General Radio Company v. Kepco, Inc.
| Decision Date | 27 November 1970 |
| Docket Number | Docket 34500.,No. 24,24 |
| Parties | GENERAL RADIO COMPANY, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. KEPCO, INC., Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
Joseph R. McPhee, Jr., Garden City, N. Y. (Andrew Perl, New York City, on the brief), for defendant-appellant.
Robert H. Rines, Boston, Mass. (Rines & Rines, Boston, Mass., Julius Foster, New York City, on the brief), for plaintiff-appellee.
Before FRIENDLY, SMITH and HAYS, Circuit Judges.
This is an appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, holding plaintiff's patent 2,942,172 valid and infringed by defendant's line of power supplies.
The plaintiff, a Massachusetts corporation with its principal place of business in West Concord, Massachusetts, is engaged in the manufacture and marketing of electronic apparatus.
The defendant, Kepco, Inc., is a New York corporation having its principal place of business and its manufacturing facilities in the Eastern District of New York. During the period in question, the defendant specialized in the production of a line of regulated power supplies and in 1960-68 was one of the best known sources of power supplies. After Kepco introduced power supplies similar to the plaintiff's, plaintiff sued for infringement of the patent in suit. Defendant answered, asserting the defenses of invalidity and noninfringement. From the court's finding of validity and infringement, the defendant appeals. We agree with the defendant and reverse.
Plaintiff's patent was issued on June 21, 1960 to Malcolm C. Holtje, an employee of General Radio, and assigned to the plaintiff. The function of the patented device referred to as a power supply is to convert alternating current, the kind normally supplied by public utilities, to low voltage direct current, which is useful in a wide range of electronic equipment. The device seeks to maintain the output dc voltage constant in magnitude even though fluctuations may occur in the ac voltage or in the equipment to which the dc voltage is supplied.
The patented power supply has three main parts, a rectifier stage and two regulator stages. The invention claimed by plaintiff is the combination, in a new way, of these stages, each in itself previously well known.
The details of the patent are fully described in the findings of the district court. The first stage of the power supply consists essentially of a transformer for increasing the magnitude of the ac voltage, rectifier tubes for converting the ac voltage to unregulated dc voltage and a capacitor, called an energy storing device, which serves to reduce the fluctuations in the dc voltage. The next stage, between the capacitor and the regulated dc output, includes a vacuum tube in a circuit known as "a series pass-element," the function of which is to keep the dc voltage output constant in magnitude. The third stage controls the voltage across the vacuum tube of the second stage by feeding back the fluctuations in that stage to the rectifier tubes in the first stage.
The relevant prior art includes patent No. 2,511,850, issued to Hoag more than five years before the Holtje application was filed, and patent No. 2,850,680 issued to Woll antedating the Holtje patent by about two years. Hoag describes a rectifier stage like Holtje's and a series-pass element serving the same function as the series-pass element in the patent in suit. In combination with these, there is, as in Holtje's patent, an additional regulating circuit which samples the voltage variations across the pass-element to control the amount of the ac voltage applied to the rectifier tubes in order to control, in turn, the voltage across the vacuum tube of the series pass-element.
The only difference between Hoag and Holtje is that Hoag applies his feedback control to the ac input of the transformer while Holtje applies it to the rectifier tubes. It appears to us that the patent examiner was right when he said:
"Whether the feedback means are used to control the output of a voltage...
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