Nyyssonen v. Bendix Corporation

Decision Date03 March 1965
Docket NumberNo. 6189.,6189.
PartiesEinard NYYSSONEN, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. BENDIX CORPORATION, Defendant, Appellee.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Robert H. Rines, Boston, Mass., with whom David Rines and Rines & Rines, Boston, Mass., were on brief, for appellant.

Morris Relson, New York City, with whom Floyd H. Crews and Robert R. Keegan, New York City, were on brief, for appellee.

Before WOODBURY, Chief Judge, and HARTIGAN and ALDRICH, Circuit Judges.

WOODBURY, Senior Circuit Judge (by designation).

We are concerned on this appeal with two patents issued to the plaintiff-appellant on the same day, April 23, 1957. One, No. 2,790,098, is for a Polyphase Synchronous Machine; the other, No. 2,790,131, is for a Polyphase Transformer System.1 In issue are claims 1 and 10 of the 098 patent and claim 1 of the 131 patent. The court below found all three claims both invalid and not infringed, and entered a judgment dismissing the plaintiff's complaint from which he has taken this appeal.2

The patents are long. One consists of 11 pages of drawings (26 figures) and almost 50 columns of text, and the other 9 pages of drawings (21 figures) and almost 44 columns of text. Both are highly technical in the fields of advanced mathematics and electrical engineering in which no member of this court can profess any competence. We can say with the court below that this case presents great difficulties to judges like ourselves who have only the most elementary training in science and mathematics and little experience with modern technological developments.

The court below in recognition of its avowed limitations rested its decision basically on its evaluation of the relative credibility of opposing expert witnesses. In view of the extreme technicality of the subject matter and the serious risk of making scientific and technological errors, the court invited each party to submit draft findings of fact. Then, concluding on the basis of observation at the trial and rereading the transcript that the defendant's expert was the clearer, more credible and more expert, it adopted the defendant's draft. It did not do so as a matter of rote, however. It said:

"Defendant\'s draft, as appears from supporting citations, rests, in the places where the issues are sharpest, upon Dr. Frazier\'s testimony and upon admissions by plaintiff\'s counsel and plaintiff\'s own expert. My own findings of fact are in most respects verbatim copies of this draft, but these findings do reflect my independent and meticulous check of the record itself."

The plaintiff-appellant complains of the District Court's technique of decision asserting that it deprives him of due process of law. We do not agree.

Counsel are certainly entitled to file proposed findings of fact on their own initiative and we see nothing whatever in any way irregular for a court to ask them to do so, particularly in a highly technical and complicated case like the present. Nor is there any reason why counsel should not cast their requests in a form which if approved could be adopted by the court as its findings. Hazeltine Research, Inc., v. Admiral Corp., 183 F.2d 953 (C.A. 7, 1950), cert. denied, 340 U.S. 896, 71 S.Ct. 239, 95 L.Ed. 650. Ordinarily we think it the better practice for the trial court to prepare its own findings with such help as it may derive from counsels' requests. But this is no ordinary case. In a case of this difficulty we think the court below was fully justified in avoiding the risk of slipping inadvertently into serious scientific error by relying heavily upon counsel for technical findings based upon highly technical evidence. The question is whether the findings are supported by the evidence. United States v. Crescent Amusement Co., 323 U.S. 173, 184-185, 65 S.Ct. 254, 89 L.Ed. 160 (1944).

We turn now to the patents themselves.

A synchronous machine such as is covered in the 098 patent is defined by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in its Standard Definitions as "* * * one in which the average speed of normal operation is exactly proportional to the frequency of the system to which it is connected." These machines consist, as we understand it, either of a synchronous generator, defined on the same authority as "* * * a synchronous alternating current machine which transforms mechanical power into electrical power" or a synchronous motor defined as "* * * a synchronous machine which transforms electric power from an alternating current system into mechanical power." The purpose of these machines operating together in a synchronous system is to transmit synchronized rotary motion over a distance by means of electricity. An electric clock is an example.

Almost all electric power produced in this country is 60-cycle alternating current. This means that the current reverses in direction from positive to negative and from negative back to positive again 120 times per second. Each cycle includes current in one direction for 1/120 of a second and current in the opposite direction for the next 1/120 of a second. The current is maintained at this frequency of alternation by running the synchronous generator which produces the current at constant speed, the frequency of the current being in direct proportion to the speed of rotation of the rotor of the generator. An electric clock uses a synchronous motor and keeps accurate time for two reasons. The first is that the generator is maintained at constant speed to produce a constant 60-cycle frequency. The second is that the synchronous motor in the clock runs at a speed directly proportional to the frequency of the current supplied to it. The hands move 1/60 of a second for each full cycle of current.

The art of synchronous machines is not new. They have been known and used at least since about the turn of the century as appears from the reference to such machines in Patent No. 785,995 issued to Alexanderson on March 28, 1905. Nyyssonen's claimed contribution to the art is smaller size and greater accuracy, which he says he attained by novel means. The defendant-appellee disputes Nyyssonen's claimed contributions, denies the novelty of his means and asserts that the accused devices it manufactures do not infringe even if Nyyssonen's patents are valid. The court below resolved these issues against the plaintiff. It held all claims in issue invalid in view of the prior art, claim 1 of the 131 patent also invalid for double patenting, and none of the claims infringed.

The testimony of the defendant's expert witness, whom the court below found clear, credible and skilled and upon whom it relied, provides ample evidentiary support for this finding. But plaintiff's counsel contends that no question of this witness's credibility is involved because his testimony is demonstrably mistaken, wherefore the findings based thereon are "clearly erroneous."

Resolution of this contention takes us into the construction and operation of generators and motors in general and then leads on into technical details many of which we find beyond our comprehension, for the plaintiff's patents are not only voluminous but are couched in a technical vocabulary with which we are wholly unfamiliar. We frankly admit that we cannot read them intelligently. We quote claim 10 of the 098 patent in the margin to illustrate our difficulty.3 Moreover, we have great difficulty in understanding, even in a general way, the technical testimony of the experts and the discussion of that testimony by counsel orally and in their briefs. However, we must do the best we can.

Generators and motors are structurally very similar. Both operate by systems of electro-magnets and both have two main components, a stator, which is a stationary part and a rotor, which is a rotating part. All such machines have a field member and an armature, either one of which may be the rotor while the other is then the stator. For present purposes the rotor will be deemed the field member.

All rotating electric machines are provided with a pre-determined number of electro-magnetic poles arranged alternately north and south, or positive and negative, around the periphery of the rotor. The number of pole pairs determines the speed of the machine, be it a generator or a motor. We see no need to elaborate further on this feature of electric generators and motors. The stators of these machines, regarded as the armatures, consist of electro-magnets equiangularly spaced around the periphery facing the magnets of the rotor. These magnets are separated by apertures called slots in which are disposed electric conductors in the form of wires. The movement of the rotor field winding electro-magnetically induces voltages in these conductors and these voltages are the output electricity of the generator.

The total slots in the stator of the machine covered by the 098 patent are divided into "collections" or "sets" and the number of slots per "collection" differs from the number of rotor poles per "collection" by one. No specific number of slots is specified in the patent. Nyyssonen's primary example is 9 slots and 8 poles but his patent is general enough to cover any number. While "collections" or "sets," sometimes called "repeatable groups," of slots are identical,4 the number of conductors or wires in each slot of each group is not, but varies from one slot to the next. The court below found, and as we understand the case, the gist of Nyyssonen's patents lies in the numbers of conductors in each slot and in their inter-connection called the conductor distribution.

Nyyssonen's conductor distribution is called a "sine distribution" which means that the number of conductors in any one slot for one phase winding is in proportion to the trigonometric sine function of an angle associated with the particular slot called in the patent the "phase-sequence angle."5 The basic bone of contention on the issue of validity is whether the sine distribution was...

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