SOCIETE ANONYME DES MANUFACTURES, ETC. v. Marzall, C. A. No. 831-51.
| Decision Date | 12 May 1952 |
| Docket Number | C. A. No. 831-51. |
| Citation | 104 F. Supp. 670 |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Columbia |
| Parties | SOCIETE ANONYME DES MANUFACTURES DES GLACES ET PRODUITS CHIMIQUES DE SAINT - GOBAIN, CHAUNY & CIREY v. MARZALL, Commissioner of Patents. |
Dale A. Bauer and John L. Seymour, New York City, N. D. Parker, Jr., Washington, D. C., for plaintiff.
E. L. Reynolds, Sol., S. William Cochran, Atty., U. S. Patent Office, Washington, D. C., for defendant.
These proceedings are brought by plaintiff pursuant to R.S. § 4915, 35 U.S.C.A. § 63, for a decree that the plaintiff is entitled to letters patent on claims 1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, and 33 to 40, inclusive, in application for letters patent filed July 4, 1945, by Roger Emile Lambert, Serial Number 603,206, and which application has been duly assigned to the plaintiff, and a determination that the defendant Commissioner of Patents is authorized to issue letters patent thereon, and for a decree that the plaintiff is further entitled to letters patent on claims 1 to 9, 11, 14, 15, 20 to 27, and 30, inclusive, in application for letters patent filed September 12, 1946, by Pierre Arbeit, Serial Number 696,451, and which application has been duly assigned to the plaintiff, and a determination that the defendant Commissioner of Patents is authorized to issue letters patent thereon. To the complaint, the defendant has answered in effect that the claims in both applications are not patentable in that they do not constitute invention over the prior art, as disclosed by the references cited in the statements of the Primary Examiner and the decisions of the Board of Appeals of the Patent Office, upon which references said claims were rejected and disallowed.
A hearing was had on November 13, 14 and 15, 1951. Voluminous testimony was taken, numerous exhibits introduced, including operating models conforming to the plaintiff's claims and of the more critical references, and also including the exhibition of a motion picture film portraying the interior of a furnace in which the plaintiff's methods were being used. Arguments of counsel were had, and briefs were subsequently filed, the last being filed January 10, 1952. Unfortunately, an intervening court assignment, entailing an unusual volume of current priority matters, has prevented the earlier study and decision in this case.
The claimed inventions here involved both relate to methods and means for the manufacture of glass. For convenience, they will be discussed separately.
The plaintiff considers that the principle constituting novelty and invention in the claimed Lambert application is representatively set forth in claim No. 10, which reads as follows:
The references relied upon in rejecting the claim are:
Peyches (A.P.C.) S.N. 295,028 Pub. April 27, 1943
Clark 1,594,496 Aug. 3, 1926
Hitner 1,827,472 Oct. 13, 1931
Wadman 1,880,541 Oct. 4, 1932
Wadman 1,905,534 April 25, 1933
Romazzotti 2,267,537 Dec. 23, 1941
Perhaps there is no industry in the world which employed from ancient times until an almost recent date the same methods of manufacture as that of making glass. There are three general stages in the process. The first stage is the melting or fusion of the materials out of which the glass is made, which is accomplished by heating the materials to 1200 degrees to 1300 degrees centigrade, at which heat the materials become molten, but with a high viscosity. The next stage is that called "fining" (which is evidently a variant of the common term "refining"), and this is accomplished by raising the temperature of the molten glass to a heat of 1450 degrees centigrade, and its effect, accompanied by foaming, is to get rid of occluded gasses. The third stage in the process is called working or conditioning, and this is accomplished by bringing down the temperature of the mass to about 1100 degrees centigrade so that it may be withdrawn and used by whatever means are employed to shape the glass in the desired form or article. Until fairly recent times, the heating and cooling for the three stages in this process were accomplished by the pot furnace, in which the materials were heated by external means. Such pot furnace was heated or cooled to accomplish the requisite temperature for the different stages of the process. An improvement came about with the use of the tank furnace, generally operated by means of flame introduced into the tank, and then came the introduction of electric heating, used alone, or in combination with flame heating, by means of electrodes introduced into the tank for the purpose of both melting the materials out of which the glass is made and also for the fining of the glass. All of the critical references relied upon in rejection of the claims under consideration relate to this method. The invention here claimed is not different in principle from that of certain of the references in so far as it is a means of introducing heat by electricity into the tank furnace for the purpose of melting the batch of glass-making materials. Its novelty is that the positioning of the electrodes, vertically introduced through the bottom of the tank, and relatively close together, remote from the walls of the tank, and positioned, as they are, in the molten glass below the batch of materials to be melted, accomplish something that is not accomplished by the electrodes in any of the references, or any combination of them. That something is this: Such electrodes, so positioned, not only introduce the heat, which the...
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