Safety Car Heating & Lighting Co. v. General Elec. Co.

Decision Date13 May 1946
Docket NumberNo. 224.,224.
Citation155 F.2d 937
PartiesSAFETY CAR HEATING & LIGHTING CO., Inc., v. GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. et al.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit

John C. Blair, of New York City (Robert S. Blair, Edward G. Curtis, and Harold L. Stults, all of New York City, of counsel), for appellant.

Charles H. Walker, of New York City, for appellees.

Before L. HAND, SWAN and PHILLIPS, Circuit Judges.

L. HAND, Circuit Judge.

The plaintiff appeals from a judgment, dismissing its complaint which alleged that the defendant infringed two patents: No. 1,708,625 and No. 1,708,626, both issued to Alan Varley Livingston on April 9, 1929. The claims in suit upon the first patent are sixteen, twenty-one and twenty-three; and on the second, nine, eleven, twelve, eighteen and nineteen. The judge held all these invalid upon the prior art, and, as we agree, we shall not consider the question of infringement. Both patents are for improvements in household refrigerators, which operate upon the principle that the heat removed from the objects to be chilled, will be taken up by the evaporation of a liquid refrigerant, which, after being again reduced to liquid by mechanical compression and cooling, is returned to be once more evaporated. The main features of such refrigerators were known long before Livingston filed his applications on March 7, 1925; but the refrigerant after compression used to be cooled by the passage of water around the coils which contained it. That was awkward and expensive, and about 1920 the industry began to substitute fans, which, either then or shortly thereafter, it followed with the natural convection of air currents over the "compressor coils." These two cooling methods have continued in use to the present time, and are now being used in about equal proportions. The compressor and the fan are driven by an electric current passing from the ordinary service connections; and, for the purposes of this case, we shall assume that the current is alternating.

Livingston disclosed a rotary fan driven by one motor, outside the compression chamber, and a compressor in that chamber, driven by another motor. The invention upon which the patents rely is the electrical coupling of these motors. For this Livingston resorted to a device, with which the electrical art had been familiar for over thirty years, and which went by the name of the "teaser" system. The ordinary "single-phase" motor: i.e., one which has only one winding upon the armature, is slow to start; and for that reason it has long been the custom to add a second, or "starting," winding, used as its name implies, only for that purpose, after which it is automatically cut out. A "polyphase motor" may be described most simply as one in which the "starting" winding is never cut out, and the motor is continuously driven by two currents "out of phase." "Out of phase" means that the "peaks" and "troughs" of the alternating current in the "starting" winding do not coincide with those of the primary winding, producing a more uniform torque. The general practice is to have a difference in "phase" of ninety per cent. This apparently has certain advantages; otherwise the defendant would not have made the fan motor "polyphase"; but the record is silent as to what these are. (Possibly, the fan motor may be smaller than if it were "single-phase.") The "teaser" system is one in which the "starting" winding of the primary, or "pilot," motor, is part of a circuit of which the second winding of a "polyphase" motor is also a part. After the primary motor has started and its "starting" winding has been cut out, that winding becomes a part of a complete but independent circuit, in which the rotation of the armature of the primary motor generates a current by induction. Since, as we have just said, the "starting" winding is in series with one of the windings of the secondary motor and the induced current is "out of phase" with the service current in the other winding, the secondary motor operates as a "polyphase" motor. What Livingston did, was to make his fan motor primary, and by putting its "starting" winding in series with the second winding of the compressor motor, to make that the "polyphase" motor of a "teaser" system. The question is whether this was an invention. For argument we accept the plaintiff's interpretation of the claims in suit as covering a refrigerator in which, contrary to the disclosure, the compressor motor is "single phase," and the fan motor, "polyphase."

It was not necessary that the fan motor and the compressor motor should be coupled at all; each might run upon a separate motor: "single phase" or "polyphase." That of course involves the possibility that one may stop while the other keeps on; and it was Livingston's principal object to avoid this by making sure that the compressor motor could not operate, if the fan motor stopped. Apparently he supposed that if this happened, explosive pressures would be set up in the "compressor coils." The testimony upon the issue is in dispute and the judge made no finding; but, whatever is the truth, in the defendant's "Hotpoint" refrigerator — the infringing device —, the compressor motor is "single phase" and will operate regardless of the fan. If therefore the claims are to include such a system, they cannot stand in any degree upon this putative safeguard. Moreover, any such consideration aside, if coupling the motors was desired there were other ways of doing it. For example, Patent No. 1,819,523, issued to Terry, on August 18, 1931, upon an application...

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