Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 9.djvu/303

 288 FEDKEAL REPOBTEE. �provements whicti might have corne into use, or might have been invented by others after its issue. The legislature was willing to eoncede to the pat- entee the right to amend his specification so as fully to describe and claim the very invention attempted to be secured by his original patent, and which was not fully secured thereby in consequence of inadvertence, accident, or mis- takfe, but was not willing to give him the right to patch up his patent by the addition of other inventions, which, though tJiey might be his, had not beet. applied for by him, or, if applied for, had been abandoned or waived. For such inventions he is required to make a new application, subject to such rights as the public and other inventors may have acquired in the mean time." �A case bearing more directly upon the one under consideration than any other one I have met is that of the Manuf'g Co. v. Ladd, 102 U. S. 408, and, as it contains the latest expression of the supreme court upon this subject, it is entitled to great weight. The original patent was for a water-wheel of specifie construction and form, with an annular chamber, a peculiar gate and guide arrangement, and a contrivance for adjusting the wheel on the step. There were three claims to the patent. After a lapse of twelve years and a half the patentee obtained a reissue with eleven different claims of a sweeping character, which, taken literally, would have given him a monopoly of all water-wheels having simultaneously an effective inward and downward flow and discharge, whatever might be the shape of the floats or of the crown. The court considered itself bound to consider the claims of the reissued patent in accordance with the limitationp of the invention in the original patent, and held the excess to be void. In delivering the opinion Mr. Justice Bradley spoke very foreibly ol the evils arising from expanding claims in reissued letters patent, an<i in commenting upon the statute observed : �" It was never intended to allow a patent to be enlarged, but to allow tb^ correction of mistakes inadvertently committed, and the restriction of claims which had been improperly made, or which had been made too broad, — ^just the contrary of that which bas corne to be the practice. In a clear case of mistake, (not error in judgment,) the patent may undoubtedly be enlarged; but that should be the exception and not the rule, whereas the enlargement of claims has become the rule, and their contraction the exception." �And in speaking of the reissue m that case he says : " The invention of a wheel was not claimed at all. A wheel was described, but it was a wheel made after a particular pattern or form, and adjusted to a particular apparatus for the reception and discharge of the water. * * * Instead of correctlng inadvertent mistakes in the specifications, which ren- dered the patent inoperative and void, the patented descriptions are evidently intended to widen the scope of the patent, and make it embrace more than it did at flrst. The mistake of the patentee, or his assigns, seems to have beei; ��� �