Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 7.djvu/213

Rh it is called by the complainant's witnesses. This toothed wheel, with its arms, lies between two constantly-rotating toothed cylinders, situated at some distance above and below it, and is brought up to engage with the upper cylinder by the finger, when a protuberance in the pattern mechanism forces the finger to rise, and, when that obstacle is passed, it drops back by its own weight to engage with the other cylinder. The difference between the reciprocating bars and the rotating cylinders, and their mode of action and combination, is so great that no one has suggested that they interfere with each other as mechanical contrivances, excepting in one particular, which I will now describe.

The small levers of the plaintiff fall in one direction by grav- ity, and to enable them to do so (as they are pivoted in the mid- dle) a spur is added to that side of each which is towards the pattern; and this spur works in a slot of the finger, or piece of iron, which is in contact with the pattern. In the defend- ants' loom, as patented, the central wheel stood upright on its finger, like a flower on its stalk, and was pushed backward and forward to meet the rotating cylinders, instead of up and down, as now; and therefore the wheel itself had no tendency to fall back when the pressure of the pattern was released. This movement was effected by making the stem, or finger, heavier on the side of the pattern than it was on the other side, so that it fell back by gravity and pulled back the wheel. The defendants' loom, as used, then, differs from the patent in this that it is set up sidewise. There is no other change; but this seems to be an improvement, because the wheel now falls by its own weight, and the finger is no longer made heavy and one-sided:

The plaintiff, in his re-issued patent, calls 'his small hooked levers "jacks," and claims the combination of horizontal fin- gers positively connected with jacks in such a way that the jacks will be pushed up by the fingers, and will be brought back wholly, or in part, by the weight of this positively-attached finger. The reason for insisting on the positive connection between jack and finger is that in the Greenhalgh loom, formerly patented, but now open to the public, there was a hori-