Court Opinion

ID: 8864522
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-26 18:00:24.829533+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:05:56.935578
License: Public Domain

WOODS, Circuit Judge,
after stating the case, delivered the opinion of the court.
The Roosevelt patent is for a mechanism, purely. It is designed for use in connection with telephones, hut its essential character is no more affected by that fact than the character of a device for opening and'closing a gate in a head race would be affected by the fact of its use for turning off and on and regulating a current of water on its way to a mill wheel. Electric currents, whether carried upon the wires of a telephone or a telegraph, were not new, and by no pretense can be brought within or made to affect the scope of this patent. Switches employed in telegraphic and telephonic devices to shift the electric current from one wire to another were not new. Such a switch, connected permanently at one end with a current conducting wire (x in the patent), and capable of being shifted at its other end from one point of contact to another (as from P to A in the patent), was a matter of common knowledge, and the problem for the solution of which Roosevelt obtained a patent was to effect that shifting automatically. That problem was not a whit different mechanically because the purpose was to shift and direct the passage of electricity over wires, than it would have been if the wires had been tubes through which the passage of a liquid was to be determined by the opening and closing of valves by means of a shifting switch or -lever. It was, of course, no problem at all, to mechanics of ordinary skill, after the telephone was invented, with a switch in position, to devise means of shifting the movable end from the point of normal contact to the other point prepared for it; but, if the like had never been done-before, it would doubtless have been an inventive achievement to provide for an automatic movement of the switch, which should be effected by the mere use of the telephone in the ordinary way in the hand of an unskilled operator. The like had been done, however, by Cushman, when he devised a signal box for fire alarms “with a switch mechanism so constructed and arranged that the shutting of the outer door of -the signal box switches the electro-magnets out of the telegraphic circuit,” etc. That switch, as a mechanism, is not to be distinguished from this of the patent because the particular results' to be accomplished are not the same, and are not brought about exactly in the same way. The shifting of currents by a switch is one thing. The subsequent course of the currents, and what they do or what is done with them, are different things, unaffected by, and without effect upon, the character of the switch. So, too, the idea and a form of automatic switch are illustrated in the burglar alarm of Fontaine. It is therefore impossible, even wilhont looking for automatic switches in the mechanic arts outside of electrical devices, to concede to this patent the character of a pioneer invention. It need not he said that *186there was no» degree of invention in so connecting the transmitting instrument with the spring switch that the unskilled operator, without intending or understanding the result, should accomplish the necessary movement of the switch merely by lifting the instrument, and, on quitting, should involuntarily, and with equal want of understanding, restore the switch to its normal position simply by releasing his hold of the instrument. This, the specification puts beyond doubt, was what the patentee supposed he had accomplished; and, the invention being from necessity very narrow, there is no good reason for giving a wider scope to the claims of the patent, even if by their terms they are not so limited. In the second, third, and seventh claims, the transmitting instrument is described as suspended to the switch; and the same meaning is made evident in the first claim, by the terms of which the switch is “to be placed in contact with one screw point through the influence of the telephone when not being used,” and “is freed from the influence of the telephone, substantially as described.”
No claim of the patent can fairly be given a construction which would include either form of apparatus manufactured by the appellees. The decree below is therefore affirmed.
Judge SHOW ALTER did not participate in this decision.