Court Opinion

ID: 9419171
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:47:14.938035+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:16.142187
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Stone :
I concur in the result.
I agree that the use of the well known thermostatically controlled heating circuit exemplified by Copeland, with the removable wireless heating unit plug of Morris, in substitution for the manually controlled circuit which had *93previously been used with the plug, exhibited no more than the skill of the art. The doubt which the court below resolved in favor of patentability because Copeland’s invention was “still-born” should, I think, have been resolved in favor of petitioners, because Mead was likewise still-born so far as its substantial commercial success is concerned.
The commercially successful structure for which respondent claims the protection of the Mead patent, and which the court below thought satisfied a felt need, is not the structure described by Mead. Both embody the combination of a thermostatically controlled heating circuit with a heating unit borne on a removable wireless plug and used as a means to close the circuit. But they differ structurally in a number of particulars.
To mention only the more important, Mead showed a rotatable socket which is turned by manually rotating the plug when placed in the socket, so as to close the heating circuit. A laterally extending pin projecting from the side of the plug, in the Mead structure, engages with a, spring latch outside the socket to hold the plug and socket in the circuit-closing position to which they have been rotated, until the latch is released by the thermostatic control, thus permitting the plug and the socket, which is activated by a spring, to rotate back to the open circuit position. The base required for the accommodation of the rotating socket and its externally operated mechanism was large and cumbersome. Respondent’s commercial structure, like the alleged infringing device, utilizes a fixed socket within which the thermostatic circuit control is located and into which the heat-unit-carrying plug may be inserted without necessity of rotating it as in the case of the rotating plug with the projecting pin shown by Mead. The thermostatically controlled circuit is closed by pressing the plug further into the socket, the plug being restored to an open circuit position by a spring carried on *94the plug, when the latch maintaining the closed circuit is thermostatically released.
The commercially exploited device, because of the differences in its structure from that shown by Mead, is the more compact and easily operated. Its utility as a lighter to be located on the dash of an automobile, which is said to be the merit of the Mead invention, is obvious. If the improvements resulting in such utility involved invention, it is not the invention of Mead. If they exhibited only the skill of the art, their success cannot be relied on to establish invention bjr Mead, who did not show or make them. The case is therefore not one for the application of the doctrine that commercial success or the manifest satisfaction of a felt need will turn the scale in favor of invention.
Ms. Justice Frankfurter joins in this opinion.