4 6 D O C U M E N T 2 8 R E S P O N S E T O W O L F F have the gift of ennobling and activating the minds of your auditors. So do send me the scribble from the Figaro sometime at your convenience, not so much for its own sake as for ours. Best regards to you, your wife, and the Anschütz[8] family, yours, A. Einstein. 28. “Response to the Expert Opinion of Hans Wolff in the Legal Dispute between Anschütz & Co and Kreiselbau”[1] 18 January [1922][2] Response to Wolff’s Expert Opinion[3] in the Matter of Anschütz versus Kreiselbau[4] It cannot be my task here to go into all points connected with the ones I would have to comment on about Wolff’s expert opinion instead I confine myself to indi- cating the most important points of principle.[5] 1. According to my earlier expert opinion,[6] any apparatus that makes use of a horizontal gyrocompass to detect curved flight falls under the protection of the plaintiff’s patent.[7] This point of view is not shared by Wolff’s expert opinion, in that it makes reference to Rosenbaum’s treatise[8] and represents the view that the transfer of the ideas expressed there to airship travel would have been obvious although it does not deny that the application to aircraft offers characteristic tech- nical advantages. This involves an issue that cannot be solved exactly but only intu- itively I am, however, as before, of the conviction that despite Rosenbaum’s article the invention of the gyroscopic kymograph for airplanes could very well not have been made or would have required some years’ wait to emerge. This issue is per- haps immaterial according to British patent specification 125096 from the year 1916 describing a gyroscopic kymograph for airplanes,[9] which patent specifica- tion was not available to me as I was writing my earlier opinion.[10] If this British patent specification should also be recognized in the interpretation of the protective scope of the plaintiff’s patent, even though its content was naturally not accessible over here in this country at filing of its patent, the plaintiff’s patent’s protective scope would have to be narrowed down further than indicated above.
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