Union Water-Meter Company

Union Water-Meter Company — Profile

Company overview. Union Water-Meter Company was a 19th-century American manufacturer of water meters, founded in 1868 in Worcester, Massachusetts, by hydraulic engineer Phinehas Ball and local mechanic Benaiah (also spelled Benejah) Fitts. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History records that the firm was reorganized in 1875 and ceased operations in the mid-1930s; the company itself is no longer an operating concern. It appears to have been a private company throughout its existence — no public ticker, parent, employee count, or revenue figures are available from the sources reviewed, and none should be inferred.

Products / services. Union manufactured mechanical water meters for municipal and building water service, beginning with the reciprocating piston meters designed by Ball and Fitts. Its documented product lines include the "Columbia" turbine meter (introduced mid-1890s), the "King" disc meter (1905) with follow-on Models, and a disc meter introduced in 1916. Period advertising (Fire and Water Engineering, 1921) also lists complementary waterworks specialties: Union compounding valves, corporation cocks, cement-lining presses, water-pressure regulators, and Worcester fire signals. This was a genuine operating manufacturer, not a shell licensor.

Patent-litigation posture. Per the tracked data, the company appears once, as plaintiff and zero times as defendant — consistent with an operating company asserting its own manufacturing patents rather than a non-practicing entity. Its sole tracked matter, Union Water-Meter Company v. Henry A. Desper, began as a bill in equity in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts and reached the Supreme Court of the United States on appeal. No NPE-style volume assertion pattern is present.

Notable case and context. In Water-Meter Co. v. Desper, 101 U.S. 332 (1879), Union asserted reissued patent No. 5,806 (a reissue of No. 109,372, granted 1870 to Ball and Fitts for liquid-meter improvements), which Union held as assignee. Justice Bradley's opinion addressed combination-claim infringement and mechanical equivalents and held the reissued patent not infringed by Desper's meter under his own patent No. 144,747. The case reflects the firm's core technology — reciprocating-piston and rotary-valve water-meter design — and its willingness to litigate to protect it.