Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 9.djvu/678

 CRANDAL V. WALTBR3. 663 �held and secured the metal or other article to which they were at- tached on the other side of the materials. Thia idea was old, and was embodied and ueed by Davis. But no article like the plaintiff's, capable of being taken and used for the purposes for which the plain- tiff's can be used, without altera,tion and adaptation requiring inven- tion, existed before. Almost all inventions at this day, that become the subject of patents, are the embodiment and adaptation ofmeehanical appliances that are. old. In tha,t consists the invention. When the thing appears it is new and usef ul. No one saw it before ; no one pro- duced it before ; it supplies a need ; it is at once adopted ; all in the trade desire to make and use it ; yet it is said to have been perfectly obvious, and not to have been patentable. Where an article exists in a given form and applied to a given use, and is talcen, in substan- tially the same form, and applied to an analogous use, so as to make a. case of merely double use, there is no invention. But it is very rarely that a tjiing of that kind secures a patent. -.. A patent to Joseph E. Bail, No. 20,246, granted May 18, 1858, for a mode of attaching the traces of harness for horses to the draught plates or straps, is adduced. Ball's apparatus could never be used as a loop for a carriage top. The metal was not so tliin that it could be practically struck up from a single piece and be bent into sha,pek The lugs could not be practically clinched by bcnding them, but were secured as rivets, by a process entirely inapplicable to the use of a loop on a carriage top. �A patent granted to Eobert Meyer, No. 61,628, January 2D, 1867, for a buckle fastening, is relied on, That does not sh9w lugs clinched by bending, but shows only pins. secured by riveting. For some purposes, in considering questions arising on letters patent, bent lugs and riveted pins may be the equivalents of each other; but, in con- sidering the question of the novelty of the plaintiff's loop,, riveted pins are not the equivalents of the bent lugs. The Meyer device could not be used in place of the Davis device without adaptation requiring invention. �The defendants also introduce a patent granted to Charles H. Lit- tlefield, No. 67,322, July 30, 1867, for an improvement in breast- plates for harnesses. It is a piece of metal bent into a loop at one end to hold a buckle, and allow the tongue of the buckle to pass through a slofemade in such bent end, and hayingwings or projecting pieces turned over so as to overlap a harness strap. This could not be used as a substitute for the plaintiif's loop without ipvention. It ��� �