Long Manufacturing Company v. Holliday

• Decision Date: 27 May 1957
• Docket Number: 7384.,No. 7383,7383
• Citation: 246 F.2d 95
• Parties: LONG MANUFACTURING COMPANY, INC., Long Tobacco Harvesting Company, Inc., and W. R. Long, Appellants, v. Jim Brown HOLLIDAY and Harrington Manufacturing Company, Inc., Appellees. HARRINGTON MANUFACTURING COMPANY, INC., J. J. Harrington, and Jim Brown Holliday, Appellants, v. LONG MANUFACTURING COMPANY, Inc., Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

246 F.2d 95 (1957)

LONG MANUFACTURING COMPANY, INC., Long Tobacco Harvesting Company, Inc., and W. R. Long, Appellants, v. Jim Brown HOLLIDAY and Harrington Manufacturing Company, Inc., Appellees.

HARRINGTON MANUFACTURING COMPANY, INC., J. J. Harrington, and Jim Brown Holliday, Appellants, v. LONG MANUFACTURING COMPANY, Inc., Appellee.

Nos. 7383, 7384.

United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit.

Argued April 11, 1957.

Decided May 27, 1957.

A. Yates Dowell and A. Yates Dowell, Jr., Washington, D. C. (Henry C. Bourne, Tarboro, N. C., on brief) for Long Mfg. Co. and others.

Robert F. Davis, Washington, D. C. (John H. Lewis, Jr., Harvey B. Jacobson, Washington, D. C., J. A. Pritchett, Windsor, N. C., and H. Vinson Bridgers, Tarboro, N. C., on brief) for Jim Brown Holliday, and others.

Before PARKER, Chief Judge, and SOBELOFF and HAYNSWORTH, Circuit Judges.

HAYNSWORTH, Circuit Judge.

The parties in these two cases, involving interrelated factual situations, are, together with their associates and licensees, owners of two separate patents issued on tobacco harvesters. Their conflicting interests led to the institution of these two actions in which each patentee maintains that his patent is valid and infringed by the other patentee and his licensee.

The two cases were consolidated for trial after which the District Court held that the device of the Holliday patent No. 2,672,248 issued March 16, 1954, was a generic or pioneer invention entitled to a wide range of equivalents while the device of the Long patent No. 2,704,158 issued March 15, 1955, embodied certain patentable improvements. Since the machine actually manufactured and sold by each is substantially that disclosed in the Long patent, it was held that Long and his associates had infringed the valid Holliday patent and that Holliday and his licensee had infringed Long's valid improvement patent. It was the judgment of the District Court that each of the patentees should have injunctive relief and compensatory damages from the other.

The defendants in each case have appealed to this Court.

The bright leaf tobacco grown in the Carolinas and Virginia is a plant consisting of a single stalk, which at maturity may be from five to seven feet in height. At intervals, broad tobacco leaves, from six to twenty-four inches in length, grow directly from the stalk.

The leaves do not ripen uniformly. Those nearest the ground are the first to ripen while those at the top of the stalk are the last. It is necessary, therefore, to have successive harvestings of the same field. The lower, ripened leaves are selected and picked by hand, while the higher unripened leaves are left to ripen for later harvestings.

The commonly accepted method of harvesting and stacking such tobacco, prior to 1953, was entirely a hand operation. Pickers, or "primers," would walk through a field, selecting and picking the ripe leaves which they placed upon a cart or sled. When filled with leaves, this conveyance was taken out of the field where "handers" arranged the leaves in convenient bundles and passed the bundles to "loopers" who tied the bundles to a stick. Many such bundles were attached to each stick until a filled stick was placed in a rack from whence it was removed to the curing barn where it was again placed on racks.

Throughout the broad field of agriculture, the rising cost of farm labor, coupled with acreage restrictions, has made such manual operations more and more uneconomic and has resulted in a rapidly accelerating mechanization of agriculture.

Tobacco farmers were not unconscious of these pressures and Holliday and Long, apparently entirely independently, each conceived the idea of a mechanical tobacco harvester.

In 1952 Holliday constructed a crude high clearance machine having a platform above the height of mature tobacco plants and equipped with hand operated conveyor chains by which tobacco leaves might be passed from pickers on seats below the platform to "loopers" working on the platform. This machine as constituted in 1952 was not practical for harvesting, however, and its principal use during that year was for spraying and dusting.

Holliday continued his efforts to produce a machine which would be practical as a harvester and on July 3, 1953, he tested his machine which was then equipped with power operated conveyor chains.

Attached to the frame of the Holliday machine were vertical members. There was a sprocket at each end of each vertical member around each of which the conveyor chain made a 180° turn. Attached at intervals to the conveyor chain were fixed, spring-pressed clips into which tobacco leaves might be inserted by a picker below the platform and from which the leaves might be removed by loopers working above the platform. The pickers were carried in seats attached to the lower portion of the vertical members carrying the chains, the seats being adjustable in height so that throughout the harvesting season, the picker would be within convenient reach of the ripened leaves.

This was the machine of the Holliday Patent No. 2,672,248. It is shown in the margin in a diagrammatic drawing,¹ and is fairly described in claim No. 7, the only claim of that patent involved in this controversy:

"A tobacco harvester comprising a frame, wheels supporting said frame, vertical members secured to said frame in spaced relationship to each other, vertically extending conveyor chains carried by said vertical members, drive means for actuating said chains, a platform secured on top of said frame, said chains extending upwardly above said platform from therebelow, said chains having spring pressed clips attached thereto for resiliently engaging and carrying tobacco leaves, a plurality of seats, and means adjustably suspending said seats from said vertical members in back of said chains."

The Holliday machine had certain practical deficiencies. The comparatively short vertical run of the conveyor chain above the platform did not permit loopers on the platform to keep pace with the pickers below. Leaves which were not removed on the rising run of the chain, being held in fixed clips, were inverted when they passed over the upper sprocket with resultant damage to the leaves.

Meanwhile, quite independently, Long had been working to produce a machine which would accomplish the same result sought by Holliday. Long was a manufacturer of farm implements, and he and his chief engineer, one Davis, worked concurrently upon two different approaches to the problem.

Long's approach, and the one ultimately adopted, was, as Holliday's, a high clearance, three wheeled, motorized machine, shown in a diagrammatic drawing in the margin.² As in Holliday, loopers worked from the high level platform where they removed from the conveyor, bundled and stacked tobacco leaves which had been picked by pickers who were carried in seats, adjustable in height, below the platform. Each conveyor chain, unlike Holliday, however, ran over seven sprockets, affixed to a variety of members. These sprockets carried each chain in front of each of two pickers below the platform and provided it with a substantially horizontal run above the platform in the work space of the loopers. Attached to the chain were spring-pressed clips, pivotally mounted so that the tobacco leaves would hang downward at every point in the run of the conveyor. The adjustable seats for the pickers were affixed to members of the frame having no direct connection with other members carrying the sprockets of the conveyor system.

An essential element of each claim of the Long patent is the combination of a conveyor chain having "a substantially horizontal run of substantial extent" above the platform and pivotally mounted clips to carry the leaves of tobacco.

Long's machine was first tested in the field on July 13, 1953, ten days after Holliday's first test of his machine.

After a public demonstration of an improved version of the Long machine on Labor Day, 1953, and a showing of three of the machines at the North Carolina State Fair later that autumn, Long undertook to promote and manufacture his harvester. This was done at substantial expense, but it proved to be a commercial success. His company sold 1,429 of the machines in 1954 and 2,120 in 1955.

Holliday learned of the Long machine prior to its public demonstration in September 1953. He had talked with Davis, Long's chief engineer, and had obtained from Davis, pictures of the Long machine. Thereafter, on October 9, 1953, Holliday filed his patent application, but he achieved no other significant step until March 5, 1954, when he entered into a licensing agreement with Harrington Manufacturing Company, Inc. Holliday's patent was issued on March 16, 1954.

Instead of following the drawings and specifications of the Holliday patent, however, Harrington, with Holliday's assistance, proceeded to manufacture machines which, substantively, were literal copies of Long's machine. Subsequently, Harrington employed Long's former chief engineer, Davis, in connection with that and other work.

In 1954 Harrington manufactured approximately 60 harvesters and in 1955 approximately 1,050, all being substantially identical to Long's machine.

The parties, in argument in this Court, do not seriously question that each of the patented devices involved some novelty amounting to invention. Long's principal contention is that his machine does not infringe the Holliday patent while Holliday contends that the Long patent is invalid because of claimed public use of the Long machine more than one year prior to the date of Long's patent application.

Claim 7 of the Holliday patent provides for vertical members, secured to a frame, vertically extending conveyor chains carried by the vertical members and with means for adjustably suspending seats from the vertical members.

We are asked to construe the word "vertical" as used in Holliday's claim as a "random adjective" implying no more than the...