Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 9.djvu/837

This page needs to be proofread.

822 FEDERAL REPORTER. �(1) Patent issued to J. Schroeder, September 24, 1867; reissued to pomplain- ants, Febraary 6, 1877. (2) Patent issued to M. Eichholtz, April 6, 1869; reissued to complainants, June 12, 1877. (3) Patent issued to C. P. Norton, October 18, 1870; reissued to I. P. Pillsbury, August 26, 1873. (4) Patent issued to James H. Pattee, Marcli 5, 1872 ; reissued to complainauts, October 6, 1874. (5) Patent issued to T. Poling, August 13, 1872. �— AU of which patents were for improvements in cultivators, and have corne by assignment into the ownership and control of the com- plainants. �It is further chargea that the defendants, disregarding the exclusive right secured by the aforesaid patents to the complainants, have made and sold, within this district, cultivators according to .and in which are embodied devices and inventions covered by the said pat- ents, as the same now stand reissued. The Mil contains the usual prayer for an injunction, and an accounting for profits and damages. The defendants, by their answer, deny the validity of the complain- ants' several patents — �First, for want of novelty ; second, because the reissued patents are for dif- ferent inventions than those shown by the original specifications and draw- ings; thtrd, they deny that the cultivators made by them infringe all or any of the complainants' patents. �It appears from the proof, as part of the history of the patents in question, that James H. Pattee, one of the complainants, devised what he considered a valuable improvement in cultivators, involving what he deemed a radical innovation on the then mode of coustruct- ing this implement, which was to make a two-horse straddle-row cultivator without a tongue or pole — in other words, a tongueless cultivator. The Pattee model, which is in evidence, shows the gen- erai idea of his invention — a cultivator, with the ordinary device of an arohed axle for straddling the rows of corn or other plants to be tilled; the axle, jointed near the horizontal arms which form the joumals for the wheels, and supported on wheels, with the plow's beam hinged to the axle by joints which allow them to oscillate or swing vertically and laterally. For this device he obtained the pat- ent of March 5, 1872, which was subsequently reissued ou the sixth of October, 1874. After this patent was obtained the complainants procured assignments of the Schroeder, Eichholtz, and Norton pat- ents, — all of which were cultivators, provided with tongues as an element of their organism, — and secured reissues thereof , covering certain features which are assumed to be essential to the tongueless ��� �