The Selden Patent Dispute: Drawings, Warnings and Cars in Evidence

The patent drawing carries its own date: November 5, 1895. Selden’s road-engine looks like a carriage whose front section contains a complex mechanical system. The application had been filed in 1879. Those two dates belong to different stages of the claim, not to two completed production automobiles.

Men gather around a Selden road-engine during the patent litigation. The photograph appeared in The Automobile in May 1906. The date 1877 displayed on the vehicle refers to the claimed origin of the design; it does not turn this into a photograph taken in the 1870s. The machine was being examined decades later.

A French motoring journal printed this sectional drawing of Selden’s engine in February 1911. Its internal arrangement mattered because the court’s decision turned on the kind of engine the patent actually described. Broad language about motor vehicles could not make every later combustion system mechanically identical.

Henry Ford sits in his 1896 Quadricycle in a photograph made in 1910. The Henry Ford identifies the New York visit as part of his legal appeal against ALAM. The car’s construction date and the photograph’s date are fourteen years apart: this was an old vehicle presented as evidence in a current dispute.