CONDENSER CORPORATION, ETC. v. Micamold Radio Corp., 27.
| Decision Date | 30 November 1944 |
| Docket Number | No. 27.,27. |
| Citation | 145 F.2d 878 |
| Parties | CONDENSER CORPORATION OF AMERICA v. MICAMOLD RADIO CORPORATION. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
Kenneth S. Neal and Ward, Crosby & Neal, all of New York City, for appellant.
W. D. Keith and F. A. Bower, both of New York City, for appellee.
Before L. HAND, SWAN, and CLARK, Circuit Judges.
The defendant appeals from a judgment against it, holding valid and infringed claims 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of patent No. 1,940,847, issued on December 26, 1933 to Harold I. Danziger. The claims may, for convenience, be divided into two groups: One, Two and Three, of which Claim One alone need be considered; and Claims Nine, Ten, Eleven and Twelve, of which Claim Eleven will serve for all. Each is quoted in the margin.* The patented machine was designed to produce electric condensers automatically. A condenser is made up of two electrically conducting surfaces in a circuit, electrically separated from each other, so that the circuit is completed only through the intervening space. In order to reduce this space the two surfaces are ordinarily separated by some dielectric substance, such as a sheet of paper. Obviously, it is essential that by no chance shall there be any metallic connection between the two surfaces, else the current would pass from one to the other, and there would be no condenser. Long before Danziger filed his application in 1925 it had been the practice of the art to make condensers upon a spool, called at times an "arbor" or a "mandrel." Two strips of tin-foil, rolled upon separate spools, were each set between two spools of paper. All six strips were brought together by a pair of rollers, and the ends were fastened to the "arbor," which pulled them off their supply spools under tension. After enough had been unrolled for the proposed condenser, the combined strips were cut by a knife, and the roll so formed was taken off the spool and flattened. This was the condenser; one terminal of the circuit was connected with one strip of foil; the other, with the other. There is, however, a danger in this practice that the ends of the two strips of foil may touch; and it therefore became the custom to insure against this by turning back the end of each strip of foil upon itself, tucking it in so that the dielectric strips should overlap it by an adequate margin. It was to avoid this operation that Danziger's Claims One, Two and Three were aimed; his machine first automatically cuts the foil strips, but continues to draw off the paper strips with no foil between them until they are themselves cut at a later point. Thus arise the desired overlaps of dielectric. Claim One is a highly generalized statement of this process.
In 1905 the British branch of the well-known German electrical engineers, Siemens, obtained a patent (1905 Brit. Pat. No. 13,682) for a machine to do precisely what Danziger's machine accomplishes. The only difference was that in the Siemens machine the mechanism for cutting the foil strips was not automatically timed with the winding "arbor" or "mandrel," as Danziger timed it. Instead, an operator had to stop the rolls which fed the foil strips and cut the strips themselves, by manipulating a lever at the proper moment. For this reason the Siemens machine was not an anticipation of Danziger; it was not completely automatic; it lacked that element of Claim One which was defined as "means driven in timed relationship with the arbor" which means in turn controlled the cutting means. Our decision comes therefore to the query whether it demanded invention to conceive of making a machine automatic in the one respect which Siemens had omitted. The plaintiff stands squarely upon the position that, considering the lapse of twenty years between the appearance of Siemens's patent and Danziger's application, and the success of Danziger's machine when it appeared, it was an invention to complete the automaticity of Siemens's machine by timing the cutters with the "arbor."
It is true that we have again and again said that in deciding the issue of invention we would look to the history of the art, and we understand that the Supreme Court still countenances that approach (Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Ray-O-Vac, 321 U.S. 275, 278, 279, 64 S.Ct. 593); but it can lead one astray unless it is carefully hedged about. The lapse of time between one...
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