View source for Appellate Brief for Petitioner (January 1939) in The Electric Storage Battery Co., Petitioner, v. Genzo Shimadzu and Northeastern Engineering Corporation, Respondents (RCTA)

== Questions Addressed ==

# Whether Shimadzu can by oral evidence of earlier conception take the date of his inventions back of June 1921. 
# Whether the patents, if otherwise valid, are invalidated by Shimadzu's suppressing, concealing, and withholding his inventions 
# Whether the commercial use by the petitioner is a public use and a bar to patentability

== Undisputed Facts ==

# Petitioner began commercial production in June 1921
# Shimadzu made no disclosure of his inventions to anyone in the U.S. prior to filing
# Shimadzu has no foreign patent for 1,896,020
# Upon evidence of oral testimony, drawings, and purported copies of alleged notebook entries, Courts below found date of invention as no later than August 1919. 
# Lower court: "We are not concerned with the motives which prompted him, in taking out the '563 patent, to confine it to a single step [...] and to withhold the really essential steps of the invention for later patenting. It is sufficient to say that he had the right to do this if he chose."
# Respondents themselves proved that petitioner's process and apparatus were not secret. 
# The inventions of petitioner's process and apparatus were made wholly independently of Shimadzu. 

== Timeline ==

* 08/??/1919: Alleged ''foreign'' invention
* 11/20/1920: Japanese patent 41,728 (alleged 1,584,149)
* 11/27/1920: Japanese patent 42,563 (alleged 1,584,149)
* 06/??/1921: Petitioner's public use in U.S.
* 01/30/1922: Filed patent 1,584,149 
* 07/14/1923: Japanese patent 42,563 (alleged 1,584,150) AND filed patent 1,584,150
* 04/27/1926: Filed patent 1,896,020