Court Opinion

ID: 9757223
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 22:26:16.730711+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:36.579005
License: Public Domain

MADDEN, Judge
(dissenting).
I am not able to agree with the court’s decision. The device of using “a chambered gas-tight device capable of expansion and contraction responsive to variations in atmospheric pressure” was not new. It was used in the Galli patent and in the Weather Bureau device, both of which anticipated the plaintiff’s patent.
The use of the force generated by the expansion or contraction of a chamber filled with air or gas to release a trigger and thus set in motion other intermediate forces to accomplish an ultimate purpose was not new. Such use was embodied in both the Galli and the Weather Bureau structures.
The intermediate devices, springs, etc., used in the Government’s structure were not copied from the plaintiff’s patent. Of course they accomplished the same ultimate purpose, the untying of the package containing the packed parachute. But even a casual look at the figures shown in the findings discloses that the mechanical steps between the trigger and the opening of the parachute were entirely different in the plaintiff’s and the Government’s structures. Besides, looking at these intermediate devices alone, there was no invention in either of the structures. No two skilled *551mechanical engineers would design the same structures for these intermediate steps, but no one could claim invention for any of the steps involved in either structure with which we are here concerned. Besides, as I have said, the Government did not use the plaintiff’s intermediate devices.
What, then, is the basis of the plaintiff’s patent. It cannot be the expansible chamber triggering other mechanical devices to exert force on the fastenings of the parachute. That idea was old. It cannot be the intermediate mechanical devices themselves. They are not claimed to be patentable, and at any rate they were not used in the Government’s structure. It must, then, be the combination of the expansible chamber, the trigger, and the intermediate devices for the purpose of releasing a parachute.
But the combination too was old. It was exactly what had been actually done in the Weather Bureau device and what had been described in the Galli patent. In the Weather Bureau device the trigger was set so that when the expansible chamber expanded because the outside air pressure diminished as the balloon carrying the device rose, when that expansion reached the point which it would reach at a predetermined height, the trigger would be released and, by intermediate devices, the parachute would be detached from the balloon. It was exactly the combination of mechanisms and forces involved in the plaintiff’s conception and the Government’s structure. In the Weather Bureau device the expansion of the chamber released the trigger; in the plaintiff’s and the Government’s devices the contraction of the chamber released the trigger. Surely that difference is immaterial. If a device for releasing a parachute by the use of air pressure when the parachute is being carried up is in the public domain, surely one cannot get a patent monopoly on the same device used to release a parachute when it is-being carried down.
The court speaks of the fact that the plaintiff, shortly after filing his application for a patent, disclosed his conception to the Air Force which wrote him that “no satisfactory automatic parachute opening device has been developed” and that his method appeared to be feasible. The court then says:
“We are of opinion that the information plaintiff furnished probably aided the Army Air Force to construct its F-l release, which it had been unable to construct or to perfect prior to the disclosure in plaintiff’s patent application.”
This judicial surmise would seem to me to be “probably” inaccurate. I find it hard to believe that the Air Force would not have known that air pressure acting on an expansible chamber could trigger the release of a wound-up spring and thereby pull a cord. The ingenious, whether workable or not, intermediate devices disclosed by the plaintiff could not have helped the Air Force much, for they did not come anywhere near to copying them. But the observation quotefl above seems to me to be irrelevant. If the things which the plaintiff’s application disclosed were already in the public domain, the fact that the Air Force did not know them, or had forgotten them, and only began to think of them seriously after seeing the plaintiff’s application would neither help nor hurt the validity of the plaintiff’s patent. One might have a guilty intent to' infringe upon another's patent, but if it turns out that the patent had been anticipated, no legal consequences flow from his guilty state of mind.
When many persons, including the Air Force itself, were working feverishly to bring to mechanically workable perfection a device so essential as the one here involved, it is not remarkable that the Air Force’s workable device should have followed closely, in point' of time, the disclosure of the plaintiff’s intellectual concept. But it is no proper case for the application of the maxim post hoc ergo propter hoc. And if it were, it would not prove anything about the validity of the plaintiff’s patent.