Source: http://supreme.nolo.com/us/282/704/case.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 15:02:49+00:00

Document:
1. Patent No. 1, 128, 145 (Claim 25), granted to Inwood and Lavenberg, for mechanical means of holding in proper relative positions side pieces and step-mitered end cleats, preformed and separate, while joining them by stapling and wiring into a foldable box-blank, held invalid for want of invention. P. 282 U. S. 711.
2. The method of making the box-blanks out of separate, preformed pieces, suitably held for stapling and wiring, was involved in and disclosed by an earlier, and now expired, product patent to the same persons. P. 282 U. S. 709.
3. The present patent (Claim 25) covers only a mechanical means, useful in pursuing that method but which did not, in itself, involve invention. It cannot be construed as embracing the method, nor be given the effect of extending the monopoly, of the expired patent. P. 282 U. S. 714.
Certiorari, 281 U.S. 711, to review a decree holding a patent valid and infringed and reversing a decree of the district court, which adjudged otherwise, 24 F.2d 872.
In this case, certiorari was granted, 281 U.S. 711, to resolve a conflict of decision between circuit courts of appeals with respect to the validity of Claim 25 of patent No. 1,128,145, granted February 9, 1915, application filed October 27, 1904, to Inwood and Lavenberg, for a machine for making box blanks. I n the present suit, brought by respondents, in the District Court for Western Michigan to enjoin infringement of this and other patents, the district court held the patent "invalid if infringed," and entered a decree for petitioner, 24 F.2d 872, which the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed, holding Claim 25 valid and infringed. 37 F.2d 830. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit had held the patent invalid, Wirebounds Patents Co. v. Gibbons Box Co., 25 F.2d 363, affirming a decree without opinion of the District Court for Northern Illinois.
expired and only indirectly involved, was No. 799,854, issued to the same patentees September 19, 1905, application filed October 17, 1904 (reissued in 1907, No. 12,725), covering a specific form of box blank which could be produced by the use of the machine and method patents, but also might be made without resort to either.
such application was made, and it was conceded at the bar that the disposition here of the issues raised with respect to Claim 25 will be, for all practical purposes, determinative of the case.
of adjoining cleats engage, and the panels form the four sides of a box, with or without overlapping edges, as may be preferred.
old method of mitering and scoring the rigid blanks, and resulted in a product with fewer defects and which folded more easily than the forms produced by the earlier.
Numerous details of the new procedure had been taught by the prior art. The idea of folding wire- or metal-bound sides into a box was old. Averill (1900, No. 661,481) and Rosback (1898, No. 608,796) specifically taught the binding of the sides together with wire Howenstine (1891, No. 453,479), Hamilton (1887, No. 373,828), and others had developed the idea of using pre-formed cleats attached or to be attached to a plurality of side sheets. Rosback had developed elaborate machines for step-mitering (1898, No. 609,630; 1899, No. 623,258), and for stapling box blanks (1898, No. 614,348; 1899, No. 630,303), and devices for feeding box blank material into the stapling machine (1899, No. 625,958, No. 636,068).
The conception of Inwood and Lavenberg which was new was that the pre-formed cleats and side materials could be assembled and so positioned with reference to each other that they could be stapled together to manufacture, in a single stapling operation, the finished product, the box blank ready for folding. This constituted an important advance over the use of the rigid box blanks in the two-step method of the prior art, which had been developed by Rosback. The new method had a large and immediate commercial success, and we assume, as the court below held, that it involved invention. See The Barbed Wire Patent, 143 U. S. 275, 143 U. S. 283; Krementz v. S. Cottle Co., 148 U. S. 556, 148 U. S. 560; Minerals Separation, Ltd. v. Hyde, 242 U. S. 261.
"Our invention relates to certain improvements in wirebound boxes, especially of that class in which the blanks constituting the four sides of the box are assembled and secured in relative position to each other prior to folding by reinforcing wires, and has for its object the assembling and fastening together such parts constituting the completed blank so that the same when folded will produce overlapping edges of the side sheets."
The drawings of the patent, which show a completed blank ready for folding, read with the specifications, indicate unmistakably that the advance, achieved by the improvement over the existing method of manufacturing box blanks was in the process, by which the product of the patent could be made by assembling and positioning pre-formed cleats and sides, so spaced that, when stapled, they will fold to form the four sides of a box.
because of the delay in filing the divisional application, as was held by the district court below.
All else embodied in the machine and work holder patents, we think, involved not invention, but the application of mechanical skill to the solution of the problem of devising suitable mechanical means for the manufacture of foldable box blanks by the process or method disclosed by the reissue patent.
The prior art had taught how to construct a machine which would fasten with staples the elements of the box blank of the reissue patent. That of Rosback, No. 614,348 and No. 625,958, used for stapling the rigid box forms of the earlier art, consisted of a stapler, stationary guides for directing the sheets and cleats, and an endless chain with attached pushers for feeding the materials along the guides to the stapler. Once it became apparent that an improved method could be employed in manufacturing the completed box blank by assembling all its pre-formed elements and holding them in their appropriate relative positions while they were being fed through a stapling machine, it was equally apparent that the new method could be used only by resort to some appropriate mechanical means for holding the elements of the blank in position until fastened. But the solution of that problem was, we think, obvious, involving only the adaptation of familiar mechanical means for holding cleats and sides in place, and requiring no more than the mechanical skill of the calling. That, we conclude, was all Inwood and Lavenberg achieved by their work holder and machine patents, and it is all that petitioner has done in the adaptation of the Rosback machine which it employs in the use of the method which it is now free to make.
blocks of such size, shape, and location as to hold the cleats in appropriate position. The box sides, resting upon the cleats so engaged, are positioned by the space blocks and held in place by clamps. The work holder, with the assembled elements of the box blank thus held in position, is then passed through the stapling machine, which staples together wire, sides, and cleats. Claim 25 of the machine patent, it will be observed, relates only to cleat treatment. The mechanism which it claims could be operated to make box blanks having multiple preformed cleats and a single piece of side material. It obviously would not, without some modification, hold both cleats and separate side panels in appropriate relative positions for stapling, and so could not be used for making boxes by the improved method. As other claims of the machine patent may be taken to supply this deficiency, we assume, for present purposes, that Claim 25, with others of the machine patent, is broad enough to embrace the essential elements of the work holder, and that the work holder is an exemplification of them. The machine patent, aside from the work controlling means, consists generally of a stapling head surmounting a table with feed roller mechanism for pushing the work holder under the stapler.
and hold back, cleats and side material are held in appropriate positional relationship as they pass under the stapler. By this multiplication of pushers, the Rosback machine did for each panel only what it had previously done for the single rigid box blank. In making the latter, as well as the former, the pushers performed a positioning function, a fact which, alone, challenges the patentability of respondents' machine claim. With the old blank, as well as the new, the pushers could not be placed at random, and cleats and side materials both had to be brought into appropriate relative positions. Moreover, the spacing of the panels with reference to each other in box- or crate-making machines of the Rosback type, by the use of a plurality of space pushers on the same endless feed chain, was old. Such an arrangement, where the pushers performed this positioning function, is shown in Greenstreet (1895, No. 547,486; 1897, No. 579,574), and Lipps & Springer (1905, No. 801,998).
"but the display of the expected skill of the calling, and involves only the exercise of the ordinary faculties of reasoning upon the materials supplied by a special knowledge, and the facility of manipulation which results from its habitual and intelligent practice."
Hollister v. Benedict Mfg. Co., 113 U. S. 59, 113 U. S. 72-73; Concrete Appliances Co. v. Gomery, 269 U. S. 177; Aron v. Manhattan Ry. Co., 132 U. S. 84, 132 U. S. 90.
"It has been suggested that the disclosure made by the method patent left no room for invention in the machine patent. This suggestion cannot be of force, since the patents were co-pending, and one is not prior art as against the other, even if they had not both been issued on the same day. . . . If, by the suggestion, it is meant that the primary thought was in the method, and that little or no invention was needed to make a machine once the method had been conceived, that may be true, but that cannot militate against the validity of the machine patent when the two are practically simultaneous, for in such case the concept involved in the method is an important and perhaps a vital part of the machine invention. The concept which underlies and precedes the machine may or may not involve an independently patentable method; in either event alike, the machine is patentable."
disclose or involve the conception of the reissue patent of producing foldable relationships in one step, which, as we have said, is the new result.
The machine and work holder patents describe and claim only a combination of mechanical elements enumerated and arranged as stated in Claim 25, as we have construed it. This combination, which had been found suitable for manufacturing blanks with a plurality of pre-formed cleats and a single piece of side material, was suitable for using the process of the reissue patent, as is the combination used by petitioner. Such possibilities of use might be spelled out of the machine and work holder patents by one skilled in the art and familiar with the process described in the reissue patent. But nowhere do they describe or claim, as the invention of the patent, the new method or procedure of Inwood and Lavenberg which was their improvement on the prior art. That is told in full in the reissue patent, and it is there that the dominating new result appears. Obviously, from what we have said, if the method concept which underlay and preceded the machine had not been independently patentable, the machine could not have been. For the same reasons, the machine cannot be patentable merely because it is capable of use in applying a conception independently patentable.
The question, therefore, is not one of reliance upon the prior art of the reissue patent as against a co-pending patent, or of double patenting, or of the overlapping of specific and generic patents. It is the attempted extension of the monopoly of the expired reissue patent in Inwood and Lavenberg's invention by resort to the machine patent, and to the work holder from which the described invention had been subtracted by division, and which cover, not the invention of the reissue patent, but a mechanical device which does not involve invention.
"Machine Patent No. 1,128,145 Claim 25. A machine for making box blanks comprising work controlling means having cleat-positioning means to receive sectional cleats in parallel lines, and spacing means to space cleats endwise from each other in each line, preparatory to connecting said cleats in their spaced relation, said work controlling means being arranged to receive side material to be secured to said cleats; fastener applying means for securing binding means to the side material and cleats controlled by the work controlling means; means for relatively feeding the work controlling means and fastener applying mechanism for securing said binding means across the intervals between said spaced cleats to secure them together in their spaced relations to form a foldable blank."
"Machine Patent No. 1,128,145 Claim 55. A machine for making box blanks comprising a plurality of groups of working controlling means, each group for a separate individual side section of the box, and comprising means to support cleats and side material in cooperative relationship for being secured together to form a box side, and each group having means to support its cleats and side material in a relationship to enable the same to be folded cooperatively with corresponding portions of a side section controlled by another group, and means to secure wire binding to the respective side sections and to provide wires for connecting one section and another in foldable relationship."
"Work holder Patent No. 1,128,144, Claim 6. Work controlling means for use in the manufacture of wire-bound boxes comprising, in combination, cleat-positioning means to receive a plurality of rows of cleats disposed substantially end to end, and cleat-spacing means relatively adjustable to suit individual cleats of different lengths to be received in said positioning means."
"Method Patent No. 1,128,252, Claim 2. The method of making wirebound boxes having individual cleats and individual side pieces separated at the lateral corner edges of the completed box and connected by wires at said edges, which comprises assembling previously formed individual cleats with the separate previously formed side material for an individual side to provide a side unit of the box; assembling additional such side units to provide the other sides of the box; securing to the cleats of each side unit a wire binding extending completely across said unit; connecting said side units by said wire binding, while leaving the latter laterally flexible to accommodate relative shifting of the separate meeting edges of the pieces of side material, arranging said side units in box form, and completing the continuity of the wire binding; whereby relative longitudinal shifting of meeting edges or pieces of side material tends to bend the wire binding out of normal alignment, and is resisted by the tensile strength of the wire."

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.