Home/Third Circuit/Davis Pressed-Steel Co. v. Morris Box-Lid Co.

Davis Pressed-Steel Co. v. Morris Box-Lid Co.

81 F. 407, 1897 U.S. App. LEXIS 1871
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Third Circuit
DecidedMay 25, 1897
DocketNo. 6
StatusPublished

This text of 81 F. 407 (Davis Pressed-Steel Co. v. Morris Box-Lid Co.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Davis Pressed-Steel Co. v. Morris Box-Lid Co., 81 F. 407, 1897 U.S. App. LEXIS 1871 (3d Cir. 1897).

Opinion

BUFFINGTON, District Judge.

The Morris Box-Lid Company filed a bill in the circuit court of the United States for the district of Delaware praying an injunction against the Davis Pressed-Steel. Company and Nathan S. Davis for infringement of three patents owned by it, viz. patent 211,854, granted February 4, 1879, to Jacob. Kinzer; No. 379,712, granted March 20, 1888, to George W. Morris; and No. 423,795, March 18, 1890, to the same. These patents are for car axle box lids. After replication filed, complainant gave notice that its prima facie case would be made out without reference to the Kinzer patent, and that proceedings would be had for dismissal of. the bill as respects it without prejudice. No such action was had,, but thereafter the case was proceeded in with sole reference to the remaining patents. The court, adjudging claim 1 of the first Morris patent and claims 4 and 5 of the second were valid and infringed, decreed an injunction, and from such decree an appeal was taken, and is now before us. The case involves lids or coverings for boxes which are filled with waste saturated with lubricants, and incase the outer end of car axles. By the rapid motion of the railway cars on which they are fitted, and their proximity to the ground, such boxes are necessarily exposed to clouds of dust and flying dirt. Th *. entrance of these foreign substances into the boxes is highly objectionable, as they injure the lubricants, cut the axles, and tend to produce hot boxes. Ordinarily, these lids were cast iron, and were kept in place by springs secured to them by rivets, but the strain upon such rivets was severe, and caused them to wear out soon. To repair a lid necessitated its removal from the box. As early as 1877,: Morris, in his patent No. 192,524, had shown a sheet-steel lid, which wholly dispensed, with rivets. It had two hinged extension pieces, which, with the box-hinged bar, formed a pintle joint, and between these extensions the lid took the form of a tongue or clamping spring; which rested on a bearing on the top of the journal box. In 1879, Jacob Kinzer, in his patent No. 211,854, already referred to as being-owned by complainant, and originally one of alleged infringed patents in this bill, devised another method of dispensing with rivets. It consisted of a self-attaching spring. To this end he employed a cast-iron lid hinged to the box in the ordinary way. To hold it in place he used a flat steel spring with an inturned or right-angled lip at the lower end. The three bearing points of the spring were, as follows: The first was where the upper end rested on the box aboythe hinge; the second was a lip dropped from the upper end edge of a loop or keeper riveted transversely on the outer side of the lid, and the third was a raised transverse section in a groove or chan[409]*409nel which extended from the said loop to a lip or handle at the lower end of the lid. This channel, as its name implies, had edge flanges, which prevented the spring from escaping laterally, and at its lower end a cross-section depression, flanked at its lower end by a raised lip, which latter served the double purpose of a handle to raise the lid and a stop for the spring. The other side of the cross depression was formed by the raised projection referred to, which latter served the double purpose of a third bearing point for the spring, and also of a lock to keep it in place. To place the spring in functional position, it was driven from the upper end, and its lower end forced over the cross section, the top of which formed the third bearing. Further driving forced the angled end into the transverse depression already referred to. Here the lip or handle prevented its further movement downward, while its angled end engaging with, or, as the [410]*410patent says, “locking against, the front receding side of the bearing, will prevent the spring from working endwise by jarring, so as to be freed from action.” Kinzer’s device was never commercially developed, as, indeed, was also the case with the device shown' in the Morris 1888 patent in suit. Whether it could have been successfully manufactured and applied is problematical, but, apart from all other questions, the cost of construction, arising from the material used and the growing tendency to supplant cast iron with pressed steel, were in themselves sufficient to account for' its nonuse. Still the teaching of the patent, its plain disclosure of the possibility — and practicability — of providing a box lid with a self-securing spring, and thus dispensing wholly with riveted springs, are facts of significant weight where a subsequent inventor claims as a pioneer to have first opened a road, rather than to have merely bettered and improved a pathway he found already existing.

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Bluebook (online)
81 F. 407, 1897 U.S. App. LEXIS 1871, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/davis-pressed-steel-co-v-morris-box-lid-co-ca3-1897.