Woodmanse & Hewitt Manuf'g Co. v. Williams
| Decision Date | 04 June 1895 |
| Docket Number | 267. |
| Citation | 68 F. 489 |
| Parties | WOODMANSE & HEWITT MANUF'G CO. v. WILLIAMS et al. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
L. L Coburn, for appellant.
Bondeman & Adams (Dallas Bondeman, of counsel), for appellees.
Before TAFT and LURTON, Circuit Judges, and HAMMOND, District Judge.
This is a bill in equity. It was filed August 1, 1890. Complainant is by assignment the owner of two patents for certain improvements in windmills, which it alleges have been, and are being continuously, infringed by the defendants. The prayer of the bill is for an injunction, and for an accounting as to damages and profits. No preliminary injunction was asked or allowed, and upon final hearing the bill was dismissed upon grounds stated in an opinion by District Judges Sage and Severens. [1] The original bill was filed alone against the individual defendants Bradley S Williams, Malcolm B. Williams, and Homer Manvel, who were charged as being engaged in manufacturing and selling windmills infringing the complainant's two patents, under the firm name and style of B. S. Williams & Co. The evidence taken developed the fact that about two years before the suit was begun the firm of B. S. Williams & Co. had ceased to do business as a firm, and had organized a corporation known as the Williams Manufacturing Company, to which the entire plant and business of the firm had been conveyed, and in which the individual members of the firm were interested as shareholders and managers. Upon this appearing, the court required complainant to amend its bill by making the corporation a defendant, which was done May 10, 1892. Its answer embodied substantially the defenses theretofore set up in the answer of the individual defendants. Among the defenses set up in their answer were, noninfringement, want of patentable novelty, anticipation by many other patents specifically set out, prior use by the defendants and their predecessors in business, denial that either complainant or its assignors had given defendants or their predecessors in business any notice that they were infringing. They further specifically aver that both of the patents claimed by complainant were anticipated by the Bignell patent No 180,189, dated July 15, 1876, and that defendants were owners of an interest under that patent, or of the invention therein secured to Bignell and others, and that they had, as assignees of an interest therein, made and sold windmills under the Bignell patent in good faith. The answers also denied that Anderson, the patentee under one of complainant's patents, was the original inventor of the improvement claimed in the patent issued to him
In the view we have taken of the evidence, it is only necessary for us to determine whether the laches of the complainant and its assignors has been such as will prevent a court of equity from entertaining this bill. One of the patents owned by complainant is for an improvement in windmills, issued December 19, 1876, on an application filed August 14, 1876 and was issued to L. D. Anderson, assignor to Harrison Woodmanse, being patent No. 185,423. What the patentee claimed is thus described:
'What I claim as new, and desire to secure by letters-patent, is as follows: In a windmill, the shoe or brake, d, in combination with the vane, B, and shaft, A, of the windmill, substantially as and for the purposes specified.'
The other patent involved is patent No. 220,514, dated October 14, 1879, and was issued to Harrison Woodmanse, assignor of the Anderson patent, and Samuel Lebkicker, for an improvement in windmills by providing a lever in connection with a brake wheel so arranged as to be operated by a projection upon the inner end of the vane, for the purpose of rendering the brake more effective. Complainant's suit must turn upon the alleged infringement of the claims of the Anderson patent. The claim of the Woodmanse & Lebkicker patent involved is the first, which reads as follows:
'The brake shoe, b; the lever, c, in combination with the wheel, a, and vane, c, substantially as and for the purposes specified.'
This slightly different arrangement of the leverage, in the application of the brake to the shaft, from that claimed in the Anderson patent, is not satisfactorily shown to have been infringed by the brake used by defendants.
In 1873, Bradley S. Williams, W. H. Pendleton, Kirk A. Smith and C. M. Hobbs, under the style of Pendleton, Williams & Co., began the business of making and selling windmills at Kalamazoo, Mich. That business has been steadily pursued, and the Williams Manufacturing Company are but the successors of the original firm of Pendleton, Williams & Co. Hobbs and Smith, of the original firm, sold out in 1879. The defendant Homer Manvel bought in in 1874, and the other individual defendants bought an interest in 1880. From 1880 the firm was composed of B. S. Williams, Homer Manvel, and M. B. Williams, and did business as B. S. Williams & Co. until 1889, when the present corporation was organized, the same persons being stockholders and officers. The evidence clearly establishes that, as early as 1874 or 1875, the defendants, or their predecessors in business, began making a brake, and applying it to their windmills, which is substantially the same brake which the present corporation is making, and this brake, with occasional slight improvements, has been continuously made and used on the windmills sold by defendants, or those to whom it has succeeded, for a period of about 15 years before this suit was brought. Now, if it be conceded that the patents owned by complainant were not anticipated by either the Bignell patent or any of the others claimed as anticipations, a point by no means clear, and that the brake made and sold with the defendants' mills does infringe both or either of the complainant's patents, we then have a case where suit has been delayed against an infringer openly and publicly engaged in selling a rival and competitive mill to that made and sold by complainant and its assignors for a period of 14 years after issuance of the Anderson patent, and of about 11 years after the Woodmanse and Lebkicker improvement. No excuse for this long delay is shown. Mr. Woodmanse, who is the manager of the complainant corporation, was the assignor of the Anderson patent, and a joint patentee under the improved brake covered by the letters patent granted in 1879. Since 1876 Woodmanse has been engaged in the same line of business, and has been interested in the successive firms and corporations controlling both the Anderson and Woodmanse patents. The complainant does not pretend that it or its predecessors were ignorant of the alleged infringement. No such excuse is offered. Indeed it is not within the range of probability that two rival concerns engaged in selling competitive windmills in the same section of the Union could have been ignorant of the fact that the mills of each contained substantially the same brake mechanism. Neither does it appear that the complainant was...
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