Home/Seventh Circuit/Burroughs Adding Mach. Co. v. Felt & Tarrant Mfg. Co.

Burroughs Adding Mach. Co. v. Felt & Tarrant Mfg. Co.

243 F. 861, 156 C.C.A. 373, 1917 U.S. App. LEXIS 2170
Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit·Decided April 10, 1917·No. No. 2255·Published·Cited by 25 cases

Opinion

SANBORN, District Judge.

These patents are for improvements on adding machines, for which Eelt had taken out earlier patents expiring before this suit was begun. The chief question is whether the mechanism employed by defendant, different from that illustrated by the patents in suit, is an infringement. The improvements covered by the patents are many of them meritorious and valuable, and give the machine much greater flexibility and rapidity of action than the earlier forms. As to most of the improvements the Burroughs Company has sufficiently departed from the patented form to escape infringement, but as to one of them, particularly, there is question.

The principle of action of an adding or calculating machine is not difficult to understand, but there is much complication in the actual machine. Aside from the recording of results on paper, and restoring the machine from one operation so that another may be begun, known as “clearing the machine” or canceling the former operation, an adding machine depends on three points. These are:- (1) The use of the numeral-wheel and column-actuator; (2) the carrying mechanism, by which the turning of the units wheel beyond a full revolution carries one to the next wheel, and so on through a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, etc.; and (3) the employment of stop mechanism to prevent the wheels from overrunning, and thus turning up a greater number than the one struck. ,

The Numeral-Wheel Mechanism. On the periphery of the numeral-wheel the digits 1 to 9 and the cipher are printed, and there are nine keys, marked 1 to 9. When a key is depressed the wheel will turn up to view the number which the key bears. Thus if the 6 key is touched the number 6 will come up, and if then the 2 in the-same bank or column is touched the number 8 will appear, each key having the ability to turn the wheel that many tenths of a revolution corresponding to its own value. Depressing the 3 key turns the wheel three-tenths around, the 8 four-fifths, etc. If the 9 is struck and then the 1 the wheel will complete one revolution, and turn up the cipher. All this is accomplished by the relation of the key bars to the column-actuator and the numeral wheel, as shown by the accompanying cut, being plaintiff’s Comparative Drawing No. 22, which needs only the number keys to give a clear idea of the latest form of calculating machine. With a bank of keys over each column-actuator the picture would be complete; but it may readily be understood that if the keys are so placed that they can depress the column-actuator, number 1 key being nearest the wheel and number 9 farthest away, the same depression of the latter may be made to depress the actuator 9 times as far as the. former, since 9 is near the fulcrum of the actuator and 1 is farthest away.

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Burroughs Adding Mach. Co. v. Felt & Tarrant Mfg. Co., 243 F. 861, 156 C.C.A. 373, 1917 U.S. App. LEXIS 2170 (7th Cir. 1917).

243 F. 861 (Burroughs Adding Mach. Co. v. Felt & Tarrant Mfg. Co.) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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