Safety Car Heating & Lighting Co. v. General Electric Co‪.‬

The plaintiff appeals from a judgment, dismissing its complaint which alleged that the defendant infringed two patents: No. 1,708,625 and No. 1,708,626, both issued to Alan Varley Livingston on April 9, 1929. The claims in suit upon the first patent are sixteen, twenty-one and twenty-three; and on the second, nine, eleven, twelve, eighteen and nineteen. The judge held all these invalid upon the prior art, and, as we agree, we shall not consider the question of infringement. Both patents are for improvements in household refrigerators, which operate upon the principle that the heat removed from the objects to be chilled, will be taken up by the evaporation of a liquid refrigerant, which, after being again reduced to liquid by mechanical compression and cooling, is returned to be once more evaporated. The main features of such refrigerators were known long before Livingston filed his applications on March 7, 1925; but the refrigerant after compression used to be cooled by the passage of water around the coils which contained it. That was awkward and expensive, and about 1920 the industry began to substitute fans, which, either then or shortly thereafter, it followed with the natural convection of air currents over the "compressor coils." These two cooling methods have continued in use to the present time, and are now being used in about equal proportions. The compressor and the fan are driven by an electric current passing from the ordinary service connections; and, for the purposes of this case, we shall assume that the current is alternating.