Electric Controller & Supply Co. v. Westinghouse Elec. & Mfg. Co.

• Decision Date: 24 June 1909
• Docket Number: 1,876.
• Citation: 171 F. 83
• Parties: ELECTRIC CONTROLLER & SUPPLY CO. v. WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC & MFG. CO.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

171 F. 83

ELECTRIC CONTROLLER & SUPPLY CO. v. WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC & MFG. CO.

No. 1,876.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

June 24, 1909

Wm. L Pierce, for appellant.

L. F H. Betts, for appellee.

Before LURTON and WARRINGTON, Circuit Judges, and KNAPPEN, District judge.

KNAPPEN District Judge.

This is a suit for the alleged infringement of claims 13 and 14 of United States patent No. 518,693, dated April 24, 1894 issued to the appellee as assignee of Lange & Lamme, upon a 'controlling switch for electric railways,' usually called in the record a 'controller.' The defenses argued here are anticipation and lack of patentable invention.

By the decree of the Circuit Court the claims in question were held valid and infringed. The office of an electric railway controller, broadly speaking, is to govern the amount of current flowing through the motors, and thereby to regulate the speed of the latter, and thus the speed of the car. The amount of current supplied to the motors is governed by the number of the motors used from time to time and their relation to each other and the extent to which (if at all) artificial resistance is used; and these elements are specifically regulated by a series of switches composed of a number of contact strips upon the rotatable axis or drum of the controller, adapted to engage with a corresponding number of contact buttons, usually on the casing of the controller-- the contact or noncontact between these strips and buttons, as the controller axle is rotated, opening or closing the switches. The patent in question embraces two inventions; the first relating to the method of controlling or regulating the motors, the second to the construction of the controller.

The contest here relates only to the construction of the controller. A consideration of the prior art, so far as it pertains to controller construction, is necessary to a determination of the validity of the claims in question. The commercial use of electric railway controllers in the United States dates from the year 1887, although experiments in that direction had been carried on for some time before. The controller drums first used were of solid wood. To this wooden drum were attached copper segments for contact with corresponding buttons in opening or closing the switch as the rotating handle of the drum was turned in one direction or the other, the copper segments being attached to the drum by screws and connected by wires imbedded in the wood and leading to the circuit of the motor. This construction was always attended with practical difficulties and was never satisfactory. The heavy arcking of the current, as the contact strips and buttons separated, resulted in burning the copper conducting segments, carbonizing the wood of the drum (thus making it an electrical conductor), causing short-circuiting and consequent injury to, and the eventual destruction of, the drum, and sometimes of the entire controller. These injuries necessitated frequent repairs and replacements. From 1887 until the time of the Lange & Lamme invention, various changes, devices, and experiments were resorted to by those concerned in electric railway invention and operation for correcting the arcking. Among such changes and devices were the substitution of fiber for wood in drum construction, and attempts to use a porcelain molded drum. Experiments were also made by way of inserting sections of mica or porcelain at the terminals of the contact segments. None of these changes and experiments overcame the evil referred to. The vulcanized fiber not only absorbed moisture to such an extent as to interfere with the maintaining of the contact segments in position, but also carbonized nearly, if not quite, as badly as wood. The porcelain cylinder, while giving less trouble than fiber or wood, still permitted heavy and injurious arcking at the contacts. The porcelain was, moreover, expensive; and serious difficulty was found in adequately securing the contact segments thereto. The mica segments were found to quickly wear out from friction, and were abandoned. The porcelain segments were unsatisfactory because of the difficulty in securing them in position. Until Lange & Lamme's invention, the wooden drum was standard construction.

The first named among the stated objects of the Lange & Lamme invention is 'the production of a controller having provision for a diminution of arcs when the same is operated. ' Fig. 4 of the patent, which is reproduced below, sufficiently shows the method of construction of the controller in suit.

(Image Omitted) In this construction, the shaft, 18, is journaled to the controller casing at its top and bottom. The drum is built up by mounting upon this shaft a series of metal sleeves, 20, which are conductors, each sleeve carrying integrally therewith and radiating therefrom a curved conducting strip concentric with the sleeve, the latter being insulated from the axle (in practice by an insulating composition by which the sleeve becomes rigidly attached to the axle), and the sleeves being insulated from each other by thin insulating strips, 21. The specifications, in commenting upon the drum construction, use this language:

'Upon this axle (referring to shaft, 18) are mounted sleeves, 20, carrying offsets as shown, curved to a cylindrical surface as shown, and acting as strips, as indicated by lettering agreeing with Fig. 1. This construction is preferred to a solid drum, as it is lighter, but of course a drum carrying peripheral strips would be within our invention, and we will in our claims use the term 'drum' as including the construction shown in Fig. 4. The various strip systems are insulated from each other by insulating washers, 21.'

The claims which are the subject of this suit are in this language:

(13) 'In a controller for electric cars, a rotatable axle, a series of conducting sleeves carried thereby, said sleeves being insulated from each other and from the axle, and a curved conducting strip carried by each sleeve, in combination with a row of switch buttons, adapted to cooperate with said strips, substantially as described.'

(14) 'In a controller for electric cars, a rotatable axle, a series of sleeves carried thereon, and curved projecting strips carried thereby, in combination with a row of switch buttons, adapted to cooperate with said strips, substantially as described.'

The following is a rough sketch of one of the sleeves, with its radiating conducting strip:

(Image Omitted)

The strips at the contact points are insulated from the drum and from each other by air, and, the metal sleeve being conducted and insulated, the drum is not exposed to serious injury from arcking. This construction is not inaptly characterized by appellee as a 'metal sleeve skeletonized drum.' It came into immediate and successful use, and soon almost entirely superseded the prior construction referred to. Since 1896 appellee and its licensee, the General Electric Company, have constructed and sold about 150,000 controllers of the Lange & Lamme construction; applying them not only to electric railways, but to various kinds of electrical devices.

The Lange & Lamme controller is convenient in construction, being easily assembled and permitting ready replacement of parts if required, and is much lighter and is less expensive than the wooden and other forms of drum construction formerly used.

The history we have given of the development of the art of electric railway drum construction, the unsuccessful experiments made during several years before the Lange & Lamme invention to remedy the serious defects and difficulties connected with the then existing construction on the part of those not only skilled in the electric art, but under the sharp spur of commercial competition, the success and usefulness of the device in question and its speedy general adoption, furnish persuasive evidence that the discovery of the Lange & Lamme idea involved actual invention, and was not the result merely of mechanical skill. Among the many cases which have recognized and applied the principle involved in the proposition just stated, the following may be cited: Keystone Mfg. Co. v. Adams, 151 U.S. 139, 143, 14 Sup.Ct. 295, 38 L.Ed. 103; Potts v. Creager, 155 U.S. 597, 608, 15 Sup.Ct. 194, 39 L.Ed. 275; Hobbs v. Beach, 180 U.S. 383, 392, 21 Sup.Ct. 409, 45 L.Ed. 586; Star Brass Works v. General Elec. Co., 111 F. 398, 49 C.C.A. 409; Kalamazoo Ry. Supply Co. v. Duff Mfg. Co., 113 F. 264, 51 C.C.A. 221; Dowagiac Mfg. Co. v. Superior Drill Co., 115 F. 886, 53 C.C.A. 36.

It is clear that the Lange & Lamme device involved patentable invention, unless it shall be found to have been anticipated by one or more of the patented devices presented by defendant.

The patent first urged as anticipatory of the patent in suit is United States patent No. 503,279 to Davis, on a 'controlling switch for electrically propelled vehicles. ' The application for this patent was filed January 7 1893. The patent is dated August 15, 1893. The Lange & Lamme patent in suit was applied for February 25, 1893. The date of the filing of the Davis application (as well, in fact, as the date of the patent) thus antedate the corresponding dates of the Lange & Lamme patent. If, therefore, the two applications disclose substantially the same subject-matter, in the absence of any other evidence of the date of invention, the date of the first application would prima facie be taken as the date of the first invention. Drewsen v. Hartje Paper Mfg. Co., 131 F. 734, 739, 65 C.C.A. 548. The prominent element of Davis' invention and patent is the reversing switch. Neither of the patent claims embraces conducting sleeves (whether insulated or not) carried by the axle, or curved...