Court Opinion

ID: 9446856
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:19:48.96919+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:48.250845
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing
Before MADDEN, Judge, United States Court of Claims,* LUMBARD and MOORE, Circuit Judges.
MADDEN, Judge.
Following our opinion of April 24, 1959, the plaintiffs-appellants filed petition for rehearing. Thereafter upon our invitation, defendant-appellee filed a brief in opposition, and appellants have filed a reply brief. Upon further consideration we withdraw our opinion of April 24, 1959, reverse the judgment below and remand the case for a new trial.
The District Court held claims 6, 8, 15, and 17 of the Anderson patent invalid because of prior knowledge and prior public use of certain Zaiger devices distributed to the trade in 1941, about four years before the Anderson patent application was filed. The appellants contend that the evidence of prior public use was inadequate to justify the Court’s finding that such public use had occurred. They remind us of numerous judicial admonitions of the danger of permitting a regularly granted patent, carrying a strong presumption of validity, to be nullified by a purported showing that another person had, prior to the time of the patent, made and publicly used the patented device.
The Supreme Court of the United States, in The Barbed Wire Patent Case, Washburn & Moen Mfg. Co. v. Beat Em All Barbed Wire Co., 143 U.S. 275, 284-285, 12 S.Ct. 443, 447, 36 L.Ed. 154, said:
“We have now to deal with certain unpatented devices, claimed to be complete anticipations of this patent, the existence and use of which are proven only by oral testimony. In view of the unsatisfactory character of such testimony, arising from the forgetfulness of witnesses, their liability to mistakes, their proneness to recollect things as the party calling them would have them recollect them, aside from the temptation to actual perjury, courts have not only imposed upon defendants the burden of proving such devices, but have required that the proof shall be clear, satisfactory, and beyond a reasonable doubt. Witnesses whose memories are prodded by the *703eagerness of interested parties to elicit testimony favorable to themselves are not usually to be depended upon for accurate information. The very fact, which courts as well as the public have not failed to recognize, that almost every important patent, from the cotton gin of Whitney to the one under consideration, has been attacked by the testimony of witnesses who imagined they had made similar discoveries long before the patentee had claimed to have invented his device, has tended to throw a certain amount of discredit upon all that class of evidence, and to demand that it be subjected to the closest scrutiny. Indeed, the frequency with which testimony is tortured, or fabricated outright, to build up the defense of a prior use of the thing patented, goes far to justify the popular impression that the inventor may be treated as the lawful prey of the infringer. The doctrine was laid down by this court in Coffin v. Ogden, 18 Wall. 120, 124 [21 L.Ed. 821], that ‘the burden of proof rests upon him, (the defendant,) and every reasonable doubt should be resolved against him. If the thing were embryonic or inchoate; if it rested in speculation or experiment; if the process pursued for its development had failed to reach the point of consummation, it cannot avail to defeat a patent founded upon a discovery or invention which was completed, while in the other case there was only progress, however near that progress may have approximated to the end in view.’ ”
In Eibel Process Co. v. Minnesota & Ontario Paper Co., 261 U.S. 45, 60, 43 S.Ct. 322, 327, 67 L.Ed. 523, the Court stated the rule to be that such evidence “must be clear and satisfactory.”
The appellants urge that oral testimony is per se insufficient for the purpose here in question, unless it is corroborated by documentary evidence. Although it is true that in practically all the cases in which prior public use has been held to invalidate a patent, there has been documentary evidence to corroborate oral testimony, we think there is no absolute requirement of such evidence. In Turner Dock Transfer v. Terminal Engineering Co., 2 Cir., 94 F.2d 79, 80, Judge Learned Hand wrote:
“ * * * however exacting the burden upon a defendant in such cases, in the end the answer must depend upon the persuasiveness of the evidence taken as a whole.”
See also Cowles Co. v. Frost-White Paper Mills, 2 Cir., 174 F.2d 868, 871.
In the instant case the evidence of prior public use was entirely in the form of depositions rather than oral testimony given in the presence of the Court. It was substantially as follows. Max Zaiger was the president of a manufacturing company which manufactures windshield wipers. That company, and the parties to this litigation, make practically all the windshield wipers manufactured in this country. Zaiger, and his then employee, Nesson, testified that in 1941, which was three years before Anderson’s invention, Nesson made some four dozen windshield wipers, of which one, Exhibit D-15, was the only surviving example. Exhibit D-15, as it appears in evidence, embodies the idea contained in the appellants’ patent. Nesson testified in great detail as to how he had manufactured the four dozen devices in 1941, had tested several of them on a curved glass windshield furnished by the Studebaker Company, and had then turned the devices over to Zaiger, except that be had put one of them on his brother’s car. Zaiger testified that he and a salesman, Mr. Mixom, since deceased, had taken a number of the devices to Detroit and delivered some of them to the Stewart Warner Company which was supplying the Packard Company with windshield wiper motors and desired a satisfactory wiper blade to go with the motors; had delivered others to Mr. Beltz, chief electrical engineer of Packard, and had taken others to South Bend, Indiana, and delivered them to the Studebaker Company. He testified that *704he had put one of the devices in a cabinet in his office, and that one was Exhibit D-15. Zaiger testified that upon his return home he put two of the blades on his own car for testing. He did not attempt to patent the device, because he understood that the law was that a new ■combination of old elements was not patentable.
Mr. Berg, for many years Sales Manager for Stewart Warner, testified that Zaiger and Mixom called on him at his office in Detroit in May or June of 1941 and gave him two sets of blades which were identical with D-15. He placed ene of the sets on his Packard car and used them for some six months. Mr. Whitted, an engineer for Stewart Warner, testified that he had no recollection of having tested a wiper blade like D-15. He said he had seen a blade •on Berg’s car which had spaced pressure points, but it had a rigid back, and he had told Berg that there was no point in having spaced pressure points on a blade that had a rigid back.
Beltz testified that in the spring of 1941 Zaiger and Mixom gave him some blades like D-15 and later sent him .some more; that the blades were tested in the Packard experimental garage on fiat glass and proved satisfactory.
Mrs. Lipkus, who was Zaiger’s secretary from 1933 to 1952, testified that Nesson made the several dozen blades in 1941; that she saw them being tested at the plant and saw a set on Zaiger’s car; that the blade in evidence, D-15, was kept in a locked cabinet of Mr. Zaiger, where he kept experimental blades. She testified that Zaiger made a trip to Detroit in 1941 before April 15.
Mr. Wood testified that he had been, in 1941, an attendant at a garage where Zaiger had' his car serviced; that he had seen a blade like D-15 on Zaiger’s car and remembered it because he had once lifted it up from the windshield.
All the cars on which the asserted testing of the D-15 devices occurred had flat windshields. Zaiger testified that his company had made, at about the time in question, some 2,000 of another wiper blade, of which D-10 was the only surviving example. It, like D-15, had a triple yoke mounting, but it had a rigid back.
Correspondence between Zaiger and Studebaker, at about the time in question, was introduced, but it showed only that Zaiger was hopeful of developing a satisfactory wiper for a curved windshield.
Because of the rearmament and the war, no automobile company adopted a curved glass windshield until the end of the war.
The plaintiff introduced expert testimony tending to show that D-15 could not have been made as Nesson had testified that he had made it and the many other identical devices in 1941. This testimony was contradicted by expert testimony on behalf of the defendant. Nesson was not called by the defendant to reaffirm, in person, the truth of the testimony given on his deposition. Judge Morgan was left completely uncertain as to whether D-15 was a genuine surviving example of some four dozen similar devices made in 1941. If it was not that, it must have been a spurious exhibit manufactured for the purposes of this litigation. Judge Morgan’s uncertainty, then, would also have been an uncertainty as to the veracity of Nesson and Zaiger, and of their testimony as to the public use which they said they had made of a wiper blade like D-15.
In that condition of the record, the evidence of prior public use of a device like D-15 consists only of the oral testimony of Berg, contradicted by Whitted, and the oral testimony of Beltz, the Packard engineer and Wood, the service garage employee. When it is remembered that the uses of the supposed D-15 type wipers which these witnesses made, or observed, were on flat glass windshields, on which the flexible back would not be important, it is quite possible that they were observing wipers with three pressure points, but with rigid backs.
*705We agree with Judge Morgan that the genuineness of D-15 has not been proved. The consequence of that uncertainty is that the evidence of prior public use consists only of oral testimony, and that testimony is by no means abundant. We do not regard this proof as clear and satisfactory especially in view of contrary conclusions on this question in the Seventh Circuit.
The plaintiff, subsequent to bringing this action, sued Zaiger’s company and Sears Roebuck and Co. in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, for infringement of the patent involved in the instant suit. The suit was defended on several grounds, one of which was the same alleged prior public use asserted in our instant case. A large portion of the voluminous record in that case was devoted to evidence on that issue. At the trial before Judge Hoffman some of the witnesses on the issue of prior public use, and particularly Max Zaiger himself, appeared and testified in person.
The Illinois District Court made a finding that D-15 was a spurious exhibit. Anderson Co. v. Sears Roebuck & Co. (Zaiger Corp.), D.C., 165 F.Supp. 611, 617. The Court held on July 3, 1958, that the Anderson patent was valid, and rejected all of the defenses, including the defense of prior public use, and held the Anderson patent was infringed. The defendants appealed from this decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. They limited their appeal to the single question of whether or not the patent in suit was invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 103 because of lack of invention over the disclosures in the prior art, and particularly over the disclosures of two of the several patents set out in their answer. They thus abandoned the defense of prior public use which, as we have seen, was the sole ground upon which the District Court in our instant case held the Anderson patent invalid. The Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment of the District Court. Anderson Company v. Sears Roebuck & Co. (Zaiger Corporation), 7 Cir., 265 F.2d 755.
Upon the whole record and in view of the opinion of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the proceedings in the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, we are of the opinion that there is such serious doubt concerning the conclusion of the District Court on the issue of prior public use that the interests of justice require a new trial of this case. We therefore reverse the judgment and remand the case to the District Court for a new trial.
Reversed and remanded.

 Sitting by designation pursuant to the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 291(a).