Court Opinion

ID: 9638077
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:32:40.68618+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:03.507942
License: Public Domain

On Application for Rehearing.
In their petition for rehearing, the appellees’ principal contention is that Daukus Patent No. 1,777,399 anticipates and invalidates the patent in suit, Daukus Patent No. 2,324,913. In the District Court the appellees evidently considered this a very minor point, for while the Daukus Patent No. 1,777,399 was included in a group of some thirty patents introduced in evidence and claimed to anticipate, no specific mention of this particular patent appears in the transcript of the testimony. The District Court made no finding upon this point. The only expert discussion of it to be found in the evidence appears in the proceedings in the Patent Office. The Examiner gave unusually extended consideration to Daukus Patent No. 1.777.399 before allowing the claims in suit. Objections made before the Board of Interference Examiners based upon the earlier Daukus Patent were overruled. In view of the absence of testimony supporting appel-lees’ contention that Daukus Patent No. 1.777.399 invalidates Daukus Patent No. 2,324,913, the conclusions of the expert tribunals should not lightly be set aside.
We think the record shows that the conclusion of the Patent Office was correct. The purpose of the earlier Daukus Patent was to prevent chatter which Daukus considered was caused by the complete rigidity of the clutch. He hoped to solve this problem by making the clutch plate slightly yieldable when first applied to .the driving member. He conceived and disclosed a structure in which a circular plate should be formed with a series of openings “closely spaced in order to form narrow arms” which would be capable of yielding during the initial engagement between the clutch member and the flywheel. He also provided for slots cut through the rim around the edge of the clutch plate, which he considered further facilitated the yieldability. As pointed out in the interference proceedings by appellees’ attorney, Daukus thus sought to secure flexibility by decreasing circumferential strength instead of by decreasing thickness, as in the patent in suit. The patent is in no way addressed to the problem of reducing spinning inertia and discloses, as stated by appellees’ attorney, no “mechanism for dealing with the problem.” On the contrary, the problem successfully dealt with in the patent in suit as set forth in our opinion is the elimination not only of chatter but also of spinning inertia. The petition for rehearing is denied.