Farr Company v. American Air Filter Company
| Decision Date | 17 May 1963 |
| Docket Number | No. 16668.,16668. |
| Citation | 318 F.2d 500 |
| Parties | FARR COMPANY, a Corporation, Appellant, v. AMERICAN AIR FILTER COMPANY, Inc., a Corporation, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
Richard E. Lyon, Los Angeles, Cal., for appellant.
Fulwider, Mattingly & Huntley, Walter P. Huntley and Frederick E. Mueller, Los Angeles, Cal., Keith, Bolger, Isner & Byrne, W. D. Keith and Robert E. Isner, New York City, and Edward C. Arenz, Louisville, Ky., for appellee.
Before STEPHENS, JERTBERG and KOELSCH, Circuit Judges.
This appeal involves United States Letters Patent No. 2,807,330, issued to plaintiff, American Air Filter Company, assignee of Richard D. Rivers, the inventor.
In this opinion the parties will be referred to by their designations in the District Court. Plaintiff brought this action for infringement against the Farr Company, seeking damages and an injunction. Defendant urged as defenses anticipation and lack of invention, as well as overclaim and indefiniteness and uncertainty of the patent claims. Judgment went for the plaintiff and defendant has appealed. We conclude that the judgment must be reversed and the action dismissed.
The Rivers' patent relates to a device for filtering air. It contains five claims; they define a roll of filter webbing, a method of manipulating the webbing in a roll-type filter, and a filter apparatus. Specifically, Claim One claims a preformed supply roll consisting of a strip of "expansible-compressible" webbing tightly wound so as to be compressed to less than half its expanded thickness on a mandrel or spool. Claims Two and Three claim the method for progressively removing and expanding from the supply roll the "expansible-compressible" web, moving it through an air stream and thereafter progressively recompressing and winding the used web onto a take-up spool to form a disposable package; and Claims Four and Five claim a means to condition and manipulate the webbing in the manner specified in Claims Two and Three.
The roll filter described in the Rivers' patent is similar in construction and operation to the familiar roll film photographic camera, in which a length of unexposed film, wound on a spool, is advanced section by section over the camera's light chamber, exposed, and then wound onto a take-up spool for removal. Such filters were not new in the art; indeed it appears that they were the subject of patents long prior to Rivers' invention and that plaintiff itself had manufactured and sold them.
Defendant argues that the phrase, "expansible-compressible," used in the patent to characterize and describe the filter web is meaningless; but for the purposes of this appeal we assume that the term adequately defines a relatively thick, resilient, loosely structured, filamentous web made of animal hair, vegetable fiber, metallic and glass wools, and like materials. Such webs permit the passage of air at high velocity and, due to their bulk, present a large effective surface area to screen solids and other foreign matter from the air stream; they are very efficient and for many years have been commonly used in unit filters. The unit filter is much less convenient than the roll filter; the former makes no provision for a supply of filter material contained on a spool but employs a single section of webbing, rigidly held in a frame or cell, which must be manually replaced at relatively frequent intervals.
However, defendant vigorously argues that Rivers' invention was anticipated, because "expansible-compressible" webbing had been previously proposed for the roll as well as the unit filter. The record shows that the Christofferson Patent No. 1,982,639 for a roll filter specifies webbing composed of "very finely carded cotton fiber" which is "loosely felted" and "of exceptionally low resistance to the passage of air therethrough while at the same time having maximum efficiency in removing impurities." And another roll filter patent, Dollinger No. 2,016,991, also describes a material of "extremely fine fibers of paper, cotton, wool, asbestos, etc. lightly held together to form a relatively thick filtering medium in a very loose or porous condition." In addition, plaintiff's own roll filter marketed under the name "Auto-AIRMAT" used a thin diaphanous paper which may have been "expansible-compressible."1
But the trial court found that issue against the defendant. It further found that the prior art taught only less efficient filter media in roll filters; those tightly structured which, although effective to screen smaller solids unduly checked the flow of air, and those loosely structured which passed air at high velocity but were too thin to present an adequate screening surface. We accept these factual findings without pausing to critically examine into their validity.
It thus appears that, in defining a method of filtering air by using webbing, concededly old, in an apparatus which was likewise old, Rivers did contribute something to the art; he achieved in one filter the cleaning efficiency of the unit filter and the automatic feature of the roll filter.
Of course, without some mechanical alteration, the old roll-type filter would not accommodate the substitute material. "Expansible-compressible" filter material is resilient and automatically expands to normal thickness when unwound from the supply spool, but to recompress the used web into a disposable roll of convenient size, it must be tightly wound and the tension necessary to accomplish this latter operation causes the web to stretch and narrow or "neck". Necking in the filtering zone causes the edge of the web to retract from the guideways through which it travels, permitting the passage of contaminated air. To prevent this the Rivers' patent describes a power driven "hold-down" roller and plate located between the take-up spool and the air filtering zone; together the roller and plate grasp the moving web in somewhat the same fashion as a washing machine wringer and prevent...
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