Consolidated Roller Mill Co. v. Walker

• Decision Date: 12 September 1890
• Citation: 43 F. 575
• Parties: CONSOLIDATED ROLLER-MILL CO. v. WALKER.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Western District of Pennsylvania

43 F. 575

CONSOLIDATED ROLLER-MILL CO. v. WALKER.

United States Circuit Court, W.D. Pennsylvania.

September 12, 1890

R Mason, for complainant.

Parkinson & Parkinson, for defendant.

Before McKENNAN and ACHESON, JJ.

ACHESON J.

The bill in this case charges the defendant with the infringement of two patents relating to roller-mills,-- one issued to William D. Gray, and the other to Udolpho H. Odell; but at the final hearing the suit was pressed only as respects the former patent, and hence the Odell patent may be dismissed from consideration. The patent to William D. Gray is No 228,525, and was granted June 8, 1880, upon an application filed May 2, 1879. Gray's invention relates to that class of mills in which horizontal grinding-rolls arranged in pairs are employed, and consists, the specification declares 'in the improved arrangement of belts and pulleys for communicating motion to the rolls, and in other minor details. ' The patent contains several claims, but infringement of the first claim only is here charged. That claim is in these words:

'(1) In a roller grinding-mill, the combination of the counter-shaft, provided with pulleys at both ends, and having said ends mounted in vertically and independently adjustable bearings, the rolls, C, E, having pulleys connected by belts with one end of the counter-shaft, and the rolls, D, F independently connected by belts with the other end of the counter-shaft, as shown.'

The answer sets up, among other defenses, want of novelty and want of patentability and non-infringement. After stating in his specification that driving the rolls by gearing occasions great noise, and also a jarring of the parts of the apparatus 'nd trembling of the mill-floor, in turn causing an unevenness in grinding, and a rapid and uneven wear of the rolls, Gray adds:

'To obviate these difficulties, and produce an even, steady motion, I discard the gearing hitherto employed, and substitute therefor a system of belting arranged in a peculiar manner, to give the proper direction and speed to the rolls.'

And he mentions, as incident to this arrangement of belting, the further advantage that, by simply removing the pulley of any shaft and replacing it with another of proper size, any desired difference in the speed of the rolls may be obtained, which he states cannot be accomplished, except by a complicated arrangement of intermediate wheels, where gearing is used. The specification, after referring to the accompanying drawings, explains the arrangement of the belts thus:

'N represents the main driving belt, which passes to and around the pulley, c, of the roll, C, thence downward, and around pulley, b, of the counter-shaft, B, thence upward, and around pulley, e, of the roll, E, and back to the source of power, imparting to the rolls C and E a motion in one direction, and to the counter-shaft a motion in the reverse direction. From the pulleys, b, b, on the rear end of the counter-shaft, B, belts, P, and R, pass upward and around pulleys, d and f, of the rolls, D and F, as shown in Fig. 2, imparting to said rolls a motion the reverse of that of the rolls, C, E. In this way the two rolls of each set are caused to revolve towards each other while being all driven from a common source primarily.'

To fully understand the particular claim of the patent involved in this controversy, one other paragraph of the specification must be quoted:

'In order to adapt the counter-shaft, B, to perform the double purpose of reversing the motion of certain of the rolls, and of acting as a belt-tightener, it is mounted, at opposite sides of the frame or body, A, in boxes swiveled or hung in yokes, L, sliding vertically in guides or boxes, K, and adjusted up and down therein by screw rods or stems, S; the swivel-boxes permitting a slightly greater movement of the shaft, B, at one end than at the other, without interfering with its free rotation, and thereby permitting the tightening of the belt or belts at one side of the machine without disturbing those at the other.'

Gray's specification, as our quotations therefrom indicate, suggests the idea that he was the first to apply belt-drives to roller grinding-mills. But the fact is otherwise, as the proofs abundantly show. Nor was he the first to discard from such mills cog-gearing and friction gears altogether, and substitute therefor belt-driving. Confining our attention here to Mechwart's Austrian patent, granted August 3, 1875, we find therein distinctly set forth the disadvantages resulting from the use of spur-gearing in roller grinding-mills, viz.: the disagreeable rattling, the rapid wearing away of the gears, and the unequal movement and unequal wearing away of the rollers, and also the inefficiency of driving by means of frictional contact between the rolls, which latter, it is set forth, is only practical when the chop passes the rollers in very thin layers, and not in coarse particles, and is not applicable when an unequal peripheral speed of the rolls is required. All these disadvantages, it is declared, are voided by Mechwart's invention, which consists in driving both co-operating rolls by means of belts, whereby, also, can be obtained an equal and also an unequal peripheral speed, while the diameter of the rolls, as well as the diameter of the belt pulleys, can be varied relatively to each other for different objects. Mechwart's drawings show as examples six different arrangements of belting, which he states are intended to illustrate 'only some of the different arrangements of the belt-drive for roller-mills, without exhausting the possible variations in its application. ' Fig. 3, sheet A, shows a machine having two pairs of grinding-rolls, the pairs being vertical, and arranged side by side. A shaft, mounted in the machine frame in fixed bearings, carries two pulleys, one at each side of the machine. A belt from one of these pulleys passes around a tightening pulley at the upper right-hand corner of the machine, thence around a pulley on the upper left-hand roll-shaft, thence around a pulley on the lower roll-shaft, and thence back to the driving-pulley, and by this belt one roll of each pair is driven. From the other pulley, on the other side of the machine, a belt is arranged in a similar manner, so as to drive the other two rolls of the pair. Without further description of the Mechwart system, it is enough to say that his patent disclosed roller grinding-mills, single and double, with both vertical and horizontal pairs of rolls arranged side by side, driven by means of belts exclusively; his machine being equipped with adjusting or tightening pulleys, and having a shaft journaled directly into the machine frame, and receiving its motion from the prime mover of the mill, either directly or by belt.

But, turning now to machinery employed in the arts generally, it is certain that the use of belt-gearing interchangeable with or as a substitute for cog-gearing was very old and common before Gray's alleged invention. It was, too, an old and familiar expedient to keep the belt adjusted to a proper degree of tightness by means of tightening pulleys, the shaft of which in revolving sometimes did other work about the machine; and shafts had been made movable in such manner as to tighten belts passing over pulleys on other shafts. It was also old, and very common in machine-shops and factories of various kinds, to provide an individual machine with a counter-shaft, mounted directly in the machine-frame, the counter-shaft being driven by a belt from the line-shaft and the machine by a belt from the counter-shaft. Furthermore, it was no new thing to provide the journal boxes or hangers in which counter-shafts are mounted with means for independently adjusting the ends of the shaft.

In view of these things, then, we are unable to discover any unpatentable subject-matter in the first claim of Gray's patent. The case, it seems to us, falls directly within the established principle that the application of an old process machine, or device to a like or analogous purpose, with no change in the mode of application, and no result substantially different in its nature, will not sustain a patent, even if the new form of result has not before been contemplated. ...