Cold Metal Products Co. v. Newport Steel Corp.
| Decision Date | 08 March 1954 |
| Docket Number | No. 516.,516. |
| Citation | 119 F. Supp. 880 |
| Parties | COLD METAL PRODUCTS CO. v. NEWPORT STEEL CORP. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Kentucky |
William H. Webb, Morton Burden, Jr., Pittsburg, Pa., J. Mack Swigert, Cincinnati, Ohio (Webb, Mackey & Burden, Pittsburg, Pa., Taft, Stettinius & Hollister, Cincinnati, Ohio, of counsel), for plaintiff.
Cyrus G. Minkler, John C. Sterritt, Arthur W. Dickey, Detroit, Mich., Frank V. Benton, Frank V. Benton, Jr., Benton, Benton & Luedeke, Newport, Ky. (Harness, Dickey & Pierce, Robert L. Boynton, Detroit, Mich., of counsel), for defendant.
This is an action brought by the plaintiff, The Cold Metal Products Company, an Ohio corporation, against the Newport Steel Corporation, a Delaware corporation, having a mill and an established place of business in Campbell County, Kentucky, in this district, where the infringing acts complained of are alleged to have been committed.
The plaintiff became the owner by assignment of all three of the patents in suit in 1942 and title to the patents has been held by the plaintiff throughout the entire period of the alleged infringement. The patents in suit are:
Keeney and Ferm 1,918.968 dated July 18, 1933
Stecked 1,977.214 dated October 16, 1934
Montgomery 2,087.065 dated July 12, 1937
The plaintiff asks for both preliminary and final injunctions against alleged further infringement of Letters Patent Nos. 1,977,214 and 2,087,065, and for an accounting of profits and damages arising out of the defendant's alleged infringement upon each of the Letters Patent Nos. 1,977,214, 1,918,968 and 2,087,065.
The defendant by its answer pleads a number of defenses but relies primarily upon the usual defenses in actions of this character; that is, noninfringement and the invalidity of the patents.
The rolling mill of the defendant is a 2-stand reversing mill for the hot rolling of steel strip or sheets, comprising a roughing mill, a finishing stand, roll tables for supporting the material, coilers and coiler furnace on opposite sides of the finishing stand for coiling the material as it is passed back and forth between the reducing rolls of the finishing stand, and a final coiler for receiving the completed material. The mill was installed in the early part of 1949 and has been in operation since that time. The mill in its regular operation rolls large tonnages, in excess of twenty thousand tons of steel per month.
The instant case is concerned only with the specialized branch of general steel rolling art in which relatively thin sheets or strip-like material is hot rolled. These strips can be reduced to various degrees of thickness. Hot rolled sheets and strip are ordinarily from 3/16 of an inch to .050" in thickness and may vary in width up to 80" or more. They also vary in length, depending, of course, upon the thickness and width desired, but may run from a few feet to several hundred feet long. The mill in question only rolls flat steel in strip form. The rolling of this hot strip is a specialized art which is divided from the rest of the rolling art. Its products are used for automobile body frames, metal rims for automobiles, guard rails, heavy stampings, tubings, automobile oil pans, steel decking, and as the starting material for the manufacture of cold rolled tin plate.
The history of the development of sheet-like steel is interesting and important. This background is not necessary, however, to the determination of the issues. It should be pointed out that modern industry and manufacturing produced a demand for hot roll strip or sheet-like material with a high ratio of width to thickness. This demand remained unsatisfied until 1927. The demand was met in a large measure by the invention and erection of what is referred to in the record as the 4-high anti-friction bearing continuous mill.
This continuous mill, it is admitted by the plaintiff, produced the desired type of material. It was necessarily large, by being continuous, required a large area on which to be constructed and was very expensive to construct and operate. These two factors, expense and space, made it unavailable to the smaller steel producers. The demand for a less expensive and smaller mill resulted in the construction of the coiler arrangement on either side of the finishing mill for the coiling and passing back and forth, by use of the coilers, the hot roll strip through the finishing mill. One of the decided advantages of the reversing mill is the speed with which the strip can be rolled. Prior to 1927, when the mechanical process came into operation, the only way in which wide sheets could be produced was a manual operation of such hot, arduous work that repeated heating of the metal in the process was necessary. Only limited lengths of from 8 to 10 feet could be rolled and, of course, the weight of a wide sheet made it impossible of production by manual labor. Under the old system the weight of the sheet was only about 70 to 90 pounds. The weight of a single strip rolled in the defendant's mill is from 9,000 to 18,000 pounds. The maximum speed under the old system was about 250 feet per minute. This should be contrasted with the speed of the defendant's mill of from 600 to 1,000 feet per minute.
The single stand reversing mill having coilers and coiling furnaces on opposite sides of the mill stand first came into use in 1927. This is only a portion of a rolling mill but it is that portion with which we are concerned in this action. The other features of the process of rolling steel are, of course, necessary and of prime importance but we are not concerned with the mechanism of the steel mill outside of the coilers. Our problem concerns only the treatment of the hot rolled strip after it reaches the entry coiler and before it is passed on to the roll table beyond the exit coiler to the runout table or roll table.
The defendant's mill charged with the infringement, is portrayed in Exhibits A and B filed with the stipulation as to the structure and operation of defendant's hot strip mill. At the trial of the case these exhibits were again produced in the record by larger drawings and diagrams which are identified as Plaintiff's Exhibits Nos. P-6 and P-7. The diagrams are herewith set forth as a part of this opinion.
The functions of the defendant's mill, as revealed from the record and with reference to the diagrams and exhibits, in producing the hot roll strip from the ingot is described as follows. The steel is produced from the blast furnace in the form of an ingot in which form it is ready for finishing by rolling. The ingot is placed in a soaking pit where it is heated to a temperature of 2350 degrees Fahrenheit. The soaking pits are not shown in the diagrams. After being withdrawn from the soaking pit the ingot is placed on the roll tables and carried to the edger. It is passed through the edger, backward and forward three times, and then carried by another roll table to the roughing mill. Before it enters the roughing mill it is descaled by a water pressure system. It passes through the roughing mill three to five times and returns to the edger for two more edging passes. From the edger it is returned to the roughing mill for further descaling and another three to five passes through the roughing mill. It is then returned to the edger for two more passes and again returned to the roughing mill for from three to five passes. After the last pass through the roughing mill the strip then travels over four roll tables to the shear where from fifteen to twenty feet are cut from the front end. The strip is then passed into the roller hearth furnace. As the trailing end comes to the cropping shear approximately three feet are cropped from the trailing end. The strip stops momentarily for each of these shearing or cropping operations.
The strip then enters the roller hearth furnace for three and a half to five minutes. Here the heat that has been lost since the metal came from the soaking pit is restored. The strip is then brought through an eleven roll scale breaker and high pressure descaling water, through the entry coiler furnace and through the reducing rolls in the 4-high finishing mill.
After the strip has passed through the reducing roll of the 4-high stand it proceeds through the side guides onto a roll table, is directed into the exit coiler furnace by the raising of what is designated as the "finger" (a part of the roll table) and the raising of the bending roll (a part of the roll table) and into the coiler reel. Through the mechanism of this coiler reel the strip is rolled until the entire strip has been coiled within the coiler furnace except the trailing end of strip which has cleared or gone through the reducing rolls and which has been stopped on the roll tables before entering the coiler furnace. When the trailing end of the strip has reached a point on the roll table between the 4-high finishing stand and the exit coiler furnace, the coil, insofar as that particular movement, is completed. The reel is then reversed and the trailing end is pushed back into the reducing rolls and is guided by the side guides over the roll table, lifted by the finger and bending roll onto the reel of the entry coiler where the strip is coiled in the same manner as in the exit coiler until the trailing end (formerly the front) reaches a point on the roll table between the entry coiler and the finishing stand. This process is followed until the strip has made five complete passes through the reducing rolls of the finishing stand. The strip is then carried by the roll tables through the exit coiler down the table line runout tables to a finishing coiler where the finished strip is coiled on a mandrel type coiler with wrapping rolls around this coiler, where it is subsequently weighed and stored.
The plaintiff alleges infringement of numerous claims. Insofar as the Keeney and Ferm patent...
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McLOUTH STEEL CORP. v. Cold Metal Products Co., Civ. A. No. 9070.
... ... Claims 2, 5, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22 and 23 of the Keeney & Ferm '968 patent; claims 4, 5, 12, 18 and 22 of the Steckel '214 patent; and all five claims of the Montgomery '065 patent were held invalid in Cold Metal Products Co. v. Newport Steel Corp., 6 Cir., 1955, 226 F.2d 19, affirming D.C., 119 F.Supp. 880 ... The Court of Appeals stated at page 22 of 226 F.2d: ... "In view of the then state of the art, we think that the particular mechanical arrangments disclosed by the patents in suit represented nothing more ... ...
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Cornick v. Stry-Lenkoff Company
...place in the constitutional scheme of advancing scientific knowledge.'" See also Judge Swinford's opinion in Cold Metal Products Co. v. Newport Steel Corp., D.C., 119 F.Supp. 880, and In re Bigelow, 194 F.2d 550, 39 C.C.P.A., Patents, III. There is no evidence in this case upon which it can......