110630-1700 EDT
JWCELECTRIC:
There is much for you to learn about patents.
You should look at some actual patents to develop an understanding of the various parts and how to read a patent.
You can use
http://www.freepatentsonline.com
as a convenient place to view any patent from #1 to the present. But earlier patents may only be found by patent number or by the inventor.
There is a lot of advertizing garbage on the freepatentonline site, but that nuisance is justified in terms of the value the site provides.
Using Zoerlein --
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/result.html?query_txt="zoerlein"&sort=relevance&srch=top
For example enter a search for 2346811 . The result is
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2346811.html
This was invented by Emil Zoerlein head of electrical engineering at Ford Motor Co. and assigned to Ford Motor. This is a very simple patent with only two claims, and possibly very broad relative to the basic concept.
Some ammeters at that time were built where the main wire to the battery was run to the instrument panel and in close proximity to the back side of the ammeter. Internal to the ammeter was a soft iron armature mounted on a pivoting needle. The magnetic field of the wire interacted with the armature on the needle and determined its deflection. The permanent magnet and soft iron vane performed the centering spring function. A spring and a mass make a very nice resonant device. Supply an impulse and and the result is an exponentially damped oscillation. The greater the mass the lower the frequency of oscillation.
Zeorlein basically added an inertia mass that lowered the resonant frequency of the system. If your noise, vibration, or other input is of a frequency well above the resonant frequency, then the resonator becomes a shunt and averaging circuit to those high frequencies. If there is no other damping you do not want to excite the resonator at its resonant frequency. Note, a mechanically balanced system was created.
A patent has drawings, a description, and claims. The claims are what legally define the scope of the patent. The purpose of the drawings and description is to provide for an understanding of the claims.
You have to be ingenious in writing the claims to make them read on your concept as broadly as possible but not be so broad that the claims read on existing art. Existing art is anything -- books, devices, other patents, etc.
In the Zeorlein patent it does not really discuss how the ammeter works, or what might help dampen the new lower frequency of resonance. Seems to imply something near critical damping is achieved. I do not have one to play with. I do suspect this design or variation on it was used in production.
I believe that claim 1 mostly would read on existing ammeters of the time if the damping wheel was removed from the claim. Some little details of the construction might help differentiate the claim as well. Note, the claim does not describe how the device works, but only the components of it, and their relative relationship to one another. Note, the extreme simplicity, low weight, great ruggedness, and manufacturing ease of this device.
Lets suppose you came up with a new means of making this meter, but did not use the permanent magnet, you used a spring. Then this claim would not read on your meter even though you used the inertia wheel.
If I have not missed something and you changed the armature from a soft iron piece to a permanent magnetic, then the claim would read on your device. This is because the word armature here is broad enough to include a soft iron piece or a permanent magnet.
You need to do your own searching for prior art, then have a patent attorney do a search. At this point you decide how to proceed.
The discussion here prompted me to look at the number of issued patents that reference patents of mine. The number of references to a particular patent ranged from 1 to 19. There might be numerous patent applications filed that failed to become patents because of reference to my patents. I have no way of knowing of any of these.
One patent application I made for an extremely simple but very voltage stable oscillator was denied because it read too closely to a simplified circuit in a text book in combination with some other prior art. The person that was paying the bills did not want to try to argue the non-obviousness of the combination. Thus, the application was abandoned.
If someone has not actually put the pieces together I do not agree it is obvious. A posteriori it is obvious because now it has been done. But a priori was it really obvious if it had not been done yet?
.
But the instant that patent issues (every Tuesday of the year that's not a Federal holiday ...), you're no longer allowed to do that. The law in that area is less clear, but making a patentable object after the patent application has been published can result in penalties.
