his case it would be impossible to appreciate the extent to which the Ordnance Department is swayed by partiality and obscurantism. Will it be believed that the very department which had been thus implicated immediately afterwards accepted the late superintendent's evidence in his own case as conclusive proof that he had not repeated in a fresh instance the very thing he had just been accused of doing in the instance of Mr Daw – that is to say, given a colourable answer which evaded the issue, and left the impression described in the above quotation on the Secretary of State, who accepted his statements? Such a thing ought not to be believed if conclusive evidence of the fact had not been set forth unanswerably in a published parliamentary paper.[1] For the benefit of our readers we will tell the story which this paper reveals as briefly as we can.
In the year 1856, a young subaltern of the Royal Fusiliers – Mr Hope – designed an improvement in "shrapnel-shells," which should adapt them to rifled guns, and should at the same time obviate certain grave disadvantages in the old form of shrapnel, which he had observed whilst on service in the Crimea. He was a Cambridge man of sound mathematical training, and he devoted a period of enforced leisure to working out the problem.
That he had worked out the problem, made his improved shell, and submitted it to the Ordnance Department in 1856, does not rest merely on his own statement; for on page 13 of the correspondence referred to below,[1] we have a War Office letter to Mr Hope, enclosing "a drawing to scale of the shell which you submitted for the consideration of her Majesty's War Department in 1856." This drawing was taken from a shell actually then, and we suppose now, in the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, which had been lying there since 1856. In 1864 the officer who had been Superintendent of the Royal Laboratory for the whole period since 1856, patented an improved shrapnel-shell in his own name. We have here in this parliamentary paper the legal opinion on the principle and detail of these two shells, – given by Mr Grove, now Mr Justice Grove, the inventor of "Grove's Battery," an authority on questions of Patent law unsurpassed by any member of the Bar or the Bench – and by Mr T. Aston, also eminent as a Patent lawyer. As between the two inventions, their opinion is clear that the distinctive features which gave their value to the one, were adopted in the other in 1856 and 1864; and that if Mr Hope had taken out a patent for his shell, the patent granted for the other would have been bad. Their opinion is positive and unhesitating. And if that were not enough, there is an independent opinion to precisely the same effect from two other eminent lawyers – Mr J. H. Lloyd, and Mr Young, then Lord Advocate of Scotland.
What was the answer of the Ordnance Department to this case? Will it be believed that the only answer of any kind which they offer is a letter from the person implicated, denying the charge, and in the teeth of the Secretary of State's remarks in the matter of Mr Daw, actually asserting that "throughout his professional career" he had "taken special care to give no ground for the accusation that he had pirated other men's ideas"?
