Henry Billings Brown

“ It is true that plaintiff claims certain advantages from locating his governor in the fly wheel of the engine, which is very much larger than the special wheel used for the governor in the Buckeye engines, but these advantages seem to be largely fanciful, such as existed before the dashpot was added, and, in any event, are not such as rise to the dignity of invention. They were advantages which a governor placed in a fly wheel has over a governor placed in any other wheel, but to which the addition of the dashpot contributed nothing new. ”

“ The only novelty he has any possible right to claim is in the application of this style of governor, with the dashpot, to an electric lighting engine, which seems to have been the thing needed to obviate the difficulty of a variable intensity of light and to secure the requisite steadiness; but this is not what is claimed in the patent. There can be no doubt that, if the attachment of a dashpot to a shaft governor had been a novelty at the time his patent was taken out, the Buckeye governors would have been an infringement. ”

“ The governors used upon these engines are not the old and familiar fly-ball governors, but consist of weights, whose centrifugal action is counterbalanced by centripetally acting springs, attached to the lever by which the weights are suspended, the object of which is to hold the eccentric constantly in a fixed position for a given speed of the wheel, and to vary the position of the eccentric exactly as the speed of the wheel is varied. ”