The Development of the Truss Plate, Part IX: The Case of the Century

Issue #15285 - April 2023 | Page #10

By Joe Kannapell

Among our industry’s unsung heroes, Walter Moehlenpah takes a close second place behind Cal Jureit. Both built pivotal, pioneering businesses, Jureit through his truss plate and Moehlenpah through his truss machine. Yet Jureit was bound to have the upper hand, as he was the truss plate’s inventor and owner of the patent, and he had already put together a nationwide franchise and had won lawsuits against Bill Black’s truss plate twice. Now Moehlenpah had the audacity to challenge Jureit with a very similar plate, and the outcome of this challenge would change the landscape of the truss industry permanently.

Moehlenpah was as fine a mechanical engineer as Jureit was a structural engineer, but most crucially, he attracted some of the finest talent. One of the first was a McDonnell Aircraft engineer, George Pallme, who designed the most prolific truss machine, the Mono Press, with the skills he had honed working on the most prolific fighter-bomber, the F-4 Phantom. Not long after, Moehlenpah hired William Webster as his attorney, who would later serve as Director of both the FBI and the CIA. Recently, Director Webster recounted his fond memories of working with Moehlenpah in the days before his ascent to the highest ranks in government. But Moehlenpah’s most consequential hire was Stuart Senniger, his patent attorney and ultimate defense counsel. Senniger was a Principal of a St. Louis specialty firm, Senniger, Powers and Leavitt, and was a celebrated patent litigator.

In August 1960, Moehlenpah applied for a patent on a connector similar to the Atkins plate and began marketing it. (For details on the Atkins plate, see The Development of the Truss Plate, Part VIII: Patent Skirmishes.) By May 1961, Jureit became aware of this and brought suit. Because patent law derives from a federal statute, infringement claims are adjudicated in the federal court with jurisdiction over the location of the alleged offense. In the present case, the District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri would hear the case in St. Louis, about 4 miles from Hydro-Air’s headquarters. Coincidentally, a few years later, William Webster would preside over this court.

Jureit was represented by two eminently qualified firms with distinguished principals. His counsel in drafting the patent and litigating it was D.C.-based Robert E. LeBlanc, who was said to be one of the top litigation patent attorneys in the United States. His local counsel was Kingsland et. al., whose senior partner had served as the head of the U.S. Patent Office. Each of these participating attorneys was registered with the U.S. Patent Office as having demonstrated their qualifications to practice patent law, a highly specialized field requiring mastery of Patent Office practice, and usually necessitating both engineering and law degrees. Obviously, these high-level attorneys earned generous retainers, rendering patent work a very expensive business. In turn, the patents often were worth the cost and effort.

The patent on Xerography, for example, enabled Xerox to discourage competitive offerings, facilitated recovery of development costs, and encouraged development of new products. And the first Xerox machines proved themselves in the truss business by lowering the cost of providing multiple sets of drawings and reducing engineering turnaround time. The same could be said about Jureit’s Gang-Nail plate in reducing the cost of building roof trusses and improving delivery times. Both inventions quickly proved themselves, attracting droves of customers. Yet their obvious success, and the high prices they commanded, also made them worth challenging.

The challenge mounted by Moehlenpah could make or break his business, and it was gutsy, selling a plate that was very similar to one that had been twice forced off the market. Likewise, the defense mounted by Jureit was crucial in assuring that he would continue to harvest the fruits of his invention and forestall price-busting competition. With all that was at stake, and the legal horsepower lined up on opposing sides, this trial would prove to be the case of the century for the truss business.

Senniger put together a formidable two-pronged attack on the validity of Jureit’s patent. First, Senniger used a courtroom demonstration acted out by his expert witness, Washington University’s Dean of Engineering, that proved the Hydro-Air tooth was stronger than the Gang-Nail tooth. Second, he found a British patent from 1893 and a French patent from 1947 that constituted “prior art,” which in the words of the judge:

“… it certainly does not take inventive genius to make joints with plates differing from the French connector plates only in that the Jureit plates have nails struck out from the plate instead of being welded to the plate.”

Accomplishing what the verdicts in the previous lawsuits had not, this decision effectively invalidated the Jureit patent and allowed Moehlenpah to continue unimpeded. Although Jureit appealed the decision, the appellate court found no reason to overturn it. From this point forward, the connector plate industry was “open for business.”