Court Opinion

ID: 9447501
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:36:39.150761+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:04.456831
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
This action was brought to recover the contract price of wire sold and delivered to defendant by plaintiff upon defendant’s written order. On receiving the wire manufactured in accord with the order the defendant used it by cutting it up and burying it in the ground in position on the works to carry electrical currents. On request for payment, defendant denied liability to pay the agreed purchase price or any part and counterclaimed for damages for breach of contract. Judgment was for defendant.
On the trial of the case to the Court without a jury it appeared that the defendant had a construction contract with the government which called for a special kind of wire covered with metal shielding, plainly distinguishable on sight and much more costly than the commoner wire described in defendant’s written order and delivered by plaintiff in accord with the order. Defendant claimed, however, that it told plaintiff’s agent over the telephone exactly the kind of wire that was specified in the construction contract and also that it mailed the plaintiff a copy of those specifications. Defendant’s witness said the copy was mailed all by itself in an addressed and stamped envelope. Defendant’s position was that because plaintiff knew of the kind of wire the government’s contract with defendant called for plaintiff became obligated though it never agreed to deliver that kind of wire to defendant for the price of the cheaper wire which the plaintiff had described and offered defendant and which defendant ordered by the same description.
On the other hand, it was shown that before the manufacture of the wire for defendant, defendant wrote plaintiff that wire conforming to the description of defendant’s order had been accepted for the defendant’s government contract by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was also shown that the supplier of the wire, the Hatfield Wire and Cable Co., a division of Continental Copper and Steel Industries, Inc., a large manufacturer of wire products “was not set up” to make the more costly type of shielded wire and would never have taken a contract to do so.
Plaintiff never received any copy of the defendant’s contract with the government. Defendant had only two copies of the specifications for its whole construction job and the specifications therein for wire covered no more than a page or two. It is not credible that defendant sent plaintiff the entire specifications *684with no accompanying writing or record whatever. The price at which defendant ordered and plaintiff delivered the wire was fully a third less than the special shielded wire specified in the government contract could be had for.
In any event, when defendant received the wire it ordered from plaintiff it was •apparent and defendant could not fail to see that the wire was not shielded as called for by the government contract. The defendant chose to take the wire sent to it pursuant to its order and to cut it up and bury it.
I would reverse the judgment.