General Electric Co. v. Wabash Appliance Corporation, 450.
| Citation | 91 F.2d 904 |
| Decision Date | 16 August 1937 |
| Docket Number | No. 450.,450. |
| Parties | GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. v. WABASH APPLIANCE CORPORATION et al. |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit) |
Darby & Darby, of New York City (Samuel E. Darby, Jr., and Paul Kolisch, both of New York City, of counsel), for appellants.
Howson & Howson, of New York City (Hubert Howson, Merrell E. Clark, and Alexander C. Neave, all of New York City, and John H. Anderson, of Cleveland, Ohio, of counsel), for appellee.
Before MANTON, SWAN, and AUGUSTUS N. HAND, Circuit Judges.
This is a patent infringement suit based on the Pacz patent, No. 1,410,499, owned by General Electric Company. The patent issued March 21, 1922, on an application filed February 20, 1917. It relates to tungsten filaments for incandescent lamps, and contains both process and product claims; but only product claims are involved in the present litigation. The defendants are charged with selling lamps having filament (purchased by them for assemblage into lamps) which infringes claims 25, 26, and 27 of the patent. The two individual defendants are the sole officers and stockholders of the corporate defendant.
It will suffice to quote one of the three claims in suit. Claim 25 reads as follows:
Claim 26 differs only in specifying that the filament shall be "drawn," and claim 27 in requiring the tungsten to contain "less than three-fourths of one per cent. of non-metallic material."
Concededly there was no novelty, when Pacz filed his application, in a filament, either pressed or drawn, composed substantially of tungsten. His advance, if any, over the prior art consisted in forming the grains or crystals "of such size and contour as to prevent substantial sagging and offsetting" during the normal life of a lamp in use. The filament of an electric incandescent lamp is a fine thread of conducting material which gives light by becoming incandescent. It is not stiff enough to support itself and must be strung between supports within the bulb. The heat to which the filament is subjected during operation of the lamp tends to deform it and cause it to sag between its supports. The specifications state that the object of the invention is "to produce tungsten metal which will retain to a much higher degree than heretofore its original properties after being subjected to high temperatures"; that in the case of incandescent lamp filaments the high temperatures at which they are run have caused them to elongate and sag between their supports, especially coiled filaments in gas-filled lamps, and this tends to reduce the efficiency of the lamp; that "by means of my invention the sagging is substantially eliminated and `offsetting' of the filament is substantially prevented, during a normal or commercially useful life of the lamp." Parenthetically we depart from the specifications to explain that "offsetting" refers to a lateral shifting of a portion of the filament from an adjacent portion — like a slip at a geological fault line. The result is to reduce the cross-sectional area of the filament between the offset portions, causing it more readily to burn out or break. Offsetting takes place along the boundary lines between adjacent crystals during the heating of the filament in use. If the boundaries are perpendicular to the axis of the filament and extend across its width, offsetting is more serious than if the crystals are small or of irregular contour. We now return to the specifications. They continue with the statement that the inventor brings into intimate association with tungsten a material which will have the desired influence upon the grain growth of the metal, and will be removed by volatilization during the sintering of the metal. It is explained that the presence of this material intimately associated with the tungsten particles "has a marked effect on the shape and size of the tungsten grains"; that the probable reason why filaments made according to the invention do not sag is that "the structure is comparatively coarse grained"; and that the coarse grained filament produced by means of the invention "does not `offset' so as to cut short the life of the lamp appreciably." The remainder of the specifications deal with the patentee's process, which need not be described for present purposes further than to say that the preferred material which is brought into intimate association with the tungsten is an alkaline silicate.
The problems of sagging and offsetting were recognized long before Pacz entered the field, and efforts had been made to overcome them by adding beneficial ingredients to pure tungsten. The Coolidge patent, No. 1,082,933, issued December 30, 1913, to the plaintiff as assignee, and to which the patent in suit refers, taught how to make a tungsten filament which was as satisfactory in respect to offsetting as is the product of the Pacz patent. Although conceding that the Coolidge filament was nonoffsetting, the plaintiff contends that it was fine-grained and therefore necessarily a sagging filament. The patents to Schaller, issued in 1918 on applications filed in 1914, taught the production of a filament consisting of a single crystal throughout its whole length. This prevented both sagging and offsetting, but the method was too costly for general acceptance by the trade and found practical use only in small types of lamps, such as flash-light and Christmas tree lamps. In 1915 Kruger obtained a process patent for the production of tungsten filaments with a boron compound, which the defendant contends produced a non-sagging and non-offsetting filament because Pacz had so asserted in the patent in suit — a statement disclaimed by the plaintiff in 1933. Pacz himself, in a prior patent, No. 1,299,017, issued April 1, 1919, to the plaintiff as assignee, taught a process, very...
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