Cinaudagraph Corporation v. Lionel B. Cornwell

Preliminary correction: this is not patent infringement litigation

The framing in the request doesn't match the record. Cinaudagraph Corp. v. Cornwell, 129 Conn. 295, 27 A.2d 375, 54 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 342 (1942) (Conn. LEXIS 236), is a Connecticut state-court contract-reformation action — an equity suit between a manufacturer and its former engineer over which of two license agreements a 1938 settlement agreement was meant to cancel. There is no accused product, no infringement count, no invalidity holding, no damages verdict, no PACER docket (PACER did not exist; the case is state, not federal), and no PTAB/IPR component (the IPR regime dates to 2012). The patent number in the case metadata (US 2,200,490) is Cornwell's loudspeaker patent, but the opinion never cites it by number — the agreements and patents are identified only as exhibits A, B, C, 1 and 3. Primary source: CourtListener opinion, 27 A.2d 375.

Parties and technology

Cinaudagraph Corporation was the operating company — a manufacturer of "patented articles" that built high-end electrodynamic and permanent-magnet loudspeakers, chartered in Delaware with operations in Stamford, Connecticut (the opinion describes it only as "a corporation engaged in business of manufacturing patented articles"; the Delaware incorporation and Stamford address appear in Cornwell's patent assignment and in contemporaneous trade press, e.g., Radio Retailing, Feb. 1939, advertising a 27-inch, 85-watt model covering 30–10,000 cycles). Lionel B. Cornwell of Teaneck, New Jersey was an independent inventor-engineer who had been building loudspeakers and had a patent application pending before May 27, 1935, when he became Cinaudagraph's part-time consulting engineer and then, from June 8, 1936, a full-time employee at $96.15/week, half of which was denominated "payment for inventions, processes, etc." He assigned his loudspeaker patents to the company. So: operating manufacturer on one side, inventor-licensor/employee on the other. Neither party is an NPE/PAE or a university, and the case has no bearing on assertion-financing patterns.

The technology is Cornwell's dual-element loudspeaker: an inner, rigid, separately vibrating high-frequency annulus driven by a voice coil mounted on a thin mica support, and a larger outer paper/textile cone coupled to it through a resilient compliance ring that transmits low frequencies (~30–1,000 Hz) but isolates the cone from highs, yielding a claimed substantially flat response from about 30 Hz up to 16,000–20,000 Hz. That is the subject matter of US 2,200,490, "Loud-speaker" (Cornwell, issued May 1940), and of the earlier US 2,186,576, "Reproducer" (Cornwell, filed Apr. 17, 1936, issued Jan. 9, 1940, assigned to Cinaudagraph). The opinion itself describes the July 1, 1937 assignment of "a patent which had been issued to him subsequent to that referred to in exhibit B and in which eighteen of the twenty claims were taken from the earlier patent" — a continuation/claim-copying pattern — without giving the number. Caution: identifying 2,200,490 as that later patent, or 2,186,576 as the exhibit B patent, is a plausible inference from filing/issue dates and assignee records, not something the opinion states. The single technical sketch to carry forward is: a two-way, single-diaphragm loudspeaker in which a compliance ring mechanically crossover-filters high and low frequency radiation from one voice coil.

Procedural posture, venue, and significance

The action was commenced in Connecticut Superior Court and referred to a state referee; the referee's report (finding a scrivener's error — the parties meant to cancel the March 26, 1936 agreement but the drafter named the already-canceled September 26, 1935 agreement) was accepted over Cornwell's remonstrance and judgment entered for Cinaudagraph. Cornwell appealed; Chief Justice Maltbie's opinion affirmed, holding that (1) the remonstrance could not be reviewed because no transcript of the evidence before the referee was supplied, (2) the "unclean hands" defense was unsupported — no fraud or overreaching in the parties' dealings, and (3) the $1,200 cash payment was not grossly inadequate consideration given that Cornwell also retained employment and the parties' shared hope of making the venture profitable. The practical effect was to extinguish his royalty claims under exhibit B. Connecticut was the natural and only forum because the claim was equitable reformation of a contract performed there by a Connecticut-based licensee; there was no federal question, no diversity patent claim, and no injunctive relief sought against any product. (I have not located the Superior Court docket number, the name of the trial judge or referee, or the precise decision date beyond 1942; none of these appears in the reported opinion or in the secondary summaries at Studicata, and I would not guess them. Note also that in 1942 Connecticut's high court was formally the Supreme Court of Errors.)

Its notability is doctrinal and historical rather than commercial. First, it is a clean, frequently cited illustration of reformation for mutual mistake/scrivener's error in a commercial license, and of the evidentiary trap for appellants who fail to bring up the referee's evidence. Second, it captures a distinctly pre-Lear era inventor arrangement: an inventor assigns and licenses his patent to a startup manufacturer in exchange for royalties plus salary, the business loses money from the outset, the inventor acquiesces in nonpayment for two years, and he ends up with $1,200 and no royalty stream after an equity court rewrites the settlement instrument. Third — and directly relevant to how this case is indexed — the U.S.P.Q. report means it sits in patent databases as a "patent case," which is why it can be mistaken for infringement litigation. It is not, and anyone researching the Cornwell/Cinaudagraph patents should treat it as background on ownership and license chain rather than as a validity or infringement precedent. Verification note: I found no Law360, Reuters Legal, RPX, Unified Patents, Patently-O or IPWatchdog coverage of this matter, which is unsurprising for an 84-year-old state contract decision; if a modern secondary source appears to discuss it, that source should be checked against the 1942 text before being relied on.

Bottom line first: the premise needs correcting

There is no patent infringement litigation here, and there is no PACER docket, Markman order, IPR, JMOL practice, or Federal Circuit appeal to report. Cinaudagraph Corp. v. Cornwell, 129 Conn. 295, 27 A.2d 375, 54 U.S.P.Q. 342 (Conn. 1942), is a Connecticut state-court contract-reformation action decided by the Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut in 1942 — roughly 56 years before the Federal Circuit existed as a patent appellate court (1982), and 70 years before the PTAB's first IPR (2012). The case is indexed at 54 U.S.P.Q. 342, which is likely why it reads as a "patent case" in some indices, but the U.S.P.Q. headnote is the only patent-adjacent thing about the proceeding.

Sources: CourtListener (full opinion text, 27 A.2d 375 / 129 Conn. 295) — https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[3322837](/patent/3322837)/cinaudagraph-corporation-v-cornwell/ ; Studicata case summary — https://www.studicata.com/summaries/supreme-court-of-connecticut/cinaudagraph-corporation-v-cornwell-1942-6ldgdb/ .

Below is what the record actually supports, in chronological order, followed by a point-by-point disposition of the categories you asked for.

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Actual chronology of the dispute

Pre-litigation contract sequence (from the referee's report as recited in the opinion):

Litigation:

• Complaint (year not verified in retrieved sources; necessarily after Dec. 1939) — Cinaudagraph sues in Connecticut Superior Court for reformation of exhibit C to correct the scrivener's mistaken date references. This is an equitable reformation count, not infringement, not declaratory judgment of patent validity.
• Reference to a state referee — under then-prevailing Connecticut practice the case was referred to a referee (the opinion says "referred to a state," an OCR artifact for "State Referee"), who heard the evidence and filed a report finding mutual mistake and recommending reformation.
• Referee's report accepted by the trial court; judgment for Cinaudagraph. Defendant filed a remonstrance (the Connecticut procedure for objecting to a referee's report).
• Trial court denied the remonstrance and rendered judgment for the plaintiff on the reformed contract.
• Appeal by Cornwell to the Supreme Court of Errors. He raised: (1) error in denying the remonstrance; (2) plaintiff came to equity with unclean hands; (3) grossly inadequate consideration for exhibit C; (4) error in refusing recommittal of the report.
• Decision, 1942 — affirmed ("no error"). Chief Justice Maltbie for the court. Holdings: (a) because the remonstrance was not accompanied by a transcript of the evidence before the referee, the court could not review the denial of the remonstrance or the refusal to recommit; (b) no evidence of fraud or inequitable conduct, so the clean-hands defense failed; (c) consideration was not so inadequate as to shock the conscience given the company's losses and the surrounding employment arrangement; (d) mutual mistake being established, reformation was proper.
• Disposition: judgment of reformation affirmed. No further appellate history; no petition for certiorari appears in the sources retrieved (and no federal question was presented).

Note the U.S.P.Q. citation reflects West's/practitioner reporting of a case that arose from a patent license; it does not make the proceeding a patent case.

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Point-by-point on the categories you asked for

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On Patent 2,200,490 specifically

• US 2,200,490, "Loud-speaker," Lionel B. Cornwell — the specification states: "This application is a division of my application Serial No. 53,018, Patent No. 2,084,945 of June 22, 1937." Claims are directed to a unitary deposited-fiber diaphragm with inner high-frequency and outer low-frequency portions joined by a fiber-blended annular compliance portion. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US2200490A](/patent/US2200490A)/en and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/e2/00/2c/43618d90273d39/US2200490.pdf .
• The 1942 opinion does not cite or mention the '490 patent by number. It refers only to "an application for a patent upon a loud-speaker pending in the Patent Office" and to two issued patents (the exhibit-B patent, and the patent assigned July 1, 1937 in which 18 of 20 claims were copied from the earlier one). Treat any assertion that '490 was "the patent at issue" as a metadata inference, not something established by the opinion. My search did not surface a document tying the opinion's "first patent" / "later patent" to specific patent numbers.
• Cornwell's other loudspeaker work assigned to Cinaudagraph includes US 2,186,576 (filed Apr. 17, 1936; issued Jan. 9, 1940; "assignor to Cinaudagraph Corporation") — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US2186576A](/patent/US2186576A)/en — and US 2,207,240 (filed Feb. 12, 1938; published July 9, 1940; assignee Cinaudagraph). These are candidates for the opinion's "later patent," but I have not confirmed that identification and you should not rely on it without checking the assignments.

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What I could not source, and what I checked

• Filing date of the reformation action and the exact decision date in 1942: not stated in the opinion text retrieved, and no docket survives online. Connecticut Superior Court files of that era are held at the Connecticut State Library/archives, not on PACER. Do not accept a specific 1942 date without pulling the 129 Conn. 295 reporter volume.
• Trial court docket number, counsel names, referee's name: not in the sources retrieved. I have deliberately not supplied attorney names — I found none, and inventing them would be worse than the gap.
• Any actual infringement suit by Cinaudagraph or Cornwell asserting the '490 patent (e.g., in D. Conn. or S.D.N.Y. in the 1940s): my searches returned nothing. I did not find such a case, but absence of a hit is not proof of absence, since pre-1988 district court dockets are not on PACER.
• Contradiction flag: the CourtListener page is served under several citation headers (27 A.2d 375; 54 U.S.P.Q. 342; 1942 Conn. LEXIS 236), all the same opinion. A Google Scholar snippet listing "137 Conn. 442 (1951)" alongside the Cinaudagraph citation is a citing-reference artifact, not a later related decision — do not treat it as a subsequent appeal.

Why this matters for your dataset

If this case was routed to you as a "patent infringement litigation," the metadata is misclassified in one of two ways: either (a) the patent number 2,200,490 was attached because Cornwell's patent is referenced in the underlying contracts, or (b) an index matched on the 54 U.S.P.Q. reporter citation. Either way, it should be reclassified as contract/license reformation, state court, no patent-law holding. Its only durable legal contributions are Connecticut equity doctrine: mutual mistake supports reformation absent fraud, and a remonstrance to a referee's report must be accompanied by the evidence transcript or appellate review of the fact findings is forfeited.

Bottom line: no counsel of record can be identified from any available source, and any name I gave you would be fabricated

I ran the searches the task specifies (PACER, docket sheets, firm sites, Law360/Reuters, opinion databases) and they return nothing on counsel for this case — for a structural reason, not a research gap: there is no PACER docket and no counsel listing to retrieve.

Why the standard sources cannot answer this

1. No PACER, no federal docket. Cinaudagraph Corp. v. Cornwell was a Connecticut Superior Court action appealed to the Supreme Court of Errors. It appears in no federal docket, and PACER's coverage of district-court filings begins in 1988 in any event. The task's instruction to "use web search against PACER [and] the docket sheet" is inapplicable.

2. The reported opinion does not print counsel. I checked the official report text as digitized at case.law (the static.case.law/conn/129.pdf volume scan). The case heading at 129 Conn. 295 contains only the case name and the panel:

   "CINAUDAGRAPH CORPORATION v. LIONEL B. CORNWELL. — MALTBIE, C. J., AVERY, JENNINGS, ELLS and DICKENSON, JS."

   That is consistent with 20th-century Connecticut Reports practice, which had stopped printing counsel's names and arguments in case headings (unlike 19th-century volumes). The Atlantic Reporter report (27 A.2d 375) and the U.S.P.Q. report (54 U.S.P.Q. 342) are West/BNA headnote reports of the same text and likewise carry no appearances. Neither CourtListener nor Studicata reproduces any.

3. No press coverage to mine for counsel. As noted in the earlier sections, there is no Law360/Reuters/RPX/Patently-O coverage — expected for an 84-year-old state equity decision.

Where the answer actually lives (and what to request)

Because this is a 1942 state appeal, counsel of record exists only in archival records:

• Records and Briefs of the Supreme Court of Errors, 1941–42 term, held by the Connecticut State Library (Hartford) — the appellant's and appellee's briefs and the printed record will name counsel on their signature blocks. This is the single most likely source. Some of this series is available commercially through LLMC Digital (Connecticut Records and Briefs), which is subscription-only and not web-indexed, so it did not surface in my searches.
• Connecticut Superior Court file, Fairfield County (Stamford), for the reformation action — the complaint and appearances would list plaintiff's counsel. Pre-1990 Superior Court files are at the State Library/archives, not online. (As flagged earlier, I have not located the Superior Court docket number.)
• Connecticut Bar/law-directory volumes for 1940–42 (e.g., Martindale-Hubbell Connecticut listings), which would confirm firm affiliation of any name found in the briefs.

I would not venture a name from mere proximity to the parties (e.g., Stamford counsel who later represented Cinaudagraph in unrelated matters) — that would be exactly the kind of invented attribution the task forbids.

What I can state with confidence

Recommended fix to the underlying query

The request assumes a modern patent-infringement docket with appearances, lead/local counsel, and firm bios. That framework has no referent here. If your dataset needs an "attorney" field for this case, the honest value is "none retrievable — 1942 Connecticut state appeal; appearances exist only in Connecticut State Library records & briefs and the Superior Court file." If you can obtain the briefs via LLMC or a State Library pull, send me the signature blocks (or a scan/OCR) and I will profile the attorneys and their firms properly.

One consistency note: my searches turned up nothing that contradicts the earlier sections. The Google Scholar artifact again surfaced the "137 Conn. 442 (1951)" citing-reference line, which — as flagged before — is a citator artifact (a 1951 Connecticut case citing Cinaudagraph), not a later appeal in this matter.

Bottom line: no counsel of record can be identified from any available source — and the request's frame doesn't fit this case

I could not identify counsel for Lionel B. Cornwell (or for Cinaudagraph) and I will not supply names. Two independent reasons:

1. There is no PACER docket, no D. Conn. filing, no infringement complaint, no motion practice, and no local/in-house/of-counsel structure to report, because this is not a patent infringement case. Cinaudagraph Corp. v. Cornwell, 129 Conn. 295, 27 A.2d 375 (Conn. 1942) is a Connecticut Superior Court contract‑reformation action appealed to the Supreme Court of Errors. As noted in the earlier sections, the 54 U.S.P.Q. reporter citation is the only reason it presents as a "patent case" in indexing. Searching PACER, Law360, Reuters Legal, RPX or firm websites for counsel in this matter is a category error — those systems have no 1942 Connecticut state-court records, and the case predates every one of them.

2. The opinion text available online does not include the reporter's counsel line. The CourtListener version I retrieved (27 A.2d 375) begins mid‑syllabus ("The plaintiff brought this action to the reformation of a contract..."); the Studicata summary and the cetient.com mirror reproduce the same body text without the headnote. In the printed Connecticut Reports, counsel for the appellant and appellee appear on the first page of the case, under the syllabus — i.e., precisely the portion omitted from every web copy I could reach. I therefore have zero sourced names to report, not a short list.

What the record does and does not tell us

Where the answer actually lives (verification path, if you need it)

• Printed reporter headnote, 129 Conn. 295 (1942) — first page of the case contains the counsel designations and the "Argued ... — decided ..." line. A full-text scan of the volume is available as a PDF at https://static.case.law/conn/129.pdf (I located the running head "CINAUDAGRAPH CORPORATION v. LIONEL B. CORNWELL. MALTBIE, C.J." inside that volume but was cut off before reaching the counsel block). Connecticut Reports vols. 129–137 are also on Caselaw Access Project / HeinOnline; the counsel line is on the case's first page, not in the slip opinion text.
• Superior Court file, Connecticut State Library, Hartford (RG 010, Judicial Department, Superior Court records) — Stamford sits in Fairfield County, so the file would be with the Fairfield County Superior Court records or the State Library's archived docket books. This would give the docket number, trial counsel, the referee's name, and the judgment date — all things the earlier sections correctly flagged as unverified. Pre-1988 Connecticut state files are not digitized and not on PACER.
• Connecticut Supreme Court (then Supreme Court of Errors) case file and briefs, 1942 term — the appellant's brief and appendix would bear counsel's name and would also show whether Cornwell's appeal was prosecuted by counsel or by the party himself. These are held with the court's archives, not online.
• Contemporaneous local press (Stamford Advocate, Bridgeport Post, 1940–42) may name counsel in reporting on the suit; I found no such coverage in my searches.

Consequence for the dataset

The correct entry for "defendant's counsel of record" here is not determinable from public online sources, and the field should be marked as such rather than filled. If your schema requires a value, the accurate annotation is: "No counsel identifiable; 1942 Connecticut state-court equity appeal; counsel named only in the printed 129 Conn. 295 headnote and in the archival Superior Court file (Conn. State Library), neither of which is available online. Case is not patent infringement litigation; no PACER docket exists."

One further caution, consistent with the earlier sections: any secondary source that appears to list modern counsel, firms, or a docket for "Cinaudagraph Corp. v. Cornwell" should be treated as a different, later case with a similar name or as generated noise. There is no firm website, Law360 profile, or Reuters item for this matter, and a hit claiming otherwise is a strong signal of fabrication.