Univis Corporation v. Rips, 7594

• Decision Date: 03 May 1939
• Docket Number: No. 7594,7595.,7594
• Parties: UNIVIS CORPORATION et al. v. RIPS et al. SAME v. GRIMSHAW.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

104 F.2d 749 (1939)

UNIVIS CORPORATION et al. v. RIPS et al. SAME v. GRIMSHAW.

Nos. 7594, 7595.

Circuit Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

May 3, 1939.

H. A. Toulmin, Jr., of Dayton, Ohio (H. A. Toulmin and H. A. Toulmin, Jr., both of Dayton, Ohio, and Ralph Routier, of Detroit, Mich., on the brief), for appellants.

Victor D. Borst, of New York City, and Otto F. Barthel, of Detroit, Mich. (Victor D. Borst, of New York City, and Otto F. Barthel, of Detroit, Mich., on the brief), for appellees.

Before HICKS, SIMONS, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

HICKS, Circuit Judge.

Separate suits by appellants against Paul Rips and Rips Optical Company and against Charlotte M. Grimshaw, an employee of Rips, for infringement of Patents No. 1,899,777 issued February 28, 1933, to Stanley; and No. 1,912,165 issued May 30, 1933, to Silverman.

Infringement is conceded. The District Court found both patents invalid for want of invention. The cases are here on one record. All claims of both patents are in issue.

These patents relate to bifocal lenses for spectacles or eye-glasses.

Bifocal lenses are very old. It appears that the earliest such lens was contrived by Benjamin Franklin, who mounted two separate lenses, one above the other, in a single frame. One advance beyond the Franklin arrangement retained the bifocal feature by grinding the upper and lower parts of a single lens to different curvatures; another restored the dual lens but inserted the minor one as a plug in a hole ground in the lower part of the major one or cemented it on the major one. Later the idea was developed of grinding a recess into a piece of ordinary lens material such as crown glass of suitable dimensions and fusing therein a piece of glass of different ingredients and hence of different refractive power. See Patent No. 876,933 to Borsch, January 21, 1908. The whole was then ground and polished on both surfaces. An example of this is the familiar Kryptok.

Courmettes No. 1,160,383, issued November 16, 1915. Courmettes ground a recess into the major lens and also used the fusion process, as did Borsch, but he prepared the blank for the minor lens out of two blocks of glass of different refractive power, which he fastened edge to edge. The upper block was of the same refraction as that in the major lens but the lower was denser. When the blank was fitted to the recess of the major lens, fused in, ground down and polished, the result was startling. The upper half of the minor lens, being composed of glass like that of of a major lens, merged with it and neutralized. The lower half of the insert, of different refraction, alone remained visible and appeared "in the finished lens as a half circle minor portion, the optical center of which being on the line dividing the bifocal surface."

Courmettes' object was to eliminate both double vision and chromatic aberration and he found that this could be achieved by providing that "the line dividing the different refractive portions, should pass through the exact optical center of the minor lens." The minor lens "feathered out" along its half circular edge but presented a thick, straight, shoulder along its horizontal upper edge.

Tillyer No. 1,544,612, issued July 7, 1925 (reissued), utilized the fusion or cementing process in the more particular placement of his minor lens to "eliminate to a very great degree the jump or displacement of the image as the eye passes over the line of division between the two portions of the lens" and to vary the "relative position of the centers of the near and distant portion * * * without affecting the general appearance of the lens. * * *" (Italics ours.)

Tillyer amplified the above statement as follows: "Prior to this invention it has been customary in the construction of two part bifocals, as for example, in what is commonly called the Kryptok lens, to make use of a major portion of one refractive index and a minor portion of a different refractive index, a countersink for the minor portion being formed in the major portion and having its thinnest point * * * disposed at the geometrical center of the countersink. Bifocals of this type when completed have had the center of the reading portion therefore disposed way down into the reading portion. It is one of the purposes of the invention to obviate the difficulties present when the center is so positioned by providing a construction in which the center is near but preferably not on the line of division between the two fields. * * *" (Italics ours.)

This was a decided advance in the art. In achieving his objectives, Tillyer used a minor lens of different refraction and fixed it into a recess ground in the major one but his means were not Courmettes'. He fashioned his insert blank in circular form but larger than the recess, then reduced its size and in doing so ground its edges eccentrically with reference to its optical center so that the latter lay near one edge of the final circular insert blank. To receive it, the recess in the major lens was ground on an angle so that it was deeper toward the center with a thick shoulder thereat, graduating to no depth at all at the point near the bottom of the major lens. The insert was fitted into this recess with its optical center nearest the shoulder. Fused on, ground down and polished, the minor portion had "a thin lower edge blended into the finished curve and * * * a thick shouldered upper edge lying below the optical center of the major portion and above the optical center of the minor portion." (Italics ours.)

In Courmettes the optical center of the lower lens coincided with this shoulder. Tillyer...