Page:United States Reports, Volume 257.djvu/112

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HILDRETH v. MASTORAS.
31
27.
Opinion of the Court.

purchased, but none of the model of Dickinson's. Mastoras, the respondent here, was for some time a licensee of Hildreth until he made and used his present machine.

In candy pulling by hand, the puller works the boiled candy, cooled but still warm and sticky, into a sausage-like piece two or three feet long, and weighing 20 or 25 pounds, called a batch. He throws the middle of this over a hook fixed in the wall about the level of his chin. He pulls down the two ends, stretching the batch two or three times its length. Then he holds the ends together with one hand and with the other seizes the two strands about their middle and carries them over the hook, thus making a new bight of the folded or lapped strands over the hook, and shortening the lengths hanging from the hook, the ends of which are now brought together and pulled down again. This operation repeated often, brings the candy into desired condition.

In the Dickinson machine, the candy is placed in the bottom of a trough, in the center of which is an upright pin, referred to in the patent as the "candy-puller." There are two other pins suspended over the trough from the ends of an arm or plate which in turn is fixed to a support and made to rotate. By suitable contrivance, the support which carries the pins is made to move back and forth from end to end of the trough. At each end of the trough, the pins are made by the rotary motion of the plate to which they are suspended, to reverse their positions from one side of the trough to the other before beginning their movement in the opposite direction. In this way there is produced an in-and-out movement of the suspended pins relative to the stationary pin every time they reach and depart from the ends of the trough. This movement causes the "batch" of the candy in the trough, attached itself to the movable pins, to be pulled by lapping on itself as the suspended pins pass and repass the fixed pin and as their positions are reversed. The change