![]() But the party attacking the validity of a claim can always find references which the Patent Office did not consider. The majority here gives emphasis to the fact that none of the prior art considered by the District Court was before the Patent Office when it granted the patent in suit. 'The primary responsibility for sifting out unpatentable material lies in the Patent Office.' Graham, supra, 383 U.S. The Uecker patent related to portable scaffolding which might be stacked to reach any desired height and thus taught stacking.Ī patent awarded by the Patent Office is to be presumed valid, and the burden of establishing invalidity falls on the party asserting it. Martin, Cederquist, the Boeing and the wind tunnel scaffolds, when considered together, would teach foldable and portable scaffolding based on a triangular concept. It had an interior diagonal stairway section for the purpose of reaching the platform. The end frames were made up of six foot sections joined in erection, one on top of the other, and the scaffold could be dismantled section by section. It was made of steel tubing and consisted of end frames and a top platform section covered with plywood. The wind tunnel scaffold was designed for use in maintenance work in the tunnel. It was designed for use in working on the outside of aircraft. The Boeing scaffold was eighteen to twenty feet high, made of welded steel tubular construction with a diagonal ladder section affixed to the side of the rectangular portion of the scaffold. These latter scaffolds were not foldable. The structure of the patent in suit would be obvious from an overlay of a sketch of the Boeing scaffold or the Southern California wind tunnelling scaffold on a sketch of the structure of the Cederquist patent. ![]() In addition, the Boeing Aircraft Company portable diagonal stairway scaffold, and the Southern California Wind Tunnel scaffold structure, both of which had been described in publications more than one year prior to the application for the patent in suit, were a part of the prior art. The prior art available to such a person would have included not only the Martin patent which taught scaffolding foldability but also Cederquist Patent No. It is true that no single prior art reference contains the exact combination of elements which are in the structure of the claims in suit but we believe the District Court correctly concluded that a person skilled in the scaffolding art as it existed prior to the patent in suit could nevertheless achieve the result of the claims in suit. We might agree with the holding of the Ninth Circuit insofar as it was based on the Martin patent but it avails appellant nothing here for that court did not have before it the additional prior art which we will now discuss. Additional units may be stacked, one upon the other, by fitting the legs of the upper unit into holes provided in the four corners of the end sections of the lower unit. The width of the ladder takes up one half of the width of the supporting ends of the platform section, leaving room for a deck covering the other half of the platform section from which to work. The ladder is used for the purpose of ascending to and descending from the platform section. The other end section supports the corner of the triangle where the ladder is affixed at the juncture of that end section and the platform, and is perpendicular to the platform and parallel to the opposite end section when the unit is in the erected position. The design is based on a triangular conception with one end section, the ladder section and the platform section forming the triangle. Each consists of a platform section hinged to two end or support sections with a diagonal ladder section hinged at the juncture of the platform and one of the end sections. They are of open frame or tubular construction.
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