Winget Kickernick Co. v. Kenilworth Mfg. Co.
| Decision Date | 01 March 1926 |
| Docket Number | No. 151.,151. |
| Citation | 11 F.2d 1 |
| Parties | WINGET KICKERNICK CO. et al. v. KENILWORTH MFG. CO. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
Briesen & Schrenk, of New York City (Hans v. Briesen, of New York City, of counsel), for appellant.
Frank A. Whiteley, of Minneapolis, Minn., for appellees.
Before MANTON, HAND, and MACK, Circuit Judges.
This suit is on claims 1, 2, and 5 of patent No. 1,389,067 for an undergarment for women. The object is to provide an undergarment with a closed crotch and an opening alongside the leg, which shall be adapted to have the leg closed to produce a bloomer construction, and which shall fit the wearer, no matter what the position of the body, without any strain or tension at any point, and which shall be particularly comfortable when worn. It may be either a union garment, consisting of waist and leg portions, or drawers-bloomers only. It is adapted to slip up over the form of the wearer, there being only a side opening along one of the legs, and which is closed by buttons or snaps, or other forms of fastening. The substantial fullness is produced by the combined effect of making the back portion of the garment longer in amount of material than the front portion, and gathering the edges of the back portion to the edges of the front portion, in combination with the provision of a rectangular insertion sewed directly to the center cleft edges of the front member and the curved bottom edge of the back member, whereby the two portions are united to form legs, and at the same time provide a substantial depth of material at the crotch.
It is composed of three pieces — the back member, the front member, and an insert. It is made simple by the fact that the front member is formed with a single slit or cleft at its center, to which the insert is sewed directly, the same being in turn sewed to the bottom curved edge of the back member, whereby legs of substantial length are provided with a markedly full seat portion, and yet the garment will have a straight front, closely fitting the form of the wearer. The garment has the characteristics of the short straight front, straight hanging legs in front, long spreading rear and seat, differing radically from the front, and particularly having depth rearwardly at the crotch, and the back really suspended at its attachment to the front, and forming a hammock structure, into which the wearer sits, rather than a hard-drawn line extending between the crotch, as existed in the prior art bloomers.
In the early form of bloomers, the front and back members were cut practically identically along the same line, both in extent and shape, and for this reason they were flat, without any depth from front to back. The crotch line was very low hung, coming well down below the crotch line, and they were usually cut with four seams all coming to the center, and the body (back) went in at the center, and the front went in at the center and the back; the seams along the inside of the legs connecting the front and back members. The front and back seams lay in the central plane of the body, from front to back, and the inner leg seams through the leg into the central plane, so that, since the front and back were all the same length, the inner leg seams were of the same length, and therefore the meeting of these seams was at almost exactly the central point of the crotch line. Some of the garments were cut without seams in front, but they were shaped in the same way; they all converged at the crotch line, so that these were distinct characteristics in this kind of garment. This new construction had the effect of producing practically a new article in the art, and also a new result.
Prior patents — to Morris, No. 1,098,960, issued 1914; Johnson, No. 850,013, issued 1907; Lowenstein, No. 241, issued 1881; and Lewis, No. 621,352, issued 1899 — are all referred to as prior art. The nearest is the patent to Morris. The difference between it and the patent in suit is that there is not the same co-operative relation with other parts of the garment; that the insert member has not the same co-operative operation with other parts of the garment, and does not serve the purpose of the insert as referred to in the claims of the patent in suit. The resemblance of the Morris patent to that of the patent in suit does not suggest a combination, or the purpose or result of the combination of the...
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Highway Appliances Co. v. AMERICAN CONCRETE EJ CO.
...White Lily Mfg. Co. (C.C.A.) 213 F. 471; Topliff v. Topliff, 145 U.S. 156, 171, 12 S.Ct. 825, 36 L.Ed. 658; Winget Kickernick Co. et al. v. Kenilworth Mfg. Co. (C.C.A.) 11 F.2d 1. While the claims are not as certain in describing the device and its purpose as they might be, yet, when we con......
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