Tool Research and Engineering Corporation v. Honcor Corporation

Plaintiff appeals from a judgment holding invalid J. E. Green et al. Patent No. 2,975,263, a patent on a method of making metallic honeycomb core. The purpose of the core is to maintain the surface sheets of panels used in aircraft and missiles in a spaced relationship with each other. The district court held that the prior art did not teach plaintiff’s claimed method but that by reason of the plaintiff’s sales of honeycomb core the rights to a patent on the process were lost under Section 102(b), Title 35 U.S.C.

All the questions in this appeal revolve around two methods of producing honeycomb core — the flat-pack method and the preformed or pre-expanded method.

Honeycomb core produced by either method looks like this:

The text of the application for the patent, filed July 6, 1954, was almost exclusively devoted to the flat-pack method and described a process which appellant’s brief fairly summarizes as follows:

The subsequent steps of the flat-pack method entailed the removal of the lower set of electrodes and its placement on the upper welded sheet of foil and the disposition of successive sheets of foil on the uppermost electrode. The successive sheets were then welded by…