Court Opinion

ID: 9638149
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:35:51.242743+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:04.396703
License: Public Domain

On Petition for Rehearing.
PER CURIAM.
The petition depends upon the supposed proof that the machines were shown to customers before March 31,1922, the effective date. The defendant’s only possible reliance is that part of Man-gold’s testimony with which the record closes, a matter so much discussed in the briefs and on the argument that it seemed impossible to us that counsel should have supposed we had overlooked it. The defendant is so insistent as to justify some further discussion. Grape had sworn that the machines had been kept isolated by partitioning them off without any name on the door of the room where they were kept, and that Mangold and two assistants were the only workmen employed upon them; these steps were taken to keep them secret. Hayes’ testimony is clearly valueless. The defendant then recalled Mangold, who swore that the sales manager of the plaintiff brought customers “to demonstrate and sell them” the machines during the year 1921, although there were no sales until 1925 according to Grape. Upon eross-examination he added that the manager’s purpose was to show them “roll leaf and machinery; * * * to show them that it could be done.” That his only purpose was “to show the use of Peerless roll leaf, * * * and to show what it could do in making box tops.”
*650We thought, and still think, that this single sentence of Mangold, which was certainly wrong in part, is too slight to overcome the general evidence that the machines were kept from the public. Indeed, just whát he meant is not very clear; he may have meant that the machines themselves as well as their product were shown, but the matter was left in the air. Supposing he did, this was not enough to prove public use before March 31, 1922. The date at any rate rests wholly upon his faulty recollection, and he remained with the plaintiff until October, 1922. The defendant had the burden of a severe degree of proof, and at best went no further than to show that customers might have been shown the machines before the critical date. This, read with the testimony of Grupe, will not answer.
Petition denied.