He lived on the $125 a month while he was testing and proving the invention. In July, 1880, when four years of his life had been thus wasted, the allowance was changed, without notice or his consent, to $75 a month. The next month he was refused even that sum "unless I signed a receipt in full of all demands, and I walked out without it."
His pipe line has become a part of the net-work of pipe lines of which the oil combination boasts. His refinery of 1869, one of the largest built in western Pennsylvania up to that time, passed into its hands. Three times in succession, after it refuses to build for him as it agreed, he arranges to put his idea of continuous distillation into use, and in each case the refinery in which he sets up his pipes and stills is bought up by it and destroyed. He is kept dangling for years by its policy of delay. Then his independent efforts are broken up; capitalists are made afraid of him. He can get no means for building new works. "Ever since I went into their hands," he said in court, "I have been just as I am now. I could not make oil; could not build a refinery; could not get anybody help me to do it; and here I have stood these last twelve years, and I want to be out. That is just where they want to keep me, so I cannot make any oil. It is the whole profit of the whole of it. They hold me to my contract, and they break theirs."
When twelve years had gone by, and he found that they would neither build for him as agreed nor let any one else build for him, Van Syckel turned to the law and sued them for damages. On the trial all the facts as we have stated were admitted--the abandonment of the enterprise in consequence of the threats that he would not be allowed to ship and market his oil; the interviews in New York; the contract; the sale; Van Syckel's later efforts to make oil in other refineries; his success in producing better and cheaper oil; its popularity; the purchase and destruction of the works using the new method. Not a word of evidence was adduced in disproof. The judge and the jury found all these questions in Van Syckel's favor.
The defence was twofold. It was admitted that the two representatives Van Syckel had dealt with had made the contract as he described it. The members of the combination did not deny that. But, they argued, it was not legally binding. "We simply concede," said these great men to the Court, "that they made a contract, but leaving it to the corporation itself to decide upon it.... There cannot be the slightest claim that the company was bound by a contract of that character." On this point they were defeated in the trial. Their second defence was that there were no damages. "The trouble is," they said, "that there are no damages sustained, no damages whatever sustained." They took the ground that his possessing a creative mind was the cause of Van Syckel's ruin, not their betrayal of him. "Mr. Van Syckel," they argued to the Court, sympathetically, "is an instance of what it means to get out a patent, and deal in patents--in nine cases out of ten. He was an inventive man. He has got out a good many patents. No question they were meritorious patents. And what is the result? Poverty, a broken heart, an enfeebled intellect, and a struggle now for the means of subsistence by this lawsuit. So that, if your honor please, there is nothing here from which we can determine what the original value of this patent was." The jury and the judge decided against them, and held there was a contract, legal and binding. That brought them face to face with the question of damages, and here the ruling of the judge saved them, as the decision of another judge saved other members of the combination in the criminal case in the same city, about the same time.[356] The judge ordered the jury to find the damages at six cents, and the jury--in the evolution of freedom juries appear to have become merely clerks of the Court--did so. "This direction of a verdict," said the Court to Van Syckel, "decides every other question of the case in your favor."