San Francisco County
Biographies
JOHN HENRY
MILLER
John Henry Miller, lawyer, was born at Lynchburg, Virginia, August 26, 1854, son of William A. and Margaret (Henry) Miller. Thomas Miller, his earliest paternal American ancestor, emigrated from the north of Ireland in 1693 and the line of descent is traced through Samuel Miller, Thomas and Ann (Ball) Miller, Samuel Thomas and Frances E. (Fitzpatrick) Miller, the parents of William A. Miller. His great-grandfather, Thomas Miller, was a soldier in the Revolutionary war, serving under General Greene in the Carolinas, and was wounded at the battle of Guilford Court House. On his maternal side, his ancestors were even more illustrious than those on his paternal side. His mother was Margaret Henry, daughter of John Henry, of Charlotte county, and granddaughter of Patrick Henry, the famous Revolutionary orator. Mr. Miller of this review was named for his maternal grandfather, John Henry.
John Henry Miller was graduated with the degree of Master of Arts from Richmond College of Virginia in 1874, at the age of nineteen, and for four years thereafter taught school in Virginia and California. While teaching in San Francisco he studied law evenings and obtained a clerkship in the law office of Pringle and Hayne at a salary of forty dollars per month. In 1879 he was admitted to the bar by the supreme court of California and began his professional career in San Francisco. After a successful general practice for several years he was requested to take a patent case by one of his clients, notwithstanding his lack of experience in that branch of the law. With youthful enthusiasm he carried it to the United States supreme court, where it was reported as Hendy vs. Ironworks (127 U. S. 370). His vigorous and masterly handling of the case, which is generally referred to as one of the leading cases on the subject of aggregation, resulted in his receiving other patent cases and within a few years he was recognized as one of the leading patent lawyers in the country. He was counsel in all of the outstanding patent litigation on the Pacific coast and he has conducted cases in twenty-seven different states. One of his cases was against the Duluth Dock and Dredge Company, which undertook to build a dredging machine on Lake Superior that would infringe the patents of one of his clients. Proceeding to Duluth he inspected the machine, prepared a hundred pages of evidence obtained by interviewing witnesses, appeared twice in court at St. Paul and traveled thirteen hundred miles, all within sixteen days, and obtained an injunction restraining the building of the dredge. In 1888 he was admitted to the bar of the United States supreme court on motion of the late United States Judge W. W. Morrow. Among Mr. Miller’s most important cases are Hoskin vs. Fisher (125 U. S. 217), involving the question of re-issues; Boesch vs. Graff (133 U. S. 150), relating to the importation of patented articles from abroad; Keyes vs. Eureka (158 U. S. 150), involving a question of license; Worden vs. Fig Syrup Company (187 U. S. 516), relating to fraudulent trade-marks; Smith vs. Vulcan Iron Works and Norton vs. Wheaton (165 U. S. 518), which interpreted for the first time the Evarts act creating the circuit court of appeals; Belknap vs. Schild (161 U. S. 10), involving the liability of the government for infringement of patents; Singer vs. Cramer (192 U. S. 265), concerning instruction to juries in patent cases, and Carson vs. American Smelting and Refining Company, known as the twenty million dollar copper case (4 Fed. Rep. [2nd] 463), and Carson vs. Anaconda Copper Mining Company (21 Fed. Rep. [2nd] 651), involving the same patent. His clients included the Bowers Hydraulic Dredge Company, the Standard Oil Company, the American Can Company, the Cable Railways of San Francisco, the Alaska Packers Association, the Risdon Iron Works, the National Cash Register Company, the Brush Electric Company, the Aeolian Company, the Westinghouse Electric Company, the General Electric Company, the California Electrical Works, the Refrigerator Car Companies, the Vacuum Cleaner Company, Babcock & Wilcox Company, Ford Motor Company, American Chain Company and many private individuals. In addition to his specialty of patent cases Mr. Miller has had a large general practice. In the case of Southern Development Company vs. Silva (125 U. S. 247) important principles of mining law were involved. He represented the state of California in its actions against the Central Pacific Railway (162 U. S. 91) to collect delinquent taxes, which established the constitutionality of California’s law of railway taxation, and when the law was upheld by the United States supreme court the state collected a million dollars in taxes. He defended the Otis Elevator Company in a suit brought by the government for violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and represented the plaintiff in the case of the Consolidated Seeded Raisin Company vs. Griffin, in which the same law was involved and its relation to patent monopolies was considered. The honorary degree of LL. D. was conferred upon him by the University of Richmond, Virginia, in 1927. Mr. Miller is a close student of history, particularly that of Greece and Rome, and still reads the Greek and Latin authors. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the San Francisco Bar Association, the American Society of International Law, the Patent Law Association of Washington; the American Geographical Society; the American Museum of Natural History; the Masonic fraternity; the Pacific Union, Bohemian and Commonwealth Clubs of San Francisco; and the Southern Society and Virginia Society of New York.
He was married November 28, 1906, at San Jose, California, to Susie Jones, a daughter of William A. Jones, formerly a banker of Memphis, Tennessee.
Transcribed by: Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
Source: Byington, Lewis Francis, “History of
San Francisco 3 Vols”, S. J. Clarke Publishing Co.,
Chicago, 1931. Vol. 2 Pages 224-229.
© 2007 Jeanne Sturgis Taylor.
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