US 110309

I'll run several targeted searches for this specific patent number across patent and litigation sources.

Let me run additional targeted searches to verify inventor/assignee details and check for any litigation references.

Search scope and limits (read first)

I do not have a direct, authenticated connection to USPTO Patent Public Search, PatentCenter, or the CAFC/RECAP docket system. My queries were open-web searches that surface mirrors of those records (Google Patents, which republishes USPTO data; Justia; DataTamp; patentimages/Google storage of original USPTO prints). Within that constraint, here is what I found for the identifier 110309, interpreted literally.

Two disambiguation warnings, since you asked me not to auto-correct:

• A search hit for PCT/CN2016/110309 (WO 2017/101851, a chemical compound application) is a PCT application number, not the US patent you asked about. Not conflated below.
• US 113,796 (Reeves), US 62,489 (Hopkins), US 81,098 (McDonald), US 181,693 (Lloyd) and US 73,075 (Broad) are different cant-hook patents that appeared in search results. Not conflated below.
• Google Patents lists "US110309D" as an alias. That is a Google-internal family/record identifier, not the application serial number. No serial number appears on the record I retrieved.

Bibliographic summary — US Patent No. 110,309

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US110309](/patent/US110309)/en (fetched 2026-09-24); corroborated in part by the US D1006569 S1 reference table at https://patents.justia.com/patent/D1006569, which lists "110309 | December 1870 | Tetro."

Claim 1 (the only claim) — plain language

Verbatim: "The combination of an ordinary iron crow-bar A, adjustable and removable socket-sleeve C, and the hook D, the whole combined and operating together, substantially as and for the purpose described."

Plain-language reading: a cant-hook made by taking three things and putting them together —

1. a standard pointed iron crow-bar (A);
2. a socket/sleeve (C) that slides onto a squared section (B) of the bar and is locked in place by a set screw (b); and
3. a hook (D) pivoted on an arm (a) that projects from the socket;

where the parts cooperate to grip, turn, and move heavy articles (logs, timbers). Because the socket is adjustable along the squared shank, the operator can raise or lower it to change the distance between the bar's point and the hook, letting the tool grip objects of different sizes; and because the socket is removable, loosening the set screw converts the implement back into an ordinary crow-bar. The claim is a classic combination claim of old elements (crow-bar, sleeve, set screw, pivot hook), so under 19th-century practice its scope is tied to that specific combination rather than to any element alone.

CAFC 2026 docket / litigation check

No CAFC 2026 docket, district court case, or any 2026 litigation reference to patent 110,309 was found. This is expected, not merely an absence of search results: the record shows the patent's anticipated expiration as December 20, 1887, so the patent has been unenforceable for roughly 139 years and cannot be asserted in a 2026 action. Any 2026 filing citing "110309" would not be an assertion of this patent.

Explicit uncertainties

• Filing date and application serial number: the retrieved record does not show them. I cannot supply them without fabricating, and I did not query PatentCenter directly. Google Patents' "US110309D" should not be read as a serial.
• Inventor name spelling: the OCR print reads "WALDYV TETRO" in the heading and "WALDY TETRO" in the signature block. I report "Waldy Tetro" as the most likely reading, but the OCR is inconsistent and the true given name may differ (e.g., Waldyn/Waldy). The surname Tetro is independently corroborated by the Justia citation table.
• Assignee: "Union Nut Company, of Unionville, Connecticut" appears in the patent heading as assignee; I could not independently verify the underlying assignment record, and the company is not confirmed to exist today.
• Abstract: none exists; do not expect one for an 1870 grant.
• Substantive claim content is limited: there is exactly one claim, and no drawing-level limitation beyond elements A, B, C, D, a, and b, so a fuller "claim chart" is not possible from this record.
• Search engine results were thin for this identifier — the strongest evidence is the Google Patents text itself plus the Justia citation row, which agree.

I'll search for litigation involving this specific patent number.

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving US Patent 110,309. My searches of patent-litigation sources (including the Unified Patents litigation portal domain, CourtListener/RECAP, Docket Alarm, and general web search) returned no case, docket, complaint, IPR/PGR, or CAFC appeal naming US 110,309 as an asserted or challenged patent.

What the record does show for this patent

Per the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US110309](/patent/US110309)/en:

The only "cited by" entries on the patent are later patents citing US 110,309 as prior art — US 4,533,117 A (Lifting device, Schwang Per Eric, 1985) and US D1006569 S1 (Log transport tool hook, Logox LLC, 2023). These are citations, not litigation, and neither indicates an infringement suit.

Searches performed and results

• Search for "110309" combined with litigation / infringement / lawsuit → no dockets.
• Search against patent-litigation aggregators (Unified Patents portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist and ptab/caselist, Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP) → no cases for this number.
• Hits containing "309" were false positives from the shorthand convention used in litigation practice, e.g. the "’309 Patent" in Wirtgen America, Inc. v. Caterpillar, Inc., No. 1:17-cv-00770 (D. Del.); the "’309 patent" in CIENA v. Corvis; the Servo hot-box-detector "’309" patent in the 4th Circuit; and the "’309 Patent" in Lite-Netics v. Holiday Bright Lights. None of these is US 110,309 — they are unrelated later patents whose numbers merely end in -309.

Important caveats (stated explicitly)

1. Database coverage limits. PACER, CourtListener/RECAP, Unified Patents, and Docket Alarm cover modern dockets (roughly the late 1980s forward, with spotty older coverage). Any 1871–1887 infringement suit on this patent would exist only in 19th-century circuit court records and West/NY reporter volumes, which are not indexed in these databases. I therefore cannot rule out a historical suit with high confidence — but I found no evidence of any, and the patent's "Expired – Lifetime" status with no litigation record is consistent with none.
2. No modern assertion is legally possible. The patent expired 1887-12-20 (before the 20-year term regime), so there are no enforceable rights to litigate today.
3. Number disambiguation. I have taken "110309" literally as US 110,309. If you intended a modern patent number in the US 11,030,9xx range (e.g., US 11,030,9__), those are eight-digit numbers and I would need the complete number to search — please supply it and I will run the litigation search on that identifier.

If you can confirm the intended patent number, or if you have a case name/court you believe is relevant, I can re-run targeted searches against PACER/CAFC-style sources.

I'll verify against live sources before concluding, since the structured block is thin.

I ran independent web searches to try to surface anything the ODP ingest might have missed (nothing relevant returned) and reconciled the structured block against the patent's own front-matter dates. Result below.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US110309: zero (0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials). The reason is not "the troll has been quiet" — it is that US110309A — "Improvement in cant-hooks," Waldy Tetro, assigned to Union Nut Company, Letters Patent dated 1870-12-20 with anticipated expiration 1887-12-20 — has been expired for roughly 139 years, and no AIA trial vehicle is available or rational against it. Bottom line for a defendant: a demand letter citing this patent is not a litigation threat, it is a sanctions/compliance problem. You cannot infringe a patent that expired in 1887, and no IPR/PGR/CBM can be filed against it today (reasons in the next section).

Proceeding-by-proceeding

No proceedings to serialize. The canonical structured list from the USPTO Open Data Portal is empty, and my verification searches returned no IPR, PGR, or CBM docket for this patent, no PTAB Final Written Decision, and no Federal Circuit appeal. I will not invent a proceeding number to fill this template.

For completeness, here is why each AIA vehicle is unavailable — this is the analysis a defendant actually needs:

Claim structure of the patent (for context, not from any FWD)

The 1870 specification recites a single claim:

"The combination of an ordinary iron crow-bar A, adjustable and removable socket-sleeve C, and the hook D, the whole combined and operating together, substantially as and for the purpose described."

So there is no claim 2, no dependent-claim ladder, and nothing for a panel to cancel at claim-level granularity. Any statement that "claims 1–5 were canceled" or "claim 3 survived" would be fabricated.

Note on forward citations (not proceedings): Google Patents lists two forward citations — US4533117A (1985-08-06, "Lifting device," Schwang Per Eric) and USD1006569S1 (2023-12-05, "Log transport tool hook," Logox LLC). These are issued patents, not PTAB proceedings, and neither is evidence of any validity challenge. The Logox design patent suggests the cant-hook form factor is still commercially live in 2023–2025, but a 2023 design patent does not resurrect the 1870 utility patent. (I did not verify whether any other Logox-related IPR exists; that would be a different patent number.)

Strategic summary

Claim status. US110309A has exactly one claim, and it is neither CANCELED nor SUSTAINED — it is EXPIRED. The block's own legal-status field reads "Expired - Lifetime," with anticipated expiration 1887-12-20 (a 17-year term from the 1870-12-20 grant, matching the pre-1995 term rule). The practical taxonomy for a defendant is: every claim is expired and unassertable. There are no "surviving claims" to design around and no claims to attack.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2). There is no estoppel, because no IPR or PGR was ever instituted against this patent. A defendant owes no § 315(e)(2) diligence (no petition was filed, so no ground was "raised or reasonably could have been raised" by a petitioner/privy). Conversely, a defendant gains nothing from IPR estoppel either — there is no prior FWD to leverage. If you are accused in a demand letter, do not budget for PTAB counsel; budget for a short letter to the sender, and consider whether the sender's conduct is independently actionable (state UCL/fair-business-practices exposure, attorney-fee exposure under 35 U.S.C. § 285 in the parallel case, or a Rule 11 posture if a suit is actually filed).

Pattern signals. No petitioner has ever filed against this patent — no repeat-petitioner pattern, no Unified Patents-type aggregator in the chain, no patent-owner appeal activity, no Director Review. The complete absence of PTAB activity here is not the "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" signal that absence would normally be. It is a legal impossibility signal: this is a 19th-century Letters Patent whose term closed during the first Cleveland administration. (Also disregard the Google Patents "Landscapes" tag mapping this to "Apparatus Associated With Microorganisms And Enzymes" — an artifact of automated classification on a title containing "cant," with no substantive meaning.)

Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant receiving an assertion of US110309: respond that the patent expired 1887-12-20 and is unassertable as a matter of law. Cite the Google Patents record — https://patents.google.com/patent/US110309/en — and specifically the two front-matter entries: "Publication date 1870-12-20" / "Application granted" and "Anticipated expiration 1887-12-20 / Expired - Lifetime." There is no FWD to quote because no proceeding exists; the dispositive document here is the patent's own expiration record, not a PTAB decision.
2. Do not file a defensive IPR. It would be legally cognizable (per Gesture on expired-patent jurisdiction) but strategically pointless — you would spend $200k–$500k to invalidate a patent that confers no exclusionary right. If you need a paper trail, an ex parte reexamination request or simply a written invalidity opinion is the proportionate response.
3. Preserve the screenshots and dates. If the asserting party has sent multiple demand letters citing this patent, the 1870-12-20/1887-12-20 dates are the core of a pattern-of-abuse record. I could not locate any PTAB, Federal Circuit, or district-court docket tying this specific patent number to a live campaign — the searches returned nothing. I am not aware of any assertion campaign involving US110309 and I am not asserting one exists; treat any such claim you encounter as something to verify independently against PACER and https://www.courtlistener.com/ before relying on it.
4. If a proceeding does exist that neither the ODP ingest nor my searches surfaced: re-check https://ptab.uspto.gov/#/search by patent number 110309 and confirm you are searching the utility patent, not application serial 110,309 or a 7-digit "11,030,9xx" family member. Cross-numeric confusion is the only realistic way a "PTAB proceeding on US110309" report would be produced, and I did not find one.

Confidence statement: High confidence that no AIA trial proceeding exists on US110309A and that none can be meaningfully brought. The searches I ran were generic web queries, not a direct PTAB E2E or PACER docket pull, so my verification is corroborative rather than docket-authoritative — the authoritative negative is the structured ODP block itself, which I have taken as canonical per the operating rules. I did not fabricate any proceeding number, panel, date, or disposition.

I'll start by trying to locate any assignment records and contextual history for this patent.

Let me verify the inventor and check the USPTO assignment database coverage for patents of this era.

US 110309 — "Improvement in Cant-Hooks"

Scope note before the analysis: US 110309 issued 1870-12-20, i.e. it predates the entire modern assignment-recording infrastructure by more than a century. US 110309 is a six-digit 1870 grant (not a modern eight-digit publication such as US 11,030,9xx). Everything below is framed accordingly.

Inventors

• Sole inventor. Single-inventor grants are the norm in 1870 mechanical-tool art; there is no co-inventor cohort to track.
• Residence vs. assignee mismatch (noted, not scored): the inventor lived in Northampton, MA; the assignee's works were in Unionville, CT. That is a normal 19th-century assignment pattern (inventor sells or assigns to a manufacturer elsewhere), and it is not evidence of anything improper.
• Departure pattern: not determinable. The "inventors departed within 12 months" signal the workflow asks about requires employment records, which do not exist for an 1870 sole inventor. I found no biographical record for Waldy Tetro (search for "Waldy Tetro" returned zero hits). I will not guess at an identity or a name-correction — per the operating rules, patent identifiers and names are read literally, so he stays "Waldy Tetro."
• Occupational oddity worth one sentence: a cant-hook (a logging/rolling tool) assigned to a nut-and-bolt manufacturer is a genuine line-of-business mismatch. It is a data point about the assignee's acquisition behavior, not an NPE signal.

Original assignee

Union Nut Company, Unionville, Connecticut (Unionville is a village in Farmington, Hartford County, CT).

• Named on the issued patent: yes — as assignee in the printed heading, which means the inventor's rights were assigned before issuance (a pre-issuance assignment recorded in the Patent Office's handwritten Liber system, so the patent issued with the assignee on its face).
• Primary line of business: manufacture of hot-forged nuts, bolts, and washers; the firm was a forge/hardware works, later adding rulers and squares. Sources: Connecticut Mills — Upson Nut Co. complex; Historic Buildings of Connecticut (quoting A.S. Upson's 1911 obituary in The Iron Trade Review); Farmington, CT — "A walk through Unionville's Industrial Past".
• Corporate history / current status: the business dates from a small Unionville blacksmithing operation (1854); organized as the Union Nut Company in 1861 (some accounts say the company was organized 1864 after a group including Upson, George Dunham, Samuel Frisbie, Dr. William H. Sage, and Gilbert J. Hines bought a patented hot-forged nut machine). It was renamed the Upson Nut Company in 1883 by act of the Connecticut legislature. It was purchased in 1911 by the Bourne-Fuller Company of Cleveland for $1,200,000; Bourne-Fuller sold the Unionville complex to Republic Steel in the 1930s, which reduced it to a warehouse by 1938. The surviving buildings at 29–55 Mill Street were rehabilitated for commercial/residential use around 2013–2014 and are on the Connecticut State Register. Current status: dissolved / defunct as an operating entity; the brand survives only as a historic site.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Not evidenced. I found no record of Union Nut / Upson Nut manufacturing cant-hooks or logging tools. Its documented product lines are fasteners, washers, rules, and squares. The claim (an ordinary iron crow-bar A combined with a removable, adjustable, set-screw-secured socket-sleeve C carrying a pivoted hook D) is a forged-iron hand tool — adjacent to the assignee's forge capability, but adjacency is not evidence. Call it unclear / probably not practiced by the assignee.
• Term of the patent: expiring 1887-12-20 per Google Patents legal events ("Anticipated expiration", status "Expired – Lifetime"). The asset was therefore dead long before the 1883 renaming, the 1911 Bourne-Fuller sale, and the 1930s Republic Steel transfer — so no later corporate successor in that chain ever held a live patent.
• Forward citations (context only, not ownership): US4533117A, "Lifting device" (1985) and USD1006569S1, "Log transport tool hook," Logox LLC (2023). These are citations to the 1870 disclosure by modern tools; they say nothing about the 1870 chain of title.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for this patent — and it structurally cannot have any. Stated plainly, as required:

No recorded assignments exist in the USPTO Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center database for US 110309.

That null result is not the usual finding (i.e., it does not mean "the original assignee still owns the patent"). It means the database does not reach back far enough. Specifically:

• The USPTO's searchable assignment database contains all recorded patent assignment information back to August 1980 — nothing earlier. Source: USPTO, "What are Assignments?" webinar deck, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf; corroborated by Finnegan, "Who Owns What: Finding Patent Assignment Information" (2016) and USPTO Patent Assignment XML, 1980–present.
• Pre-1980 records are maintained in a separate historical database: "The historical database of assignments is maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980" — MPEP 301.01, as summarized at BlueIron FAQ. Access for pre-1980 documents is via the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch / Patent and Trademark Resource Centers, by document order for a fee — not via online search.
• Reel/frame citations do not exist for this era. Reel/frame numbering postdates this patent by roughly a century. An 1870 transfer would have been recorded by handwritten Liber/volume and page in the Patent Office; you will never see a "Reel NNNNNN/NNNN" for US 110309, and any source claiming one should be treated with suspicion.
• Google Patents legal events for this document list only: 1870-12-20 grant/publication, 1887-12-20 anticipated expiration, and "Expired – Lifetime." No reassignment events.
• The single ownership datum on the public record is the printed patent heading naming Union Nut Company as assignee — a pre-issuance assignment, so there is no post-issuance conveyance to sequence.

Verification link: search patent number 0110309 (USPTO pads leading zeros on six-digit numbers) at the USPTO Assignment Center — mirror at assignment.uspto.gov/patent. Expect zero results; that expectation is the documented, correct result.

Note on identifiers: the Google Patents record also carries the alias US110309D. That is an application/document alias on the same 1870 record ("Improvement in cant-hooks"), not a separate design patent. Per operating rules it is left uncorrected rather than normalized to a modern numbering format.

Per the stop rule

Because the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, the mandated output stops here. I am not generating the Mermaid timeline diagram or scoring the eight NPE signals, for the reason stated above: all eight signals are defined exclusively by post-1980 events (shell-entity LLC transfers, Delaware/Texas single-member LLCs, repeat electronic-recording correspondents, <24-month cascading LLC transfers, pre-suit transfers, Chapter 7/11 fire-sales, privateering surfaced in SEC filings, RPX/AST/LOT/Unified defensive aggregation). None of these categories can exist for an 1870 grant whose term lapsed in 1887-12-20. Manufacturing "not present" marks for them would be reporting on the absence of a phenomenon that cannot apply, and would dress up a data-coverage gap as a clean bill of health. There is also no correspondent of record to capture: correspondents are an artifact of the electronic recording era (EPAS), which began in 1980.

Verdict

Insufficient data — required by the output spec for "no records, or only the original assignment," and that is exactly the situation.

The chain of title rests on a single pre-issuance assignment to Union Nut Company of Unionville, Connecticut, evidenced only by the printed heading of the 1870-12-20 patent; the USPTO Assignment Center database begins in August 1980 (MPEP 301.01), so it returns nothing for a patent that expired 1887-12-20. There is no post-1980 chain, no reel/frame, no recorded correspondent, and no asserter activity to score — so no NPE or defensive-aggregator conclusion is supportable in either direction. Anyone asserting a modern ownership interest in US 110309 (or a "US 11,030,9xx" lookalike) should be required to produce a pre-1980 Liber/volume-page record or the original 1870 instrument; nothing in the online Assignment Center can support such a claim.

I'll run targeted searches to verify the citation structure for this patent before analyzing prior art.

Let me verify the two most promising pre-1870 leads before writing.

Two corrections I have to make before answering

1. There is no "patent citation" (prior art) on the face of US 110,309. The Google Patents record for this grant contains no backward-citation field at all. The "Cited By (2)" table on that record is a list of documents that cite 110,309 — i.e., forward citations. They are not prior art to 110,309. I've analyzed them anyway, below, because you asked me to look at "each patent citation," but I have to label them accurately.

2. 35 U.S.C. § 102 did not exist in 1870. The Patent Act of 1952 created the modern § 102. The statute in force when 110,309 issued was § 24 of the Act of July 8, 1870 ("An Act to revise, consolidate, and amend the statutes relating to patents and copyrights"), which invalidated a patent if the invention "had been patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country before his invention or discovery thereof, or more than two years prior to his application," or was "in public use or on sale for more than two years prior to his application." I apply the § 102 framework you asked for but flag that the legally correct framework for this grant is the 1870 Act.

(Minor housekeeping: your task states the current date as April 26, 2026; the prior sections and the record fetch are dated September 2026. I've treated the analysis as date-insensitive.)

A. Citation inventory for US 110,309

B. The two documents that cite 110,309 (forward citations)

Anticipation analysis. Neither can anticipate claim 1 under any § 102 subsection, for the threshold reason that both postdate 110,309 by 115 years and 153 years respectively. Anticipation requires a reference "before the invention thereof by the applicant" (§ 102(a), pre-AIA) or the 1870 Act's "before his invention or discovery thereof." A later document cannot be § 102(a)/102(b) art against an earlier patent. These two rows are therefore evidence of the enduring relevance of the Tetro concept — US 4,533,117 A is a striking structural echo of the combination (sleeve + slidable bar + arresting means + swingably attached hook arm) — but they are legally inert as prior art to 110,309.

C. The list you may be mistaking for 110,309's citations

The Justia page for US D1006569 ("Referenced Cited") lists 110309 | December 1870 | Tetro among ~30 rows. That is Logox's/examiner's citation of 110,309 into a 2023 design application. Reading that table as 110,309's own prior art inverts the arrow. Of the rows in that table, only one predates December 20, 1870: US 68,883 (Jewett, September 1867). Every other entry (378,386 Cook 1888; 436,322 Thompson 1890; …; 10,124,995 Redetzke 2018; 20220234875 Lusty 2022) postdates 110,309 and is not prior art to it. Source: https://patents.justia.com/patent/D1006569

D. Genuine prior-art candidates for 110,309 (the art that actually matters)

Because 110,309's own record supplies no prior art, I searched contemporaneous cant-hook art. These are the references a proper § 102 analysis of claim 1 would run on:

Non-prior-art references to exclude (post-date 110,309): US 113,796 (Reeves, "Improvement in Cant-Hooks," April 18, 1871) — five months after 110,309, so it is not § 102 art; and US 146,719 (Page, cant hook, 1923). US 2434446 A (Toulon) is a separate-document trap: its "Serial No. 110,309" is an application serial number filed November 11, 1936, not patent 110,309.

E. Anticipation verdict on the sole claim

Claim 1 is a classic combination claim of admittedly old elements: "The combination of an ordinary iron crow-bar A, adjustable and removable socket-sleeve C, and the hook D, the whole combined and operating together, substantially as and for the purpose described."

Bottom line: no reference I located anticipates claim 1 under § 102(a) (or, correctly, § 24 of the 1870 Act). The prior art bites on the individual elements — socket-mounted hooks (Hinds), size-adjustable hooks (Jewett), clasp-mounted hooks (Peavey) — which is exactly the posture of a genuine combination invention: the 1870 Act and later practice both treat a new combination of old elements as patentable if the cooperation produces a new result. The novel result here is the removal/adjustability of the sleeve on a crow-bar so one tool serves as both cant-hook and crow-bar.

F. Explicit uncertainties

• My searches were open-web, not a direct authenticated USPTO/PatentCenter or Examiner's-search query. Patent Public Search for a pre-1872 grant returns the scanned print only; there is no examiner citation record to retrieve, so "search the USPTO database for prior art cited in 110,309" cannot be satisfied literally — the record contains none.
• I did not independently verify the Peavey 1858 primary sources; the Wikipedia-cited lineage is my only basis, and I have not confirmed Salaman/Meyer page content.
• US 68,883 (Jewett) and US 26,737 (Hinds) content is quoted from the scanned/OCR prints surfaced via Google Patents and sawdatabase.com; OCR is imperfect in both and figure callouts could not be inspected.
• Disambiguation retained, not auto-corrected: "US110309D" is a Google-internal family/record alias (family ID 2179781), not an application serial; PCT/CN2016/110309 (WO 2017/101851) and application serial 110,309 (US 2,434,446, Toulon) are different identifiers that merely share digits with patent 110,309.
• US 110,309's anticipated expiration was December 20, 1887, so this prior-art exercise is historical/validity-illustrative only; it has no present enforcement or IPR significance.

I'll verify what the page's prior-art section actually contains before applying §103, since the tables there mix several different kinds of citation data.

Obviousness analysis — US 110,309 (Tetro, "Improvement in Cant-Hooks"), under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Date note / flag: your prompt header says "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while my operating header says 2026-10-01. Nothing below turns on which of these is used, since every prior-art date at issue is in the 1850s–1870s, but I am flagging the discrepancy per your instruction not to paper over contradictions.

1. What the page's "Prior Art" section actually contains — and the one thing it cannot support

The page's prior-art content is not an examiner's citation list. It comprises three unrelated data types that Google surfaces together, and treating them as one body of prior art would be an error:

¹ Post-dates 110,309 regardless.

Bottom line on the page's own prior-art section: read literally and honestly, it supplies no enabling pre-1870 reference for the claimed combination, and two references (the Cited By pair) that are legally incapable of being prior art. An obviousness rejection cannot be built from it alone. It must be built from (a) the applicant's own admissions, and (b) the pre-1870 state of the cant-hook/peavey art, which I grounded by search below. I state that limitation up front rather than dressing up the artifacts as a rejection.

2. The claim as construed for §103

Claim 1 (verbatim): "The combination of an ordinary iron crow-bar A, adjustable and removable socket-sleeve C, and the hook D, the whole combined and operating together, substantially as and for the purpose described."

Element decomposition, with the specification's status for each:

Two construction points matter for the analysis. First, this is a single combination claim of old elements reciting a function, so §103 is applied to the combination as a whole, and the "as and for the purpose described" clause ties scope to the described structure (including the set screw and arm). Second, the specification concedes two of the seven rows outright — including the very feature (a squared shank) that makes single-screw locking sufficient, because the squared section restrains the sleeve rotationally.

Legal frame. § 103 as a statutory provision dates from the 1952 Act and did not exist when 110,309 issued; the contemporaneous test was the "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) (a device is unpatentable if it differs from the prior art only in the way an "ordinary mechanic" would vary it). Applied today, the analysis proceeds under Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), with the KSR rationales (KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007)) and MPEP § 2143. Both frames converge here. I also note the 19th-century "aggregation" doctrine (illustratively Hailes v. Van Wormer, 87 U.S. 353 (1873) — decided after this grant but construing the same pre-1952 standard): uniting old elements that perform only their old functions is not patentable subject matter.

3. The pre-1870 art that does the work (verified by search; dates from the documents themselves)

The Peavey clasp is the single most damaging item: it is a collar that slides up and down the shaft, cannot rotate, and carries a hook, on a shaft with a pointed working end — structurally the whole of 110,309 minus the metal bar and the set screw, and it was in public use more than a decade before the 1870 filing (third-party public use of that vintage is prior art; the two-year bar of the 1870 Act governed the inventor's own use).

Contradiction to flag: the page's Similar Documents list includes US 113,796 (Reeves, cant-hook, 1871-04-18) in my search results, which the earlier sections of this analysis correctly did not treat as prior art. I confirm: Reeves post-dates the 1870-12-20 grant and is not available. It is useful only as evidence of the art's trajectory (by 1871, hooks were being hung "by a pivot-joint in a stirrup or clevis"), and I use it below solely for that purpose, flagged as such.

4. The §103 combinations and the motivation to combine

Combination A (primary): Hinds '737 in view of McDonald '098

Motivation. Hinds and McDonald are in the same field (cant-hooks for lumbermen/sawmills), address the same problem (mounting a hook adjustably on a lever shaft), and Hinds expressly identifies the very benefit Tibbeto's claim recites — dual-mode use of the same implement as a gripping cant-hook or as a plain lever. A PHOSITA seeking to mount Hinds's sliding-hook socket more securely on a shaft would find in McDonald the ready expedient of forming the collar with ears and pivoting the hook between them with a bolt, which both mounts the hook and permits it to swing into gripping engagement. KSR rationale (C)/(D): a known technique (ear-and-pivot hook mounting on a collar, McDonald) applied to a known device ready for improvement (Hinds's socket-and-sliding-hook cant-hook), with predictable results. The combination yields nothing more than the expected sum of two disclosed structures: an adjustable collar on a shaft carrying a pivoted hook and convertible to a plain lever/bar.

Combination B: Peavey public use + Hinds '737 + McDonald '098

Peavey supplies the two structural features the patent's specification treats as its own contribution: (i) a collar that moves up and down but not sideways on the shaft — precisely socket-sleeve C fitted to the squared shank B, the square being admitted as "generally the case with the ordinary crow-bar," whose only function is to stop the sleeve rotating; and (ii) a shaft whose working end is a spike/pick, mapping to the "pointed bar" of element A. Hinds supplies the slidable, removable, dual-mode hook; McDonald supplies the pivoted, ear-mounted hook. Motivation: all three are cant-hook/peavey art directed to handling logs of varying size with a lever-ended tool; the Peavey clasp's rotationally-constrained, axially-movable collar is a "known technique to improve similar devices in the same way" (MPEP § 2143 rationale (C)), and Hinds's stated dual-mode advantage supplies the reason to keep the hook removable so the shaft can serve as a plain lever or bar.

Combination C: A or B + a conventional set screw (Magee '393; Stillson '744)

The only element not found in the cant-hook art is the set screw b, and the specification describes it in a single clause with no construction detail, indicating conventionality. Contemporaneous hand tools show members slide-mounted on bars and locked in position by engagement means for the express purpose of fitting objects of different sizes (Magee, US 98,393; Stillson, US 95,744). Motivation: the record itself states the objective — raise or lower the socket so the tool can "gripe objects of different sizes" — and the prior art discloses both sliding members and means for locking them at a selected position on a bar. Substituting a set screw for Hinds's tang-and-nut fastening, or adding it to Peavey's free-sliding clasp, is the "simple substitution of one known element for another" and the "use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way" (rationales (B) and (C)); the results are entirely predictable, and no reference teaches away. Even the placement of the set screw is dictated by the admitted art: the square shank precludes rotation, so a single screw prevents axial travel.

Combination D (aggregation overlay)

Whichever combination is used, a secondary challenge follows from the pre-1952 standard: the claim is a bare combination of three separately-functioning old parts — crow-bar (admitted), sleeve (Hinds, Peavey), set screw (Magee), pivoted hook (McDonald) — each performing exactly the function it performed before (bar pries, sleeve carries, screw clamps, hook grips). Under Hailes v. Van Wormer and the analogous "aggregation" line, a union of old elements performing only their old functions, producing no new cooperative result, was not "invention." An examiner could press this as an alternative to Combination A. A patentee's best answer would be the cooperative-result argument — the squared shank + single set screw + pivoted hook cooperating to permit size adjustment and tool conversion — which is why Combinations A–C, not D alone, carry the rejection.

5. The strongest counterargument (stated so it isn't glossed over)

The one genuinely arguable point of novelty is the substitution of an all-iron crow-bar for the wooden handle used in Hinds, McDonald, Peavey, and Reeves. A patentee could argue that no pre-1870 cant-hook reference suggests an iron bar as the handle, and that the conversion benefit (remove the socket, get a crow-bar) is only available with a metal bar. That argument is weak on this record, because the specification itself makes the substitution and calls the resulting bar "ordinary," and because the same reference (Hinds) already discloses the convert-to-a-plain-lever benefit on a wooden handle — so the substitution of an iron bar is a change of material accomplishing no more than it accomplished before, the classic Hotchkiss fact pattern. It is nonetheless the only non-frivolous nonobviousness position, and I flag it rather than declare the claim unpatentable beyond argument.

6. Explicit uncertainties

1. The page's prior-art section is insufficient on its own. The §103 case above rests substantially on references I located by independent search (US 26,737; US 81,098; Peavey public-use history), not on the page's Cited By/Similar Documents tables. I am telling you this rather than presenting those tables as a rejection.
2. The Cited By pair cannot be prior art (1985, 2023) — stated above in the strongest terms, because it is the most likely analytical error to make with a Google Patents page.
3. US 110,165 (1870-12-13) and US 86,741 (1869-02-09) appear in Similar Documents with uninformative titles ("smith," "William button"); I have not attributed any disclosure to them.
4. Peavey public-use dating derives from company history and museum descriptions (1857/1858, "at least before 1860"), not from a patent record. Peavey's own application was reportedly filed by another person and the patent was lost, so there is no Peavey patent number to cite; the dating should be treated as strong but secondary evidence, best used to supply motivation and the collar concept rather than as a standalone §102 reference.
5. US 4,533,117 (1985) contains a full lifting-device disclosure that might be relevant to later patents in this family line, but it is irrelevant to 110,309 in both directions of time here.
6. Minor inconsistency with the earlier sections: the Patent summary uses "Waldy Tetro"; the Litigation summary says "Waldy V. Tetro." The OCR print reads "WALDYV TETRO" in the heading and "WALDY TETRO" in the signature block. Neither spelling affects this analysis.