The Licensor

This expert holds more paper about the Hartford-Empire Company than about any other firm except the one it is named for. That is an accident of what survived: the machinery licensor was sued by the United States, and the transcript of that suit is where most of the Three Rivers correspondence now lives [ev-0059]. So Hartford appears here twice over — as the company whose refusal shaped the plant’s first years, and as the custodian whose files are the reason this expert can quote the plant’s own general manager.

What follows is not a corporate history. It is what the holdings say about Hartford in its dealings with, and about, this one Texas factory.

Where the company was

The two accounts held here of where the company was disagree. Charles R. Tips placed Hartford-Empire in Hartford, Connecticut; Michael David Smith’s 1989 Texas Glass placed it in Newark, New Jersey.

Tips, writing in 1971:

“We applied to the Hartford Empire Company of Hartford, Conn., for the right to use their equipment. They had a complete monopoly on glass container machinery and refused to give us a license.” [@ev-0041, p. 43]

Smith: “all glass container production machinery manufactured in the United States was controlled by a single supplier, the Hartford-Empire of Newark, New Jersey” [@ev-0038, printed p. 11; @ev-0039, printed p. 11].

The trial record settles it against Smith, twice, on the company’s own paper. Government Exhibit No. 479 opens with the letterhead “Hartford-Empire Company / Glass Working Machinery / Hartford, Conn.” [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 59554]. Government Exhibit No. 583 is addressed to “Mr. F. Goodwin Smith, President, Hartford-Empire Company, Hartford, Connecticut” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59692]. A third exhibit is headed simply “Hartford-Empire Company / Hartford, Conn.” above the date [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60720]. The place is in the company’s name and in its address, and Tips had it right.

This is worth stating plainly because the two accounts are not of equal kind. Tips wrote from having applied to the company; Smith wrote a book about Texas glass sixty years later, and this expert has recorded elsewhere that Smith’s book adds circumstantial detail its own sources do not carry. That is the weight behind the correction here. It is not a general rule that Tips is the better witness — on the character of the antitrust case he is wrong and Smith is wrong in a different direction, and this expert says so in the article that covers it. It is a rule about this kind of fact: the address of a company a man wrote to is the sort of thing an applicant knows and a later author looks up.

What it was to this plant

The relationship is documented elsewhere in this expert and is only summarized here. Hartford notified Three Rivers in 1929 that its feeders infringed; the company did not contest the claim and took a licence [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 60713]. The Bottle Research Group records the licence as covering three feeders, for beverage, packers’ and prescription ware [ev-0042]. Hartford refused, then and afterwards, to license the plant for milk bottles, and knew the plant ran a home-made feeder on milks regardless [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 60719]. It numbered the plant’s individual feeders and audited what each of them made against a field of permitted ware [@ev-0059, part 16, fols. 60789-60791]. In January 1935 it proposed to forbid a reorganized Three Rivers to make jars with the Mason finish and seal [@ev-0059, part 16, fol. 59030]. It was still sending letters about lehr licence fees at Three Rivers in July 1938, eighteen months after the plant changed hands [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 60688].

Four suits at once, and no room for a fifth

What is new here is the licensor seen from inside its own enforcement department. An undated letter signed by Hartford’s president — the initials “FGS-C” identify F. Goodwin Smith — answers a licensee who has asked for royalty relief and complained about Three Rivers. It is worth reading for what it concedes about the limits of the machine.

“Messrs. Mandeville and Hazelton are satisfied that we are doing everything that possibly can be done to push our patent suits to a conclusion, and although we would like to start a number of other suits, we have our hands full in carrying on four suits at the present time. In other words, it is physically impossible for us to do more.”

“Since Jan. 1st practically our entire Legal Department as well as many of our Engineers and road men have been spending their time between St. Louis and Columbus, testifying and conducting the suits against Obear-Nester and Kearns-Gorsuch, thus we have been quite demoralized ourselves, and any real progress on work here has been com[p]letely interrupted.” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59478]

Then the offer, which is the reason the letter is in the record at all:

“If you will notify us definitely as to whether Three Rivers are actually using, or have installed, one or more Bethel feeders we will immediately serve notice of infringement, and this will perhaps offer you an opportunity to confer with Three Rivers, and perhaps you can urge them to behave themselves at least temporarily.” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59478]

Three things are visible in that sentence. Hartford did not know what machinery was on the floor of a licensee’s plant until a competitor told it. The infringement notice is offered in advance, conditionally, as a service to the party who reports — it is a thing the licensor will do for someone. And the stated object is not a judgment but leverage: an “opportunity to confer,” so that the reporting licensee can “urge them to behave themselves at least temporarily.” Behaving, in context, means not cutting prices.

The letter is undated in the window this expert holds, and the correspondent is not named in it. What can be dated is the surrounding condition, which Smith gives in the same letter: “The real and fundamental trouble is that the capacity in the industry is about 33[⅓]% greater than the consumption” — the scan runs the fraction together as “3314” — “The same situation exists in a number of other major industries, such as textiles, leather, silk, etc.” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59478]. That is a depression letter. The Bethel feeders it asks about have not otherwise been identified in these holdings.

A patent case for a commercial reason

A second Hartford letter in the same run of exhibits describes the machinery of an infringement suit being built against a different Texas company — the Knape-Coleman Glass Company, founded in 1933 by two men who had left Three Rivers [@ev-0059, part 04, fol. 3430]. It is the frankest document about Hartford’s motives that this expert holds, and it is frank because it was written to a friendly reader.

“Upon learning from the Liberty Glass Co. that the Knape-Coleman Co. apparently intends to keep going with their automatic feeders, we wired them yesterday, reminding them of the assurances which they have given us that they would not incur litigation by continued use of infringing feeders and asking them to wire us a definite statement as to their intentions.”

“We have also communicated with our Texas attorney, Mr. Searcy, for the purpose of getting some necessary information as to the Texas courts and as to the procedure that would be followed in such an infringement suit.” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59495]

Then the admission:

“Since the Knape-Coleman infringement consists at present of the use of one feeder only, and is thus the smallest of all the present infringements of our patents, we should not regard the Knape-Coleman infringement as warranting a suit for some time to come, considering it purely as a patent matter. However, we understand that the Knape-Coleman infringement is important from the business point of view, especially as regards competition with the Liberty Glass Co., and that you desire us to push this matter promptly.” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59495]

Considering it purely as a patent matter, the case was not worth bringing. It was being prepared anyway because a licensee wanted a competitor stopped. Hartford says so in its own letter, in the ordinary voice of a firm explaining a scheduling decision to a client. Nothing in the Three Rivers file is as explicit as this about what the patents were for, and Three Rivers is a party to the same pattern from the other side: the Bethel-feeder letter above offers the same service, in the same terms, against this plant.

The letter also fixes the standing of the San Antonio attorney this expert already has an article about. “Our Texas attorney, Mr. Searcy” is Hartford’s own phrase, in a letter that is not about Three Rivers at all, and it is being used to price the procedure of a Texas infringement suit before one is filed. Searcy’s retainer by Hartford dates to at least August 1932, when Safford wrote to him about Three Rivers as “a perpetual thorn in the side of all the manufacturing companies” and about taking “the machinery out of their factory” [@ev-0069; @ev-0067]. Whatever else Searcy was, he was the man Hartford asked what a Texas court would do.

What the licensor would not do

The same president’s letter refuses the relief it was written to answer:

“I think you can appreciate that there really isn’t anything we can do for you in the way of a reduction or suspension of royalties. Several of our good friends have taken this matter up with us, and we have convinced them that this is not a logical or wise course to pursue either for us or for themselves.” [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 59478]

That is the other half of the picture the Three Rivers correspondence shows from below. This plant fell behind on its royalties and paid up the arrears when Tips could raise the money [@ev-0059, part 16, at fol. 60716]. The licensor’s position on royalty relief, stated to a licensee in better standing than Three Rivers ever was, was that there was nothing it could do — and that its good friends had been talked out of asking.

What this expert does not hold about Hartford

Nearly everything, outside its dealings with this plant.

• No corporate history. The only account held of the company’s formation is one sentence in a scholarly chapter: that Hartford-Fairmont merged with the Empire Machine Company in June 1922 to form Hartford-Empire [ev-0042]. Nothing held describes its capitalization, its officers beyond the names that appear on this correspondence, or its plants.
• No patent list and no market-share figure. Accounts of Hartford’s size circulate in the collector and popular literature — a count of patents held, a percentage of American glassware produced under its licences, the terms of its 1924 agreement with Owens. None of those figures rests on anything admitted here, and this article states none of them. What the holdings support is narrower and better attested: that Tips believed the company had “a complete monopoly on glass container machinery” and applied to it because there was nowhere else to apply [@ev-0041, p. 43].
• The decision is now identified but not held in primary form. The case reached the Supreme Court as Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States, 323 U.S. 386 (1945) — a civil equity suit decided January 8, 1945 at Toledo, with compulsory reasonable-royalty licensing ordered on equipment patents; twelve corporations and 101 individuals were defendants [ev-0063]. The opinion itself is not admitted here; what is held is a research note reading it. That reading records that Three Rivers is not individually named in the Supreme Court’s opinion, that the decree ordered Ball Brothers to divest the plant, and that Tips’ account of the case — venue, multiple defendants, scope — tracks the decision more closely than Smith’s [ev-0063].
• The TNEC hearings. Safford testified before the Temporary National Economic Committee in December 1938, and TNEC Exhibit No. 123 prints the August 1932 letter retaining S. S. Searcy as Hartford’s Texas attorney — the same letter that appears in the transcript as Exhibit 1786 [ev-0067]. The TNEC hearings are not held as primary evidence; what is held is a research note’s reading of them.
• A wider sweep of the transcript. A search of all fifty-eight parts of the transcript has located material not in the four-part extract this expert holds: Government Exhibit 1785 (Hartford’s own “Chronology of Relations Between Hartford-Empire Company and Three Rivers Glass Company,” 5 June 1934), Exhibit 1786 (the “perpetual thorn in the side” letter of 26 August 1932), Exhibit H-5750 (licensing events 1916–1940), and the royalty stipulation showing Ball paying Hartford $800 a year for machines in a plant making no glass [ev-0069]. Those readings are held in a research note and should be checked against the primary pages when the extract is extended.
• Fifty-four of the fifty-eight parts of that transcript, and the pages of Hartford’s own licence register that lie between the windows the extract happens to capture.