Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 3.djvu/233

 926 FEDERAL REPORTER. �the iron bar and secured by a nut at the ônd. The handle and its nut kept the step bar in place. �The improvement set forth in the re-issued patent of the plaintiflfs may be said to eonsist of cutting the step plate in two, lengthwise, and putting a screw thread upon the part nearest the hand, which thus becomes a nut, having a recess for the -wooden handle. The utility of this change is said to be (1) that the step plate is secured by the upper nut, inde- pendently of the nut at the end of the handle, and thus, if the handle becomes loose, the smooth and regular working of the rod on the step plate is not affected ; (2) that, by securing the step plate to the main bar, or iron body of the wrench, by this independent nut, much of the strain which in Coes' wrench is brought upon the wooden handle, which is the weakest part of the tool, is transferred to the solid iron bar. The evidence bears out this claim of utility. The same resuit of transferring the strain to the bar has since been reached by G. G. Taft, in a patent now owned by the defendants, but in a wholly different way. �It is ably argued for the defendants that the mere addition of a nut to the Coes wrench has not invention enough to be patentable. Considering, however, that the change, simple as it seems, was not made for some 26 years after Coes' wrench was patented and came into common use, and that there appears to be a value in it which others have obtained in a different way, it seems to me that the combination is new and useful in the sense of the patent law. �There is a disputed question of faet, whether the "Dixie" wrench had a nut which resembled the plaintiffs'. That was not a patented tool, but was made and sold to a considerable extent before the Coes wrench became known. It seems to me to be proved that this wrench was sometimes made with a nut, into which the handle of the wrench was inserted ; but it was not always made so, and the specimen in court does not have that construction. The "Dixie" wrench defeats the sec- ond claim of the re-issued patent in suit, which is broadly for a nut combined with the wrench bar, and recessed to reçoive the handle. But there is no reason to suppose that the assigo- ����