General Electric Co. v. Wabash Appliance Corp., 110.

• Decision Date: 03 January 1938
• Docket Number: No. 110.,110.
• Citation: 93 F.2d 671
• Parties: GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. v. WABASH APPLIANCE CORPORATION et al.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit

93 F.2d 671 (1938)

GENERAL ELECTRIC CO. v. WABASH APPLIANCE CORPORATION et al.^*

No. 110.

Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

January 3, 1938.

Howson & Howson, of New York City (Hubert Howson, Merrell E. Clark, and Alexander C. Neave, all of New York City, and John H. Anderson, of Cleveland, Ohio, of counsel), for appellant.

Darby & Darby, of New York City (Samuel E. Darby, Jr., and Paul Kolisch, both of New York City, of counsel), for appellees.

Before MANTON, AUGUSTUS N. HAND, and CHASE, Circuit Judges.

MANTON, Circuit Judge.

The Pipkin patent, No. 1,687,510, for an electric lamp bulb, granted October 16, 1928, on an application filed June 29, 1925, was held invalid below in this suit for infringement, but, if valid, infringed. The two claims¹ sued on were held valid in General Electric Co. v. Save Sales Co., 6 Cir., 82 F.2d 100.

The invention is for a bulb with a novel inside frosted covering. It is the first inside frosted bulb produced having the requisite strength for commercial use. The patent teaches that to manufacture, the inside is given a frosting resulting in a frosty or clouded appearance and, in so doing, in the first coat or covering, there are created a multitude of tiny pits or depressions in the glass. This may be done by sand blasting with a fine powder or by etching with acid. The purpose is to diffuse the light from the incandescent filament or reduce the brightness or glare of the lamp, but the bulb must be made strong to withstand the shocks and impacts incident to manufacture, transportation, and use.

Prior to this invention, bulbs were frosted on the outside surface, but these were found to be defective, for they were dust retainers. To overcome this problem, moulding corrugations in the glass of the bulb were tried unsuccessfully. Other inventors attacked the problem.

Hewitt, No. 1,036,527, granted August 20, 1912, described an effort to make the outside surface adequately diffusing, while still preserving a particularly smooth surface. He said he produced lamps which did not have "relatively low emissive efficiency of frosted glass surfaces in which there are internal losses due to dirt reflection and refraction, and other losses due to dirt accumulations which cannot be easily removed." The Herrman (British) patent of 1913 considered the same problem of the internally frosted bulb and failed. Kennedy, in a patent granted July 21, 1903 (U.S.), suggested frosting the bulbs on the inside instead of the outside, leaving the outside surface smooth. In the trade this result was a failure, and that was due to the fact that the first frost etching treatment removes only a slight amount of glass. When applied to the outside of the bulb it appears not to affect the bulb's strength but, when applied to the inside surface, it reduces it against outside impact to but a small fraction of its original value. This makes the bulb unfit for commercial use. Thus, at this stage of the progress of the art (1924), no completely satisfactory diffusing lamp bulb had been devised for frosting on the inside in commercial production.

Pipkin's patent achieved the result. He refers to the conventional frost etching when applied to the inside of the bulbs rendering them fragile to such a degree as to occasion prohibitive breakage. Tests of bulbs, after this inside frosting treatment, showed that the frosting reduces the strength of the bulb from 44.8 to 3.2 on the scale of the bump tester. Pipkin says that, "if the bulb is given a further treatment which I term a strengthening treatment in which it is subjected to an etching or frosting treatment of a lower degree than that to which it was first subjected, it becomes quite strong. Indeed, it may be made practically as strong as the original clear glass bulb." The increase in strength was stated in certain instances to be as much as 1137 per cent. A frosting solution is injected into the bulb through a pipe and washed out; while it is then in a fragile structure, an acid solution is injected. The patent gives the formula which may be used for the frosting solution and the strengthening solution. The claims, however, are directed to the product — the bulb structure itself. It was found and recognized by this inventor that the first treatment resulting in a multitude of tiny pits or depressions eaten into the surface of the glass — millions of them to a square inch — could be strengthened by filling in these pits and crevices with a strengthening treatment. He says that this second treatment eats away still more glass from the inside surface, and by so doing produces the increase in strength to which he refers. The multitude of tiny pits or depressions produced by the initial treatment are sharply angular in character. The treatment rounds them out, and it is this rounding out of the pits or depressions that makes for strength and remedies the fatal weakness of inside frosted bulbs.

To have accomplished this over the Kennedy patent of 1903 amounts to invention. The claims are novel. Although the advantages of inside frosted bulbs were recognized long before Pipkin, no one produced an inside frosted bulb with the adequate strength for commercial use. No one before had suggested rounding out the tiny frosted crevices by dissolving additional glass and thus rectifying the weakness which was attributable to the sharpness of those crevices.

It is argued by appellee that...