I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly about encoding, and barely incidentally about typography. And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.

The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities.

A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.

> And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.

As I responded to you elsewhere, the idea that capitals are hard on the eyes is just a myth. All caps with no spaces is bad, but that's because of the missing spaces.