89 F. 204 | U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Eastern New York | 1898
This patent (Condict, No. 393,323, November 20, 1888, switch or controller for electric motors) was before the United States circuit court in the district of Connecticut, and was sustained as to the claims here in controversy in the case of Same Complainants v. Hartford & West Hartford E. Co., 87 Fed. 733. Reference may be had to the opinion in that case for a description of the invention and a discussion of the patent and the scope of the claims. The only question to be decided on the papers presented here is whether defendant’s devices (there are four varieties of them) infringe the claims as construed in the earlier case. The additional patent introduced by defendant here was before Judge Townsend on motion for rehearing, and belongs to a different, although a cognate, art. The invention patented is a device for regulating or controlling the current delivered to an electric motor from the supply wire by combining the motors, their coils, and two or more resistances, in such different relations to each other that the intensity of the current received at the point of operation may be reduced or increased, and thus the motor may be run slowly or fast, and changed from one rate of speed to another, without jerks or sudden changes of speed, and without sparking. Among the changes of relation so made is one in the connection of the motors from series to parallel, and vice versa, necessitating an open circuit, with consequent danger from sparking, and great strain and stress from abrupt shifting of connection. “To overcome these objections,” says the specification, “I have constructed my switch so that, at the time of changing the connections, I insert resistances more or less great. * * * I also so arrange the switch that the resistances are all cut out of circuit as soon as the new motor connection is made.” A subsidiary invention, as found in the West Hartford Case, is the “cutting in or out of one or more of the resistances, and thereby providing an additional means of regulation where slight variations in the speed or power of the motors is required.” The main invention is covered by one group of claims, Nos. 27, 28, 29, and 31; the subsidiary invention by another group, Nos. 20, 21, and 22. For a further description of the inventions, Judge Townsend’s opinion may be referred to. Defendant’s several devices are numbered, successively, 1, 2, 3, and 4, and it is conceded that No. 3 infringes both groups of claims,, upon Judge Townsend’s construction of them. ■ It