Home/U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illnois/General Sub-Const. Co. v. Netcher

General Sub-Const. Co. v. Netcher

167 F. 549, 1909 U.S. App. LEXIS 5354
CourtU.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illnois
DecidedFebruary 11, 1909
DocketNo. 28,238
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 167 F. 549 (General Sub-Const. Co. v. Netcher) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering U.S. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illnois primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
General Sub-Const. Co. v. Netcher, 167 F. 549, 1909 U.S. App. LEXIS 5354 (circtndil 1909).

Opinion

SANBORN, District Judge.

This is a suit in equity for the alleged infringement of letters patent No. 718,441, issued January 13, 1903, to John M. Ewen, covering a mechanical process or method of making substructures for buildings. The general purpose of 1 he inventor was to so construct the exterior wall trench, extending around the proposed building, as to sustain and equalize the lateral pressure from adjoining buildings and streets, without the necessity of shoring or underpinning them. While the owner of land may [550]*550not remove the lateral support of adjoining land in its natural state, he may do so as to artificial structures, provided he uses ordinary care. This is the common law. But in a large city a builder cannot afford to stand on his common-law right. Business necessity and the convenience of his neighbors, his own power to proceed uninterruptedly with his building, the probability of litigation over the vexed question of ordinary care — always a troublesome question, and one immensely difficult in lateral support cases — all combine to influence him to find some means of sustaining adjoining structures while proceeding with his own. Indeed, it has become the general if not universal custom in large cities for builders to do this, and contracts for large buildings commonly so provide; so the necessity in building operations in large cities for some practical means of sustaining adjoining buildings is apparent. Another important element of tire problem is the deep basement, lately made more important by the construction of the Chicago Subway.

The problem of lateral support in building operations has always been an important and difficult one, and it was partly solved more than a hundred years ago. In 1803 the center-core system, as it has been called, was used on the Tronquoy Tunnel in France, and has been ever since employed in some form. This system is the leading feature of the Ewen patent, and has long been applied to parallel longitudinal trench open-cut tunneling. Its simplest illustration is a street subway. Two parallel trenches are dug, one on each side of the street. These are lined with planks or timbers, braced with pieces of timber to prevent caving. The middle of the street is the center core. A stone wall is built in each trench, girders laid from the top of the walls to a column set in the street center, and the street surface constructed upon the girders. The core of earth is then removed, and the tunnel complete. This description is not technically accurate, but good enough to illustrate the plan of overcoming lateral pressure by the. center-core system, with its trenches, trench linings, and braces, the girders finally taking the place of the core. It was employed in the great Boston subway, built in 1896 and 1897, and was fully known to the inventor when he conceived his invention in 1902. The system is completely described in the Goodredge patent of 1882, No. 262,403, except that sheet piling or plank driven into the earth, edge to edge, is used to line the trenches, without braces; was applied to a single trench by Friestedt, in his patent of 1890, No. 4.35,492, for supporting and lowering building foundations; and the feature relating to the use of linings and extensible braces is covered by the McKiernan patent of 1873, No. 145,116. Some features of the system also appear in other illustrations of the prior art, among others the Washington patent of 1900, No. 654,426. It was also employed on the east wall of the Tribune Building in Chicago in 1901, where a rigid wall was constructed on the outside of the wall trench, and a flexible lining on the inside against the earth core, the space between the two being braced by jackscrews. This is shown by the following cut:

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Related

H. Mueller Meg. Co. v. Glauber
184 F. 609 (Seventh Circuit, 1910)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
167 F. 549, 1909 U.S. App. LEXIS 5354, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/general-sub-const-co-v-netcher-circtndil-1909.