Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co. v. Taub

• Decision Date: 14 October 1924
• Citation: 4 F.2d 605
• Parties: WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC & MFG. CO. et al. v. TAUB.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

4 F.2d 605 (1924)

WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC & MFG. CO. et al. v. TAUB.

District Court, S. D. New York.

October 14, 1924.

Charles Neave and Stephen H. Philbin, both of New York City, for plaintiff Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co.

L. F. H. Betts, of New York City, for plaintiff Radio Corporation of America.

Charles J. Holland, of New York City, for defendant.

KNOX, District Judge.

Defendant has put upon the market and sold a superheterodyne radio receiving set, which plaintiffs claim to be an infringement of Fessenden patents, Nos. 1,050,441 and 1,050,728, and of the Armstrong patent, No. 1,113,149. Each of these patents has been adjudicated and sustained. They are now owned or controlled by plaintiffs.

The two Fessenden patents relate to heterodyning; one being for the method, and the other for the apparatus. Concededly defendant's receiving set is not in form the apparatus shown in the Fessenden drawings. Nevertheless infringement of both patents is charged. The Armstrong patent relates to an arrangement of audion circuits on which oscillating current energy is transferred from the output or plate circuit of an audion to its input or grid circuit, to sustain the oscillations in the grid circuit. See Armstrong et al. v. De Forest (C. C. A.) 280 F. 596.

Heterodyning, as applied to radio, is the method by which is brought about the production of signals by beats whose frequency is the difference between that of a received current and that of locally produced oscillations. See Kintner v. Atlantic Communication Co. (D. C.) 241 F. 956.

Defendant's alleged infringing device, when in operation, receives a wave length of say 1,000,000 radio frequencies per second. Before such wave is "detected," it is subjected to the opposition, or, to use the nomenclature of Fessenden, the "interaction," of locally produced audion oscillations of say 950,000 or 1,050,000 frequencies per second. The difference between the number of received frequencies and those locally produced results in a beat frequency of 50,000 cycles. This frequency is then passed through appropriate circuits, whereby it is amplified and detected in such manner that the signals carried by it may be heard through the use of telephone receivers. The means which defendant employs to amplify or regenerate the beat frequencies are claimed to infringe the Armstrong patent.

In the Kintner Case, where an oscillating audion was held to infringe upon the method of generating local oscillations as shown by Fessenden, Judge Mayer said: "The beat system in acoustics was old and well known, but Fessenden was * * * the first to apply this principle to signaling in the radio art. * * * He made, in the best sense, a new contribution to the knowledge of the time; for nowhere and by no one had there been even a suggestion of the applicability of the `beats' principle to radio."

The court regarded the Fessenden invention as being of a high order, and entitled to a broad scope of equivalents. That a similar view was held by the Circuit Court of Appeals is indicated by what was said in International Signal Co. v. Vreeland Apparatus Co., 278 F. 468. The division in the court, which there occurred, was not founded on any difference of opinion as to the merit of the Fessenden patents, and the scope to be accorded them, for as to that the judges were in accord, and even the majority felt that the Vreeland patent, if permitted to stand, would infringe Fessenden. The division arose as to whether, in the presence of the Fessenden patent, the patent to Vreeland, which doubtless improved Fessenden, should be permitted to stand.

So broad and comprehensive is the scope given to the Fessenden patent in the Kintner and Vreeland Cases, that it can no longer be persuasively argued, as is here attempted, that the disclosures of Fessenden can only cover a specific device for utilizing the heterodyne principle in a particular way. While it is true that his apparatus is inoperative for voice reception, and is suitable only for code, and that to accomplish the end sought to be served he attached a diaphragm to a coil, and set up a magnetic field between such coil and another, and that the interaction between the constancy of one coil and the variations induced in the other produced an actual physical motion of one coil towards or away from the other, and thus impressed a resultant upon the diaphragm, there is no doubt that he employed the "beat" principle.

For the reasons just stated, it was undertaken to limit the Fessenden patents in the Vreeland Case. The court refused to do so, and in his dissenting opinion, Judge Manton called attention to Vreeland's admission that there is no distinction between the fields and currents or between superposition or combination of currents and the interaction of fields. Such an admission, made long before the present litigation arose, and in connection with a principle here involved, is helpful in considering the weight to be given to defendant's contention that there is substantial difference between the production of a beat current through the intermingling of two currents of different frequencies, and the "interaction" of magnetic fields of two coils, one of which is operated by a current of frequencies differing from that which operates the other.

According to defendant his superheterodyne receiving set is one in which "the high frequency waves coming from a broadcast station are brought in through the antenna and through the first tube. The second tube produces an independent train of waves of high frequency. The plate current of the first tube and the waves produced by the second tube produce a third wave, which is sent through the so-called filter system and the amplifier system, consisting of three tubes and three transformers, around which has been connected a neutrodon to prevent the natural regeneration which is unavoidably present in most radio circuits employing radio vacuum tubes. The filter system determines the frequency of the waves which pass through the amplifier."

In considering this description of the operation of defendant's device, it is to be recalled that one of the primary objects of Fessenden was "to utilize the interaction of forces produced by a...