Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 1.djvu/863

DELA.WABB OOAL et lOE 00. V. PAOEBB. 855 �no principle of law which permits a patent thus issued to stand. Nothing here can be left to inference. It is the office of the claims of .a patent to reveal to the world what the characteristics of the invention are for which the patentee desires protection. If he fails to state these fully and cor- reetly, he may remedy the omission by a surrender and re- issue, but until then the court has no power to give him relief against infringers. �I do not wish to be understood as affirming that if the inventer had f ormulated a claim for the combination to which he refers in his schedule that such a claim would have been valid as against the older Bell patent, before spoken of. It is not necessary to decide the question, in view of the fact that no claim of that sort has been made. �Judging of this case simply from the record, and without stepping outside to ascertain the state of the art at the time of the application for the complainant's patent, I should say that the most valuable part of the invention, if not the only novel part, was the use of sliding chutes in the delivery of coal from wagons or other vehicles. If the third claim had been for sliding chutes alone, and if a combination claim had also been put in with only these as one of the constituents of the combination, it would have been a great improvement upon the Bell combiaation, and Would clearly have anticipated the Iske patent. No. 137,371, for "improvements in extension troughs for wagons," under which the defendant justifies the alleged infringement, in so far, at least, as that patent em- braced the use of sliding chutes. �And this seems to have been the view of the patentee him- self, for in his examination in chief, (Complainant's Eeo. p. 5, fol. 90,) in response to the inquiry as to what he claimed as the principal feature of his invention, he replied: "The third claim of my patent, which is for hinged or sliding chutes or tubes, marked H in the drawing, fig. 1, when attached to an open mouth, or to the end or side of a cart or wagon, for the purpose of unloading coal or other material from a cart or wagon directly into a cellar or vault." �It appears, in the evidence, that the inventor eniployed a ��� �