Keystone Manufacturing Company v. Adams

Statement by Mr. Justice SHIRAS:

On the 14th day of May, 1886, Henry A. Adams filed in the circuit court of the United States for the northern district of Illinois a bill of complaint against the Keystone Manufacturing Company, a corporation of the state of Illinois, and Thomas A. Galt, J. B. Patterson, George S. Tracy, and E. L. Galt, officers and managers of the said company, complaining that the defendants were infringing his rights as the patentee and owner of letters patent No. 132,128, granted on October 15, 1872, by the United States to him, as the original and first inventor of a certain new and useful improvement in cornshellers. The bill contains the usual averments, and prayed for an account and an injunction. On August 2, 1886, the defendants filed a joint answer, admitting that letters patent had been issued to the complainant as alleged, denying that said patent described any new or patentable invention, alleging that the said alleged invention had been anticipated in numerous other specified letters patent, and denying that the machines made and sold by the defendant company were infringements of any rights possessed by the complainant.

A replication was duly filed, evidence was taken, and argument had, the result of which was that on June 30, 1888, the court entered an interlocutory decree sustaining the validity of the patent, finding an infringement, directing an account, and appointing a master to state the same. 35 Fed. 579. Afterwards, on June 21, 1889, the master filed a report awarding the sum of $27,620 to the complainant, being the amount of the profits he found to have accrued to the defendants from their use of the patented machines, to which report exceptions were filed. On February 5, 1890, a final decree was entered, overruling the exceptions to the master's report, decreeing the payment by the defendant company of the sum of $27,620 and costs, and dismissing the bill, for want of equity, as against Thomas A. Galt, J. B. Patterson, George S. Tracy, and E. L. Galt. 41 Fed. 595.