I apologize for the length of this amusing (yet true) story. If I knew how to link to the original, I would do that.
HOW THE HASKELL BALL AMUSED THE LAWYERS by Horace Hutchinson. Golf Illustrated 1915
One night I was going North by one of the sleeping trains, and, having business late in the afternoon in Holborn, I did not return to the civilized parts of the town but dined at the Inns of Court Hotel. There are little tables, for two, and at mine was dining also a man with whom I got into conversation. He told me he came from Glasgow and was in town on a busi-ness which he dared say I should think a very curious one—a big lawsuit pending about such a small matter as a ball used in the playing of the game of golf. Did I play golf? I said "A little." I also said that in all the history of coincidences this was just about the most singular, for that I too had been engaged as a witness in the very same case. It was the case that the manufacturers of the Haskell ball were bringing against the manufacturers of the Kite ball. The point was to prove the Haskell patent good for their protection in a monopoly of making rubber-cored balls. The Haskell people had asked me to give evidence because I was the first man to play with these balls in England and because I considered them, and pace the law, still consider them, an absolutely new departure in golf ball manufacture. It would be ungrateful not to think that providence designed this meeting at the Inns of Court Hotel, for my new friend was able to tell me what the right fee was for me to charge as an expert witness.
He told me that that was what I was—an expert wit-ness. I did not know it before, although I knew, without his telling me, the ancient divisions of the species "liar," into "liar," "d d liar," and "expert witness." I was prepared to play my part, especially when I heard, with pleased surprise, the large fees paid for witness of this expert and unimpeachable character. So in due course of time I was summoned up to London to attend the trial. I suppose other trials are sometimes as humorous, but I could not have believed it possible that there could be such good entertainment as I found in that Court where I sat with much enjoyment calculating, between the acts, the sum to which my expert witness fee was mount-ing up as I waited.
The judge, Mr. Justice Buckley, if I remember right, was not a golfer; yet the way in which he kept his eye on the ball during the three days or so of that trial was above all praise. And the ball took a deal of keeping of the eye on itself, for there were many balls of different sorts brought into Court, and they were constantly running off the Judge's desk and tumbling and jumping about in the body of the Court where learned gentlemen knocked their wigs together as they bent down to search for them. There was an old lady who said she had made balls which were practically identical with those Haskells all her life—balls for boys to play with. So she was commanded to go away and to come back with all her apparatus and to show in Court how the balls were made. She returned, and it appeared that after some winding of thread about a core the next proceeding was to dip the balls into a molten of some boiling stuff which smelt abominably. She cooked this up in Court, and the whole business was very suggestive of the making of the hell-broth by the witches in "Macbeth," only that perhaps the court of law did not give a striking representation of the "blasted heath." The balls were apt to escape from the old lady when they were half cooked and to go running about the Court where the barristers, retrieving them, got their fingers into the most awful sticky state and their wigs seemed to be the ap-propriate places on which to rub the stickiness off.
Willie Fernie was there, enjoying himself hugely too. He, it seems, had long ago made a ball resembling the Haskell. There too was Commander Stewart, whom I had known in the early eighties at St. Andrews. He was the maker of the "Stewart patent" balls which had a vogue for a time, though they had not the least resemblance to the Haskell balls. They were of some composition, quite solid, and with iron filings in them. Nevertheless Commander Stewart, as it appeared, had made a ball similar to the Haskell, though it could not have been the one known as his patent. All these were testimony to what the lawyers call "previous user."
Then an old gentleman was called who said that he had played at ball as a boy with another old gentleman, whose name he gave, with a ball similar in all its essentials to the Haskell golf ball. The other old gentleman was called then and he was asked whether his memory corroborated this, and it was in essentials the same ball. To which he answered, to the delight of the Court, that it was not the same ball at all. "What then," asked the Counsel, in a profoundly shocked voice, "do you mean to say that you think your old friend is a liar?" "No," he replied quite readily, "I don't think so, I know it." I looked out to see those two old friends going out of Court, to discover whether they were quite as good friends as they had been before, but I could not see them.
I do not remember much about my own testimony. I think what I said was true, but I am nearly sure that it was quite unimportant. The present Lord Moulton, I remember, examined, or cross-examined me, but he did not turn me inside out very badly and I believe I left the Court "without a stain on my character" according to the stereotyped phrase. At all events the conclusion of the whole matter was that we lost our case very handsomely.
The Judge, considering the evidence of the old lady, of Com-mander Stewart, of Willie Fernie and so on, said that he thought there was sufficient witness to "previous user," and no doubt "Messrs. Hutchison Maine and Co."—I think this was the name of the firm opposing them—fought a good fight in the best interest of the golfer, for it would have been a bad job for us if there had been a monopoly in the hands of one firm of the manufacture of the rubber-cored balls. They put the prices up against us fairly high as it was, without that. Had there been a monopoly of manufacture we might now be paying five shillings each perhaps, instead of half a crown, for the balls—a very solemn thought.
They carried this case to the Court of Ap-peal, but that Court only confirmed the finding of the Court below, and thereto added this further com-ment, that whether there were "previous user" or no, they did not think that the invention in itself had sufficient novelty for the patent to be good. So that "put the lid on," to use homely phrase. Surely it is not for me, who went no further in study of the law than to eat, though seldom to digest, those singular dinners at the singular hour of six o'clock at the Inner Temple, to criticize the high findings of the law, but it does seem to my unin-structed wisdom that if ever there were a substantially new invention, making a new departure, it was this of these that we then called Haskells and now call India-rubber-cored balls. Nobody, before Haskell, had ever given them to us as reasonable things with which to play the game of golf. He gave them to us as the best balls hitherto invented. They spoilt the game in a sense, it is true. The ability to hit the ball absolutely exactly has not the same value now as in the days of the solid gutty ball; nor does forceful hitting count for as much. On the other hand the greater resiliency of the ball makes the game more pleasant, especially for weak muscles. But that, the quality of the ball, is another story. The story the Court had to sit in judgment on was whether sub-stantially the ball was a novelty. They found it was not, and we all should be very thankful they found it so; but at the same time it is quite possible that we may think it a queer finding.