Gibson-Stewart Co. v. Wm. Bros Boiler & Mfg. Co.

• Decision Date: 19 February 1959
• Docket Number: No. 13500.,13500.
• Citation: 264 F.2d 776
• Parties: GIBSON-STEWART COMPANY, Inc., Appellant, v. WM. BROS BOILER AND MANUFACTURING COMPANY, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

264 F.2d 776 (1959)

GIBSON-STEWART COMPANY, Inc., Appellant, v. WM. BROS BOILER AND MANUFACTURING COMPANY, Appellee.

No. 13500.

United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit.

February 19, 1959.

Howard E. Moore, Dallas, Tex.; Cecil L. Wood, Fort Worth, Tex., W. D. Cole of Kuth & Cole, Cleveland, Ohio, on the brief, for appellant.

Andrew E. Carlsen and Douglas L. Carlsen, Minneapolis, Minn.; John F. Oberlin of Oberlin & Limbach, Cleveland, Ohio, on the brief, for appellee.

Before ALLEN, Chief Judge, MARTIN, Circuit Judge, and GOURLEY, District Judge.

MARTIN, Circuit Judge.

In this suit for patent infringement, the able and experienced district judge held the four claims of Bros, et al., Patent (No. 2,610,557) to be valid and infringed by the appellant, Gibson-Stewart Company, Inc.

As stated by the patentee, the invention in the patent in suit relates to the art of compacting earth for roads, highways, airport runways, fills for dams, etc., where deep penetration and uniform but maximum density are important objectives and where the primary purpose is to provide a novel, efficient and practical pneumatic-tired compactor that will effectively, yet economically, meet these rigid objectives or requirements. The inventor stated that a typical exigency is presented by airport runways, which must receive and support aircraft weighing as much as three hundred thousand pounds. It was said further, in the patent application, that the resulting impact is such as to break down the runway pavement, unless properly constructed by base courses and sub-grades which have been compacted to an extremely high degree of density and to a depth of as much as five to six feet below the surface. The inventor then goes further to detail the specifications in the patent and makes four claims: all of which, as heretofore stated, were upheld by the district court.

Claim One is for an earth compaction roller comprising a hollow body member adapted to receive weight-producing ballast and having a transversely extending arched recess between its front and rear ends, an axially aligned series of pneumatic-tired wheels mounted in such recess to support the body member with its center of gravity substantially over the wheels, and a draft beam extending longitudinally through the lower part of the body, centrally thereof, such draft beam traversing the arch recess between two of such wheels and rigidly connecting opposite wall portions of the recess.

The other claims are in substance, as follows:

Claim Two. A unitary body structure having the central recess and employing two pairs of wheels — one of which is under each side — each pair being carried by the support beam additionally operating to maintain the lower ends of the recess wall in parallelism.

Claim Three is similarly limited to the use of four wheels and mountings in the recess; but this claim is directed specifically to the feature of arranging the four wheels so that they will carry equal loads and be spaced to produce equal compaction pressures in equally spaced paths.

Claim Four, in a general way, is similar to Claim Three; but it includes the parallelism-maintaining characteristic in addition to the wheel-spacing arrangement, which is specifically confined to an arrangement in which the space between any two wheels is less than the width of the tread of one wheel so as to prevent any substantial movement of earth upwardly between the tires.

The district judge received in evidence various exhibits revealing the prior art. He heard testimony of experts and other witnesses, analyzed the case and rendered an oral opinion, subsequently revised. He stated that "the defendant at the trial admitted infringement was present if the patent claims were valid."

On the issue of validity of the patent, the judge considered it more than a mere aggregation or assembly of well-known elements in the road-building art where densification of the ground is one of the principal accomplishments desired and compaction is another. He thought that the need for a marketable machine for compaction had been fulfilled by the appellee in a new and useful way, even though it had been necessary to use the prior art and structures to accomplish it. He considered that the problem solved by the inventor had been to bring together in a compact, efficient unit the necessary elements to meet a need by the use of means which would make the completed structure an easy on to manipulate, while accomplishing all that the old machines and structures had done. He stated that the arched recess is old and, standing alone, put nothing new into the combination of elements, being useful nevertheless. He said further that the oscillation and rocker-beam idea was not new and that the appellee did not even claim originality or novelty for most of the elements embraced in the structure. But he well reasoned that novelty, usefulness and commercial acceptance for the manner in which the known elements were put together — not as a mere aggregation, but as a combination which accomplishes the job sought to be accomplished in a new and better way — was manifest.

The judge asserted that it had been conceded on the trial that the structure had met with commercial success which, had there been doubt about the validity of the patent, might have been sufficient to maintain validity. There was no doubt in the mind of the judge as to validity of the patent.

Judge Jones went into further discussion of the elements of the patent and concluded that the arrangement of the patented structure, distributing the load equally in all portions as it does, required more than ordinary mechanical and engineering skill for accomplishment. The distinguished jurist thought that, on the whole, the equalizing of the weight by the distribution of the wheels of the patent in suit and the recess part were not shown exactly by anything in the prior art. He...