Pennington v. W. Union Tel. Co.

• Citation: 67 Iowa 631,25 N.W. 838
• Parties: PENNINGTON v. WESTERN UNION TEL. CO.
• Decision Date: 14 December 1885
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Iowa

67 Iowa 631

25 N.W. 838

PENNINGTON

v.WESTERN UNION TEL. CO.

Supreme Court of Iowa.

Filed December 14, 1885.

Appeal from Winneshiek district court.

Supplemental opinion. See S. C. 24 N. W. Rep. 45.

*838Colley & Akers, for appellant, Western Union Tel. Co.

Cyrus Wellington, for appellee, George Pennington.

ADAMS, J.

The plaintiff has filed a petition for a rehearing, in which he insists that the court has erred in its rule concerning the measure of damages. The plaintiff contends that the true rule is that where a contract of purchase is not entered into by reason of a loss of an offer of the contract through the negligence of the party intrusted with its transmission, the measure of damages is the difference between the contract price as would have been offered and such greater price as the commodity may bear at the time the party losing the offer obtained knowledge of the failure of transmission, by reason of which it had not been made. Several authorities are cited and relied upon, but in our opinion none of them sustain the plaintiff's position. We can conceive that knowledge of the loss of an offer of a contract like the one in question--an offer for the sale of apples--might not be obtained until, in the progress of the season, sound apples would naturally be much higher, or it might not be obtained until the next season, when they might be much lower.

The general rule is that where a person sustains an injury through the negligence of another, he is entitled to recover to the extent of the injury which the wrong-doer should reasonably have apprehended. Under this rule, we thought that the loss of the offer could not be greater than the difference between the price which would have been offered but for the failure of transmission, and the market price, if greater; and as bearing upon that question, there was no evidence. It is true that where a party has received an offer and acted upon it by an attempted acceptance, and governs himself upon the just supposition that he can rely upon a completed contract, and waits as *839long as he might reasonably wait, and he loses his contract through the negligence of the party charged with the duty of transmission, his damages are not necessarily to be estimated with reference to the point of time when there was a breach of the duty of transmission. In True v. International Tel. Co., 60 Me. 9, the defendant was employed to transmit the acceptance of an offer of contract, and, by failure of the defendant, the...