Show MANY YEARS OF LABOR LOST odd of a man who once wrote a book I 1 have been told salt a man 0 experiences that it is not unusual for men to spend much thought and toll over inventions of one sort and another only to fand when they took these things to washington to be pat anted that the same ideas had long before been worked out by somebody else and that patents had already been issued on them I 1 had that ex peri ence once with a book I 1 spent fourteen years once writ ing a book and I 1 had it all but corn plated and then one day stopping at a second hand book stall I 1 picked up from among a lot of books offered at five cents each one that bore a title in the very words that I 1 had decided upon for the title of my book and the opening sentence in this book was al most identical with that in my own somebody else had had the same idea that I 1 had worked over so long and had written and published atooli about it fifty years before |