The Standard Electrical Dictionary

1. Make and Break Current

   A current which is continually broken or interrupted and started again. It is applied only where the "makes" and "breaks" succeed each other with great rapidity, as in the action of an induction coil or pole changer, etc. It has had considerable importance in litigation affecting the Bell telephone patents, the courts holding that the original Bell patent (No. 174,465, of 1876,) covered the undulating current, for the transmission of speech. Many efforts have been made by litigants to prove that specific telephones have transmitted articulate speech by the make and break current, but without success. If this could have been proved the assumption is that the courts would have sustained the use of such device as not infringing upon the claims of the Bell patent.