Court Opinion

ID: 8814730
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 15:14:15.167331+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:04:25.429082
License: Public Domain

On Petition for Rehearing.
[7] The application for rehearing brings to our attention a matter not mentioned in the opinion. We selected claim 5 as the one most suitable for study, because it expressly incorporated those features in which we thought patentable novelty was to be found. One of these features was the horizontally movable boom carrying the conduit, and “being adjustably connected with the tower and adapted to be arranged at various positions in the height .thereof.” We assumed that this referred to a vertical adjustment of the boom in the tower. The assumption is now challenged, because it is said that the adjustable connection between the boom and the tower was that mechanism which provided for a horizontal adjustment of the upper end of the boom on a horizontal track (which defendant has not used), and that the provision for vertical change of the boom in the tower is not adjustability, but rather refers to a disassembling of the parts in-one location and reassembling them in another. It is true that the specification refers to a horizontal adjustability, but we do not think that it is this capacity to which claim 5 refers — at any rate, this inference is not clear enough to justify limiting the claim to a comparatively unimportant detail. Such an inference is contradicted, both by the fact that this horizontal adjustability of the boom on the tower is made the special characteristic of a group of claims not in suit, and by the fact that the thought is stated in the claim in immediate connection with the reference to “various points in the height” of the tower, and after one reference has been made to the horizontal motion of the boom and the reference to that function apparently finished, while the draftsman turned to the thought of vertical change. It is true, also, that in the form of the invention shown in the drawings, and specifically described, the vertical change was to be made by taking out bolts, removing the horizontal platform, raising it, and bolting it again to a new position, and that this is not adjustability in the most precise definition. However, it is well within the sense in which the word is very often used, and we must define it as the patentee intended. For these reasons we adhere to the interpretation of the claim in this respect which the opinion assumed.
It is also true enough that Callahan specifically contemplated building his tower up section by section, as the building progressed; but this was a matter of preference. His drawing shows tibe completed tower, *968permitting operation anywhere along its height, and observation of his plan of erection does not change our conception of the real disclosure.
In other respects, further review of the case leaves our stated conclusions unchanged,- and the application for rehearing will be disallowed.