Faulkner v. Delph Spinning Co., Inc.
| Decision Date | 13 April 1914 |
| Docket Number | 311 |
| Citation | 245 Pa. 40,91 A. 607 |
| Parties | Faulkner v. Delph Spinning Company, Inc., Appellant |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
Argued January 13, 1914
Appeal, No. 311, Jan. T., 1913, by defendant, from judgment of C.P. No. 2, Philadelphia Co., Sept. T., 1912, No. 4956, on verdict for plaintiff in case of Mary A. Faulkner, by her next friend, Margaret J. Howard, v. Delph Spinning Company Incorporated. Reversed.
Trespass to recover damages for personal injuries. Before HALL, P.J. specially presiding.
The opinion of the Supreme Court states the facts.
Verdict for plaintiff for $5,000, and judgment thereon. Defendant appealed.
Error assigned, among others, was the fourth assignment which complained of the charge to the jury as erroneous, inadequate and misleading.
The judgment is reversed and a venire facias de novo is awarded.
Henry Spalding, with him Edward W. Fell, for appellant.
John J. McDevitt, Jr., with him John C. Bell, for appellee.
Before MESTREZAT, POTTER, ELKIN, STEWART and MOSCHZISKER, JJ.
The plaintiff, a girl of seventeen years, was a conewinder in the employ of the defendant company. The work assigned her was to walk back and forth in front of a spinning machine, remove the waste material as it gathered, tie up the threads or ends where broken, and generally to see that the machine was kept busy in winding the yarns on the spools. Underneath an iron frame which extends along the length of the machine there is a series of wheels attached to a revolving shaft. Dividing these, in the center of the frame, are two cog wheels, one on the driving shaft, the other on an upright shaft. This part of the machine is exposed to view, and is without physical guard of any kind, and, according to plaintiff's testimony, these cog wheels are close to the front of the frame of the machine where plaintiff stood at the time of the accident, so close, as she expressed it, that "if you just put your foot out you could catch your dress, it was so near the front." Her narrative is that at the time of the accident she had a piece of waste in her hand which she had gathered, that this waste suddenly dropped from her hand and falling upon the roller underneath got caught in the shaft, that she tried to grab it as the roller was revolving and that it took her hand around as well and drew it into the cog wheel, with the result that she lost several of her fingers. It is impossible to derive any other meaning from the narrative than that the waste as it left her hand fell outside the frame of the machine. If, as she testified, the roller and cogs were close to the front of the frame, there would be nothing improbable in the statement that the waste had fallen upon the roller. The significance of this will appear later. We start then with a prima facie case made out by the plaintiff, the negligence charged being failure to properly guard the cogwheels which inflicted the injury. The defense was two-fold. First, with a view to disprove negligence on the part of defendant, evidence was introduced to show, by actual measure, not impeached or contradicted in any way, that these cogwheels are on a shaft twenty-one inches back from the frame of the machine, and are but six inches in diameter, leaving a clear space of eighteen inches between the front of the frame and the nearest surface of the cogs. Upon this state of facts it was argued, following the doctrine of McCoy v. Wolf, 235 Pa. 571, that having regard to the nature and character of the employee's duty, the particular machinery which inflicted plaintiff's injury -- the cogwheel -- was so distant from the place where plaintiff was employed as to render it entirely safe as to her, and was therefore not unguarded within the meaning of the statute. Allowing the argument its full legitimate force it could prevail no further than to carry this particular question to the jury, and to this extent it was allowed to prevail. The second line of defense was a deduction from the same evidence as to the actual location of the shaft and cogwheels with respect to the position occupied by the plaintiff when at work, and the argument is that with the shaft and cogs from eighteen to twenty-one inches within the frame of the machine the accident could not have happened in the way described by the plaintiff; that the waste could not have fallen upon either shaft or cog, and that therefore plaintiff must have been otherwise engaged than in an endeavor to recover the fallen waste when her hand came in contact with the cogwheels. The purpose of the evidence was to overcome plaintiff's prima facie case. If it did overcome it in any material respect -- and that would be a question for the jury to determine -- the effect would be the same as though plaintiff had failed in the first instance. Plaintiff's prima facie rested wholly and exclusively upon her own testimony; she alone testified to the circumstances under which she received her injury. Conceding the negligence of the defendant, her prima facie was still incomplete except as it showed circumstances attending the accident which gave rise to no presumption of negligence on her part. She detailed circumstances which left her clear of contributory negligence. If the...
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