end of the teeth of each roll and the smooth surface of the other roll was only about three-eighths of an inch. The two rolls were run at a differential speed. It is also true that small stones would pass between the rolls and that the clay was subjected to other treatment before it went into the molds; but it is shown that whether such further treatment was necessary would depend upon the clay used, and that if free from rock and of the right kind it would be completely treated and fitted for the molds by being passed between the rolls. This machine, while it was a disintegrator, was also to a certain extent a grinding and pulverizing machine, and under the ruling of the Supreme Court in this case it lacked the patentable elements secured to the complainants by the Letters issued to them. Next comes the machine constructed by Rossi at the Elizabethport factory before 1883. The rolls on that machine were in use about six months and until the failure of the company. The three steel bars of each roll were located spirally across its face and intended to feed the clay through. These bars extended within three-fourths of an inch of the face of the opposite roll. This also is recognized as establishing that shredding clay was accomplished by its operation. The Watson machine has already been referred to as accomplishing the shredding of clay. The Archenbronn mill, constructed for grinding apples and provided with a cylinder armed with eight knives located on a line parallel with the axis of the cylinder and across its surface, it is said, is almost a precise reproduction of the Butterworth mill, both being cider-mills. The Supreme Court rejected the Butterworth mill as an anticipation for the reason that the knives had serrated or toothed edges that formed chisel-shaped cutting projections and operated to cut or grind the apples, the only point of resemblance between that device and the Potts patent being that knives were set on a periphery of the cylinder in much the same way as the scraping-bars of the complainants' patent. The Court held that the Butterworth patent could not have been used as a clay-disintegrator without changes involving more or less invention. It appears by the testimony of two witnesses in this case that the Archenbronn knives, which were three sixteenths of an inch thick and straight-edged, were adapted to shred clay. It further appears that that mill suggested to the witness McKinley, and through him to the witness Smith, the use of bars or rollers for the disintegration of clay for making brick. Taking these facts in connection with the fact that by the Moore machine, the Rossi machine, the Watson machine, and by other machines above referred to the disintegration and shredding of clay had been accomplished and was not original with the inventors of complainants' machine, and considering also that the only material change necessary to make the Archeubronn roller not only operative, but permanently effective, for the shredding of clay was to make the knives thicker, or, in other words, to substitute bars of steel for the thick steel knives, the Archenbronn mill must be recognized as anticipating complainants' patents. I am not able to see that the mere substitution of the steel bars for the steel blade, in order to accomplish a known result, i. e., the disintegrating and pulverizing of clay, involves invention, and I do not understand that the Supreme Court has given its sanction to any such proposition. Upon the other hand, that Court seems to have regarded it as indispensable that the use to which the complainants' rollers were to be put should be new, in the sense that it would supersede other methods of doing the same work-that is to say, that crushing the clay would be superseded by disintegrating and pulverizing it. The record now shows what the record before the Supreme Court did not show-that that use was not new, and therefore that that essential element of the complainants' invention was lacking, and that by reason of that lack their patents are invalid. It is not necessary to consider separately the other patents. They are all recognized as bearing upon the state of the art, but not as anticipations. The decree will be for the defendants. [U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals-Ninth Circuit.] VON SCHMIDT . BOWERS. Decided January 4, 1897. 1. BOWERS-HYDRAULIC DREDGING-MACHINE-VALID-INFRINGED. Claims 10, 16, 25, 53, and 59 of Letters Patent No. 318,859, granted May 26, 1885, to Alphonzo B. Bowers, for improvements in hydraulic dredging-machines, construed and Held valid and infringed by machines constructed under the Von Schmidt patents, Nos. 277,177, 300,333, and 306,368. (Bowers v. Von Schmidt, 63 Fed. Rep., 572, affirmed.) 2. SAME-SAME-SAME-SAME. Claims 13, 17, and 18 of Letters Patent No. 355,251, granted December 28, 1886, to Alphonzo B. Bowers, for improvements in hydraulic dredging-machines, construed and Held valid and infringed by machines constructed under the Von Schmidt patents, Nos. 277,177, 300,333, and 306,368. (Bowers v. Von Schmidt, 63 Fed. Rep., 572, affirmed.) 3. SAME-SCOPE OF CLAIMS-PIONEER INVENTION. The Bowers patents disclose and cover inventions of a pioneer character, standing at the head of the art, and their claims are entitled to a broad and liberal construction. 4. SAME CLAIMS CONSTRUED-NOT FUNCTIONAL. Said claims are not functional in form, nor are they claims for results, nor are they limited to any particular form of construction of the elements which make up the combinations, but they are broad generic claims, without any limitation as to the form of construction of the particular elements; and all subsequent machines which employ substantially the same means to accomplish the same result are infringements, notwithstanding the subsequent machine may contain improvements in separate mechanism which go to make up the machine. 5. SAME-SAME-NOT FOR AGGREGATIONS. The Bowers claims are not mere aggregations, because the result produced is the product of the combination in which each element affects the action of all the others, and all of the elements coöperate in the one result of severing by the forward and side action of the machine the material in place where it is not wanted and depositing it in another place where it is wanted. 15377-34 6. CLAIMS-COMBINATION-AGGREGATION. No combination of elements that so operate can be regarded as a mere aggregation, for each one has a direct influence upon the action of each of the others, the result necessarily being the product of the combination itself and not a mere aggregate of several results, each the complete product of one of the combined elements. (Hailes v. Van Wormer, 5 O. G., 89; 20 Wall., 353; Royer v. Roth, C. D., 1889, 682; 49 O. G., 1987; 132 U. S., 201; 10 Sup. Ct., 58; Reckendorferv. Faber, C. D., 1876, 430; 10 O. G., 71; 92 U. S., 347; Beecher Manufg. Co. v. Atwater Manufg. Co., C. D., 1885, 324; 31 O. G., 1306;,114 U. S., 524; 5 Sup. Ct., 1007.) 7. CLAIM-CONSTRUCTION of. The terms "inward delivery" in a claim for an excavator have direct reference to the mechanism itself, and cannot properly be limited to the description or effect of such mechanism. The clear meaning of a claim to “an excavator having inward delivery" or "with inward delivery through itself” is an excavator so constructed as to produce an inward delivery. 8. PIONEER INVENTION-JOINDER OF GENERIC AND SPECIFIC CLAIMS IN SAME PATENT. A pioneer inventor is entitled in his patent to a generic claim, under which will be included every species of the genus, and in addition thereto he is entitled in the same patent to make specific claims for one or more species of the genus. 9. INTERFERING PATENTS-ANTICIPATION-TIME OF. The defense of anticipation to be successful must be established as of a date anterior to the patented invention, not merely prior to the application for or date of the patent. 10. SAME-SAME-EARLY DRAWINGS AND MODels. As against the defense of anticipation the patentee may show the fact of invention by drawings, sketches, models, or any other competent proof. 11. ABANDONMENT-DELAY IN APPLYING FOR PATENT-REASONABLE DILIGENCESTANDARD OF PROOF OF. Delay in applying for a patent after an invention is made will not constitute abandonment where the inventor has used reasonable diligence to perfect the invention and avail himself of its benefits, and there is no general standard by which such diligence is to be established; but it must be reasonable under all the circumstances of the particular case. The character of the invention; the health, the means, the liberty of the inventor; his occupation upon kindred or subordinate inventions-are proper subjects for consideration. Such reasonable diligence does not involve uninterrupted effort nor the concentration of his entire energies upon the single enterprise. 12. INFRINGEMENT-DEFECT IN ORIGINAL MACHINE. The fact that the first machine built by a patentee whose patent is sued on was not successful in operation is unimportant and no reason for denying him relief, especially where his subsequent machines have proved successful in practice. APPEAL from the Circuit Court of the United States for the Northern District of California. Before GILBERT and Ross, Judges. Mr. M. A. Wheaton for the appellant. STATEMENT OF THE CASE. This was a suit in equity brought by Alphonzo B. Bowers against Allexey W. Von Schmidt to restrain infringement of Letters Patent No. 318,859, for a dredging-machine, and No. 355,251, for improvements in hydraulic dredging-machines, both issued to Alphonzo B. Bowers, the first on May 26, 1885, and the second on December 28, 1886. The lower court sustained both patents, and found infringement of claims 10, 16, 25, 53, 54, and 59 of Patent No. 318,859 and of claims 13. 17, and 18 of No. 355,251. (63 Fed. Rep., 572.) The following are copies of the drawings annexed to Patent No. 318,859: |