Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 2.djvu/871

864 ; and in a single territory along Oil creek, where one operator operated, it has increased the production several hundred thousand barrels. In the Bradford oil district, where the daily production is from 22,500 to 25,000 barrels daily, one-half is proved to be due to the Roberts invention. The cause that works such results cannot be the same as that exhibited in the abandoned experiments. Holding them up as anticipations of the patented device is another illustration of what is very common, an attempt to defeat a meritorious patented invention by proof that something similar had been previously known, though it had never been perfected, and had never been any useful contribution to human knowledge or convenience.

We conclude what we have to say upon this branch of the case by quoting what we said in the former case: "Roberts was the first to reduce the method invented to actual and successful practice, and all that was done by others may be properly classified among unsuccessful experiments. However suggestive they may have been they cannot be made available to defeat a patent granted to an inventor who, subsequently to the failure of others, reduced jis idea to practice, and revealed to the public a useful process, which the crude and fruitless experiments of others had not made known. In Partchnut v. Kinsman, 1 Blatch. 494, Mr. Justice Mason said: 'Crude and imperfect experiments, equivocal in their results and then given up for years, cannot prevail against an original inventor, who had perfected his improvement and obtained a patent.' There can be no better evidence that all the trials of blasting in oil wells which were made before the complainant Roberts obtained bis patent were immature, and inadequate to the accomplishment of the desired result, than the fact that they were abandoned, and the patentee's method was resorted to as soon as it became known. Certain it is, a great boon has been given to the oil-producing regions. Something bas been conceived and worked out that has immensely increased production. It is confessedly embodied in this patentee's method, and it