of actions against all companies using planetary transmissions in their vehicles.