The Federal Reporter with Key-Number Annotations, Volume 272: Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Courts of Appeals and District Courts of the United States and the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, June-August, 1921. Page: 2

272 FEDERAL REPORTER

outgrowth of such development. Each step forward prepares the way for
the next, and each is usually taken by spontaneous trials and attempts in a
hundred different places To grant to a single party a monopoly of every
slight advance made, except where the exercise of invention, somewhat above
ordinary mechanical or engineering skill, is distinctly shown, is unjust in
principle and injurious in its consequences
"The design of the patent laws is to reward those who mnak" som, .nh-
stantial discovery or invention, which adds to our knowledge and makes a
step in advance in the useful arts. Such inventors are worthy ot all tt; or
It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling
device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and sponta-
neously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary piogres of
manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tend"
rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a cla"s of specula-
tive schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave ot
improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which
enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without con-
tributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the
honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens
and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits
made in good faith."
The plaintiff claims, broadly, patents on the process and on a machine for
converting finished paper into stretchable crinkled paper for wapping and
packing purposes. The gist of this process is that the finished paper is first
moistened or saturated in one or two baths, smoothed or "laterally stretched"
by a convexed roller, pressed against and drawn around a smooth roller, from
which it is detached by striking against a blunt blade, called a doctor blade,
after which it is pulled off on a carrier so regulated in speed as to leave in
the crinkled paper the desired percentage of stretch as the paper is dried.
Crinkling moist paper by this general method of striking it against a
doctor is old-how old this record does not show. Bartlett Arkell's patent,
No. 565,587, issued on August 11, 1896, on an application dated December 5.
1895, for an expansible bag with "a lining of paper having a multiplicity of
tight creases, * * * the creases in the paper lining being formed while
the paper is wet," assumed that crinkled, stretchable paper was then produci-
ble by known processes. Such crinkled, stretchable paper was manufactured
in substantial quantities by use of the doctor in Lawrence, Mass., as early as
1892. This appears from the entirely credible and reliable evidence of the
witness Allen, who testified before me.
The Lysle patent No. 414,557, of 1889, shows knowledge of the essence of
this crinkling process 30 years ago. So also does the English patent No. 1927
of 1894 to Lewer and Edwards.
If moistening finished paper so that it will crinkle as paper still moist from
the process of manufacture will crinkle involves invention, Bainbridge in
No. 548,108, issued October 15, 1895, covered that point. I cannot believe
that, for present purposes, it makes any difference whether the moistening is
done by submerging a roll around which paper is passing, or by running the
paper from roll to roll through one or more saturating baths, or by spraying or
bf a combination of any or all these processes. To dampen finished paper,
so that it will crinkle, may be done in a great variety of ways, with only
ordinary mechanical skill applied to devices in common use for decades.
"The selection and putting together of the most desirable parts of different
machines in the same or kindred art, making a new machine, but in which
each part operates in the same way as it operated before and effects the same
result, cannot be invention." Huebner-Toledo Breweries Co. v. Matthews
Gravity Carrier Co., 258 Fed. 435, 447, 165 C. C. A. 177, 189.
This is really just what the plaintiff has done; and when war conditions
developed new and enlarged needs and demands, and profits in meeting them,
the defendant, by using simple and well-known processes and devices, sought
to meet some of these new demands. In this course it acted within its rights,
and its competition conduces to the general good.