Hartford-Empire Co. v. Coe

• Decision Date: 07 December 1936
• Docket Number: No. 6544-6546.,6544-6546.
• Parties: HARTFORD-EMPIRE CO. v. COE (three cases).
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

87 F.2d 741 (1936)

HARTFORD-EMPIRE CO. v. COE (three cases).

Nos. 6544-6546.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Argued April 9, 1936.

Decided December 7, 1936.

Vernon M. Dorsey and Alan F. Garner, both of Washington, D. C., and Sidney F. Parham, of Hartford, Conn., for appellant.

R. F. Whitehead, of Washington, D. C., for appellee.

Before MARTIN, C. J., and VAN ORSDEL, GRONER, and STEPHENS, JJ.

VAN ORSDEL, J.

Plaintiff-appellant, the Hartford-Empire Company, filed three bills of complaint in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, under section 4915, R.S., as amended (35 U.S.C.A. § 63), where the cases were tried on a single record. While the cases are here in separate appeals, they are on a single record.

No. 6544 relates to the Peiler application, No. 823,894, filed March 10, 1914. Appeal No. 6545 involves the application of Steimer, No. 543,582, filed February 12, 1910. Appeal No. 6546 relates to an application of Steimer, No. 65,185, filed October 27, 1925 as a division of the original Steimer application involved in Appeal No. 6545.

The applications here involved all relate to the feeding of molten glass to molds in the production of bottles, jars, and other kinds of glassware. The claims in No. 6544 and No. 6545 are process claims. The claim in No. 6546 is an apparatus claim.

In No. 6544 claims 2 and 92 sufficiently define the alleged invention:

"2. The method of feeding molten glass, which consists in accumulating and suspending masses of the glass in a heated atmosphere, and successively shearing mold charges from the accumulations when such charges have attained the desired size while thus suspended at a plane sufficiently far below the plane of suspension of said masses to prevent smearing of the glass during the shearing of said charges.

"92. The method of feeding molten glass from a submerged discharge outlet in the bottom of a container in periodically severed compact mold charges, comprising the steps of controlling the temperature and viscosity of the glass as it passes to the outlet and regulating the rate of flow of the glass through the outlet to cause glass to issue from the outlet at such rate and in such condition that a compact mass comprising enough glass for the desired mold charge will accumulate in suspension below the outlet between successive charge severing operations, and severing mold charges from the successive suspended masses by causing shear blades to cut cleanly through each suspended mass at a plane spaced sufficiently below the outlet to be out of glass smearing relation therewith, the viscosity of the glass flowing to the outlet, the rate of flow through the outlet, and the periodicity and rate of the charge severing operations of the shears all being selected and regulated with relation to one another for coaction to cause the accumulation in suspension of mold charge masses of suitable size and consistency before the respective severing operations and the severance from the suspended masses, at the proper times for proper delivery to the molds of an associate glassware fabricating machine, of compact uniform mold charges, each having a weight appropriate for the mold to be fed and each being of suitable viscosity and condition for shaping in the mold for the production of a practically perfect article of hollow glassware."

The claimed invention in this case consists in forming from the molten glass contained in the melting furnace a regulated succession of mold charges, each having proper weight, compactness, and viscosity for fabrication in a mold into an article of glassware. Each charge is formed while freely suspended in the air, and while it remains connected with the glass in the furnace. When formed, it is mechanically cut off and dropped into the mold where it is converted into the intended article of glassware. To accomplish this result, the various steps taken must be co-ordinated with each other in an exact manner to accomplish the desired result.

In practicing the present method, the viscosity of the glass is so affected above the submerged orifice that the glass from which the charge is to be cut emerges in a "pasty" or highly viscous condition so that it will remain suspended in a mass which will hold itself in compact form until more than sufficient glass for a mold charge has accumulated.

It is well to point out that Peiler's method, known as "pasty glass suspended charge feeding," is in distinction to the mechanical methods of the prior art which employed hot, liquid glass. The term "pasty glass" is defined as a highly viscous condition referred to as "super-viscous" in Hartford-Empire Co. v. Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. (C.C.A.) 59 F.(2d) 399, where the court was considering Peiler's patent No. 1655391, covering an invention involving an improvement of the method here in issue. This pasty or highly viscous condition is essential to the method here used in that it enables the suspension of a mass which holds itself in compact form.

It appears that Peiler is a rather distinguished inventor in this field, and has filed numerous other applications and obtained a number of patents relating to the method of feeding molten glass to the molds. The appellant company has been involved in a number of suits in connection with these Peiler patents, and special stress is laid by appellant on the case of Hartford-Empire Co. v. Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. (C.C.A.3d) 59 F.(2d) 399. That suit involved a patent granted to Peiler in 1928 on an application filed in 1919, which is known as the "plunger" patent. That process disclosed a plunger which operated in a vertical direction over the opening through which the molten glass passed from the furnace, and its function was to control the amount of glass passing through the orifice.

In the Hazel-Atlas Case the court paid a great tribute to Peiler for revolutionizing the art and supplying an "urgent and desperate need" of the bottle manufacturing industry. The patent there under consideration came into competition with what was known at the time as the Owens method. The Owens machine was so expensive (costing $80,000) that it was controlled by a few manufacturing companies. The Peiler device, being much cheaper, and being an improvement over the Owens method, had through competition supplanted almost entirely the use of the Owens method. The court, however, in that case was not considering an apparatus or process such as is disclosed by Peiler in the present case, but the process and apparatus of the later Peiler patent. The court treated the patent there under consideration as involving a complete solution of the problem.

That court, while considering devices of Peiler to regulate the out-let flow from the molten mass, referred to the gob feeding process here under consideration and distinguished it from the prior art in the following statement 59 F.(2d) 399, at page 407: "By this use of a pulsating, vertical plunger so synchronized that the initial discharged mass or gob was held in suspension while there was fed into its upper end glass hotter and more fluid, whereby the gob's viscous skin surrounding was evenly expanded on all sides to the desired mold shape and then the flow of glass was stopped, the gob sheared, and the glass at the orifice withdrawn so as not to smear the shears. The periodic, separated, individualized mold forms or gobs discharged by this current-intercepted process and its contrast with the continuous feed stream of the earlier art are described by the union official president of the Glass Blowers' Union just referred to in language we now repeat and whose keen accuracy will be better appreciated from what has been shown in the intervening part of this opinion. Accordingly we repeat his words: `Instead of employing a stream of glass which collected in the mold until the desired mold charge had accumulated, these new feeders cut off a suspended chunk or gob of glass which was pre-formed during the suspension to correspond, to some extent, at least, to the shape of the mold cavity in which it was to be received.'"

In the case of Hartford-Empire Co. v. Nivison-Weiskopf Co. (C.C.A.) 58 F.(2d) 701, 704, the court had before it for consideration some of the Peiler patents and a patent to Steimer, granted as a division of the application here in suit. In that case the court held "that Peiler was not the inventor of suspended charge feeding or shaping charges while in suspension," and relied upon the prior disclosures of Hitchcock, Brookfield, Lot, and others.

The Board of Appeals in the Patent Office rejected the claims here in issue chiefly upon the Hitchcock patent, No. 805068. An examination of the Hitchcock patent discloses that it was not a gob feeding device. What Hitchcock did was to pour the molten glass into the mold and when the mold was filled to a proper proportion the narrow string of glass between the mold and the molten mass from which it is drawn was severed and the portion above the point of severance was drawn back to the molten mass while the portion below...