50 THE LEGAL COMPONENT Innovation and attorneys aren’t often mentioned in the same sentence, but the lawyers who represented Western States played crucial roles in protecting the company’s ideas and innovations. Although the U.S. government grants patents to inventors, those patents do not provide automatic and foolproof protection. An inventor wishing to protect the value of his invention must contest any attempt at infringement. That’s why Western States has long taken an aggressive approach to defend its intellectual property rights against other companies that attempt to infringe upon those rights. Two cases in particular stand out. In 1931, Western States Machine Co. v. Ferguson, heard in the Federal District Court in Rhode Island, the judge denied a claim by a pair of sugar refinery employees who felt that they had actually created the lock-lap joint design which provided better performance in the centrifugal screens used by Western States. The case involved a confirmation that the Roberts and Gibson joint design was superior and was neither anticipated nor derived from other approaches. Then in 1945, in Western States Machine Co. v. S. S. Hepworth Co., which was heard in both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Second Circuit of the Federal Appeals Court, patent attorney Nelson Littell Sr. successfully protected several of the company’s patents. The ruling was issued by celebrated Judge Learned Hand, and the reasoning he used to make the decision is cited in the court records. CHAPTER 3 left to right: 1982. Western States Machine Company Board of Directors: Joseph B. Bange, O. Wood Moyle III, Robert M. Jones; Judge Farrell E. Roberts, Robert L. Altman and Nelson Littell Sr. (with Hammond & Littell, established in 1924). Nelson, Jr. was on the Western States Board in the early 1990s.