US 1103545

I'll run the requested searches before answering.

Let me run a couple more targeted searches on the specific US number and any 2026 appellate activity.

Search scope and results

I ran the requested searches (USPTO-sourced Google Patents full text, PubChem/EPO patent records, and Federal Circuit 2026 reporting/docket material). Findings and limitations up front:

• No CAFC 2026 docket exists for this number. Searches for "1103545" in Federal Circuit 2026 docket material returned only a Patternson Sheridan weekly summary PDF covering unrelated patents (e.g., U.S. 10,912,321; U.S. 8,958,853) and an NK‑1 antagonist litigation record referencing EP1103545A1. Nothing ties US 1,103,545 to any 2026 appeal. This is unsurprising: the patent's anticipated expiration is 1931‑07‑14 (17 years from grant), so it has been unenforceable for ~95 years.
• I do not have direct credentialed access to USPTO PatentCenter/PAIR or the CAFC docket through these tools — my results are web-search-mediated (Google Patents, which republishes USPTO data) plus the authoritative full text you supplied. I treat the supplied full text as controlling.
• Identifier caution (interpreted literally, not corrected): "1103545" is a 7‑digit US patent number = 1,103,545 (1914). It is not to be confused with: EP 1103545 A1/B1 (Hoffmann‑La Roche, NK‑1 antagonist / netupitant family, priority 1999), CA 1103545 (Sefton, implantable pharmaceutical dispensing device), or a hypothetical 8‑digit US 11,035,455. None of those are this patent.

Bibliographic summary — US 1,103,545

Note on a common confusion: some search hits show "13 Claims, 1 Drawing Sheet" near this material, but that caption belongs to US 10,208,073 (a fosnetupitant/palonosetron patent in the New Jersey litigation file), not to US 1,103,545. The 1914 patent has two claims.

Abstract

There is no abstract. This patent issued in 1914, before abstracts were required on US patents — the specification opens directly into the descriptive text ("This invention relates to a fishing tool of the type used in well drilling operations"). The Google Patents record likewise contains no abstract field. Anyone reporting an abstract for US 1,103,545 is misattributing text from another document. The nearest thing to a statement of purpose is the stated object: "to provide a substantial, cheaply manufactured fishing tool, especially constructed to recover tools or sections of pipe which may have been lost in the well during drilling operations."

Plain-language overview of each independent claim

Claim 1 — a fishing tool for well‑boring apparatus made up of four cooperating elements:

1. A sleeve with an interior seat (an internal shoulder) near its lower end, the sleeve's internal diameter being uniform from that seat up through the upper end of the sleeve.
2. A pair of substantially semi‑circular, conically shaped gripping jaws sitting inside the sleeve, their bases resting on the seat, with the outer faces of those bases loosely resting against the sleeve's inner circumference — i.e., a deliberately loose fit, so the jaws are not fixed in place.
3. The jaws are free to move both longitudinally (up/down) and circumferentially (rotationally) within the sleeve, and are able to gravitate inward — the taper makes the heavy inner edges drop back together, closing them.
4. Means to support the sleeve and to close the upper end of the sleeve, which limits how far the jaws can splay outward because the top ends of the jaws abut that closure. In claim 1 that means is specifically recited as a pipe threaded into the upper end of the sleeve — i.e., the drill pipe string that suspends the tool doubles as the upper closure/retainer.

Claim 2 — same general combination, but broader in three respects:

1. A sleeve with an interior seat (no "adjacent its lower end" and no uniform‑internal‑diameter limitation).
2. A plurality of substantially semi‑circular, conically shaped jaws in the sleeve — not limited to exactly two — with bases on the seat and outer base faces loosely against the sleeve's inner circumference.
3. Jaws movable longitudinally and circumferentially and able to gravitate inwardly.
4. Means to close the upper end of the sleeve to restrict outward jaw movement by engagement with the jaws' top ends — stated generically, without the claim‑1 limitation that the closure be a pipe threaded into the sleeve.

Practical reading: Claim 1 is the narrower claim (two jaws only, uniform bore above the seat, pipe‑threaded closure). Claim 2 is effectively claim 1 with those three limitations removed and the jaw count opened up to "a plurality." Both claims are structural and are directed to the same inventive concept — a washover/overshot type tool in which the lost pipe passes up between the loose conical jaws and the jaws wedge against a sleeve seat to grip and lock when the tool is raised.

Uncertainty notes

• OCR quality is poor. The full text (and the Google Patents rendering of it) is heavily garbled — e.g., "a iairof substantially SemiCirCular conica,y shaped jaws" and "internal diameter from said seat through the upper end" with "having a uniform" displaced by column wrapping. My restatement of claims 1 and 2 above reconciles those fragments, and I flag that the exact wording/phrasing of the printed claims should be confirmed against the PDF facsimile or the original Letters Patent if verbatim claim text is needed. I could not retrieve the facsimile images through these searches.
• Some bibliographic details in the body text are partly illegible (the specification line read as "Serial No. 7559,36?" is reconciled to 758,367 from the application‑number field, and the "Fig. 6 section on the line m‑m" caption is incomplete). I have not invented replacements for the unreadable portions.
• Jaw count in the drawing/specification: the description consistently refers to "a pair" of jaws (claims 1 and the working description), while claim 2 recites "a plurality." I report this as written rather than harmonizing it.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 1103545.

Initial results are off-target (they reference unrelated EP 1103545 and a '354 patent for hay rakes). Let me search litigation-specific databases.

No relevant litigation surfaced. Let me try two more targeted databases before concluding.

Litigation search results for US Patent 1,103,545

Conclusion: No litigation is known or discoverable involving US Patent 1,103,545.

What the patent is

Per the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1103545](/patent/US1103545)/en:

Why no litigation exists

• The patent expired in 1931, before any modern patent-litigation docketing system existed (PACER electronic records begin in the 1980s; CourtListener/RPX/Unified Patents coverage is essentially post-2000). Google Patents' litigation metadata shows no litigation entries for this patent, and no assignee ever appears other than the individual inventors.
• It is a 1914 oil-well fishing tool (a sleeve with tapered segmental gripping jaws on an internal seat, plus a guide shoe). No commercial enforcement history, no asserted patents, no family members to litigate.

Search attempts made and their results

• US patent 1103545 litigation → returned an unrelated Luhn v. Armor Markman order about hay rakes referencing a different "'354 Patent" (a modern hay-rake patent, not US 1,103,545). Not a match.
• "1103545" patent lawsuit case number → returned New Jersey litigation documents citing EP 1103545 A1, a European publication number for a 2001 chemical/pharma application in a fosnetupitant case. Not a match — different jurisdiction, different number series.
• site:portal.unifiedpatents.com 1103545 → zero results.
• "US1103545" OR "US 1,103,545" fishing tool patent lawsuit infringement → only the Google Patents page itself plus unrelated fishing-tackle disputes (Black River Tools v. Steve Douglas, TTAB Accurate Grinding v. Eposeidon, AOB v. Eposetion/KastKing), none involving this patent number.
• courtlistener "1,103,545" patent case → no matching docket.

Caution on number confusion

Two recurring false positives to avoid:

1. "The '354 Patent" in Luhn v. Armor (W.D. Wis., 2006) is a hay-rake patent — a different patent, not US 1,103,545.
2. EP 1103545 A1 is a European publication number (2001) — a different number system entirely.

Required case listing

No known litigation. If a party believes a case exists, the definitive check would be the USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records for US75836713A and a PACER docket search restricted to the exact string "1,103,545" (not "1103545" in other numbering systems), since a patent that expired in 1931 could only appear in litigation as ancient, paper-era prior art, not as an asserted patent. I could not perform that PACER query directly, and I have no high-confidence knowledge of any such case — so I state plainly that none is known rather than speculate.

I'll verify the structured data with a quick check before writing up.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block reports no AIA trial proceedings for US 1103545 as of the most recent ingest, and independent web searching surfaced nothing to the contrary — zero active, zero claims-invalidated, zero claims-sustained, zero settled, zero institution-denied. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "hardened patent" but the opposite: US 1103545 is a 1914-issue, 1931-expired patent that cannot support an infringement claim at all, so the IPR analysis is moot rather than favorable. There is no FWD to cite because there is no trial.

Threshold note before anything else. US 1103545 (Snow, Kidd & Whaley, "Fishing-tool," filed 1913-04-02, granted 1914-07-14, expired 1931-07-14 per the Google Patents record at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1103545/en) is a well-drilling overshot/grappling tool. It is frequently conflated in search results with an entirely unrelated patent, EP 1103545 B1 (Hoffmann-La Roche, 2-(3,5-bis-trifluoromethyl-phenyl)-N-methyl-N-(6-morpholin-4-yl-4-o-tolyl-pyridin-3-yl)-isobutyramide, an NK-1 antagonist compound). Those are different jurisdictions and different inventions. Any hit you see referencing "1103545" plus pharmaceutical chemistry, fosnetupitant, or palonosetron is not this patent. Confirm the number by jurisdiction and issue year before relying on it.

Proceedings

None to list. Per the operating instruction to prioritize the structured ODP block, and per my own search, the correct answer is that the proceedings list is empty. I will not manufacture a proceeding number to fill this section.

For completeness on the "flag anything you find" instruction: nothing was found. Searches for US1103545 in combination with IPR/PTAB returned (a) the Google Patents page for the fishing tool itself, (b) unrelated PTAB papers concerning other patents (e.g., a decision on U.S. 10,562,680), and (c) the EP 1103545 pharmaceutical family discussed above. No Petition, no Institution Decision, no FWD, no Termination, and no CAFC appeal touching US 1103545.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Both claims of US 1103545 are UNTESTED — and will remain so. Claim 1 recites a fishing tool comprising a sleeve with an interior seat adjacent its lower end, a pair of substantially semicircular conically shaped jaws having their bases resting on that seat with the outer faces of the bases loosely resting against the sleeve's inner circumference, capable of longitudinal and circumferential movement and of gravitating inwardly, plus means (a threaded pipe) closing the upper end of the sleeve to restrict outward jaw movement. Claim 2 is the same structure with a plurality of substantially semicircular conical jaws. Neither claim has been canceled, narrowed, or otherwise adjudicated anywhere. That is not because the claims are strong; it is because the patent has been expired since 1931-07-14, roughly 67 years before the AIA created the IPR/PGR/CBM regimes (AIA trials became available 2012-09-16). Congress did not create — and the Board has no occasion to exercise — jurisdiction over century-old apparatus claims of this vintage; § 311 imposes no filing-date bar, but no rational petitioner spends six figures invalidating an expired patent.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is not in play, because no petitioner has ever been a party to an IPR on this patent. There is therefore no estoppel to navigate and, correspondingly, no IPR-based defense to inherit. Practically, estoppel is the least of a defendant's concerns here: the real defense is that an expired patent supports neither injunctive relief nor damages. Any recovery of damages is independently barred by the six-year limitations period of 35 U.S.C. § 286 running from the last permissible infringement, which ended in 1931. Do not spend budget on prior art; spend one paragraph on the expiration date and attach the face of the patent.

Pattern signals. None. The original assignee is listed as "Individual" (Albert J. Snow, Archie M. Kidd, John H. Whaley, all of Taft, Kern County, California). There is no current corporate assignee, no continuation or reissue family, no defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents in the chain, no serial petitioner, and no PTAB appeal history. The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list is populated entirely by early-20th-century mechanical art (US 808378, US 776523, US 1066000, etc.), which reflects classification proximity in E21B31/18, not litigation activity.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and have received a demand letter citing US 1103545: say so plainly, with dates. The patent issued 1914-07-14 and expired 1931-07-14 — the Google Patents legal-status field reads "Expired - Lifetime," with anticipated expiration recorded 1931-07-14 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US1103545/en). There is no live claim to infringe, and any demand premised on this patent is defective on its face. Rule 11 / § 285 exposure attaches to the claimant, not to you.
• Do not file an IPR. It would be dismissed as a non-starter given expiration and would generate costs with no estoppel or cancellation benefit. Confirm current status yourself in the USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End system (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) before responding, and attach the printouts.
• Sanity-check the number. Because of the EP 1103545 confusion, verify whether a counterparty is actually asserting the European Hoffmann-La Roche patent, a different US patent mis-cited as "1103545," or US 10,xxx,xxx. A demand letter citing "the '545 patent" without a jurisdiction is the single most likely source of a false alarm here.
• If you were expecting an active proceeding: there is none. The absence of PTAB activity is not a signal of a well-defended patent in this case; it is the expected consequence of a patent that has been public and expired for over nine decades. A 112-year-old patent attracting no IPRs tells you nothing about its technical merit and everything about its legal irrelevance.

Confidence and caveats. I have high confidence in the expiration and issue dates as reported by Google Patents, and high confidence that no AIA trial proceeding exists, consistent with the ODP block. The one thing I cannot do from here is independently query PTAB E2E or the Federal Circuit docket directly; if you need a certified negative, pull the E2E case-search result for the number and attach it. I found no Federal Circuit appeal and no settlement, and I am not claiming any exists.

I'll start by checking the authoritative assignment sources for this patent number.

Let me probe the Assignment Center directly and check for any assignee history or corporate context.

Assignment Record Reconstruction — US 1,103,545 ("Fishing-tool")

Patent: US 1,103,545 A — Fishing-tool
Application: US 758,367 (filed 1913-04-02) — Serial No. 759,367 per the printed specification
Granted: 1914-07-14 · Anticipated expiration: 1931-07-14 · Status: Expired – Lifetime (public domain)
Assignee on the granted patent: None — issued to the inventors as individuals.

Inventors

The specification opens: "Be it known that we, Albert J. Snow, Archie M. Kidd and John H. Whaley, citizens of the United States, residing at Taft, in the county of Kern and State of California, have invented new and useful Improvements in Fishing-Tools…" The claim of inventorship is therefore three co-equal individual inventors, not a corporate filing.

Pattern notes (and their limits):

• All three inventors share a single residence town (Taft, Kern County, California). Taft was a Kern County oil-boom town adjacent to the Midway–Sunset field, which is consistent with — but does not prove — co-workers in oil-well drilling. No employer is named anywhere in the patent, so no employer inference is asserted here.
• The prompt's "all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing" tell cannot be assessed and does not apply: there was no original corporate assignee to depart from. The patent issued directly to the three individuals.
• No inventor is named in any later-of-record document, and none appears in the digitized assignment, SEC, RPX, or Unified Patents datasets I could reach.

Original assignee

None. The patent was granted to Snow, Kidd and Whaley as individuals, with no assignee named on the face of the patent.

• Google Patents lists Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual, with the standard disclaimer that "the listed assignees may be inaccurate" and that no legal analysis has been performed. This is the database's fallback label for "the grantee was a natural person, not an organization" — not evidence of an entity called "Individual."
• Because there is no assignee entity, there is no product-shipping question, no line of business, and no corporate status (operating / acquired / dissolved / bankruptcy) to report. The tool was a well-drilling fishing tool (an overshot-style grapple with tapered segmental jaws on an annular seat inside a threaded sleeve, plus a notched wedge-nosed guide shoe) — a class of oilfield rental and service-shop equipment of that era, not a consumer product.
• The invention predates any plausible corporate chain of title for the asserted claims. With expiration on 1931-07-14, the claimed subject matter has been unenforceable and in the public domain for roughly 95 years.

Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for US 1,103,545 in the accessible Assignment Center data, and no assignment, change-of-name, security-agreement, merger, license, or release entries appear in the Google Patents legal-events record.

The complete set of indexed legal events for this patent is:

No reel/frame, conveyance type, assignor, assignee, execution date, recording date, or correspondent of record exists to report. I am explicitly not fabricating any.

Two caveats stated plainly so the finding is not read more broadly than it should be:

1. Coverage limitation. USPTO's image-based assignment records for the 1913–1914 period are incompletely digitized. A pre-1930 assignment that was recorded on paper may exist in the USPTO's microfilm/paper reel archive without being indexed in the modern Assignment Center search by patent number. I could not verify the paper record from the sources available to me. The absence above is an absence of indexed records, which is the strongest statement the data supports.
2. Per the operating rule, this is where the chain analysis stops. There is no second link to analyze. The remainder of the report is provided only to close out the requested verdict; every NPE signal is untestable rather than refuted.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1103545
    1913 : Filed by Snow Kidd and Whaley
         : No assignee named
    1914 : Patent granted to inventors
    1931 : Patent expired
         : Public domain

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Because no post-issuance assignment exists, none of these signals can be evaluated on evidence. Each is marked accordingly; marking any of them "present" would require a reel/frame that does not exist.

Note on the analytical frame itself: the NPE/troll indicators requested are anachronistic for this artifact. US 1,103,545 issued in 1914 and expired in 1931 — decades before the modern patent-assertion economy, the 1952 Act, and the 2011 AIA. The relevant finding is the total absence of a chain of title, not a hidden one.

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment).

The indexing surfaces no assignment for US 1,103,545 whatsoever: Google Patents shows only the 1913-04-02 filing by Individual, the 1914-07-14 grant, and the 1931-07-14 anticipated expiration, with Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual. There is therefore no second link in the chain to characterize, no shell entity, no repeat correspondent, and no pre-litigation transfer to cite — and the patent has been in the public domain since 1931, which makes any current NPE analysis moot regardless. The one open item is a coverage gap, not a finding: pre-1930 paper assignment records are not reliably digitized in the Assignment Center, so a recorded 1914-era assignment could in principle exist on a physical reel without appearing in the indexed data.

Verify directly:

• USPTO Assignment Center (search by patent number 1103545): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy Assignment Search interface: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1103545/en

I'll build on the litigation/PTAB sections already produced and focus strictly on the prior-art record for US 1,103,545. Let me verify what citations the patent actually carries.

Let me verify whether the patent carries any "Citations" or "Cited By" sections at all.

The Google Patents record for US 1,103,545 returned no "Citations" or "Cited By" block (contrast the US2128102 result, which did print a "Cited By (11)" table). Let me confirm and then build the closest-analog prior-art landscape from the pre-1913 art.

I hit the tool-call limit, but the searching is conclusive on the central question. Here is the prior-art analysis for US 1,103,545.

Prior Art Analysis — US Patent 1,103,545 ("Fishing-tool")

1. The literal answer to the question asked

US 1,103,545 has no patent citations of record — zero backward citations ("References Cited") and zero forward citations ("Cited By").

The authoritative record at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1103545/en contains the following sections: Priority Applications, Applications Claiming Priority, Publications, Family, Country Status, Classifications, Landscapes, Similar Documents — and no "Citations" block and no "Cited By" block.

This is a verifiable, structural absence, not a search failure. Compare the search result for an unrelated later patent, US2128102 ("Overshot," filed 1936), whose Google Patents page does print a "Cited By (11)" table (US2652281A, US2681207A, US2713910A, etc.). US 1,103,545 prints none. I ran that comparison specifically because a rendering/scrape failure would be the obvious alternative explanation, and it is ruled out by the contrast.

Why there are no citations (historical practice, not an anomaly)

The familiar "(56) References Cited" block on the face of US patents is a mid-20th-century convention. Patents granted in 1914 — 22 years before even the 1936-filed US2128102 — were printed from the specification and claims alone. There was no examiner citation table to print. So the answer to "look at each patent citation for 1103545" is that the set is empty, and any analyst who hands you a citation list for this patent has almost certainly substituted the "Similar Documents" table (see §3).

2. Identification of the patent (no auto-correction applied)

Dates are taken from the Google Patents record; the specification itself references "APPLICATION FILED APR. 2, 1913."

3. What is not a citation — the "Similar Documents" list

The Google Patents page prints 25 documents under "Similar Documents." These are classification/embedding neighbors, not citations of record. They were not cited by the examiner, not cited by the applicants, and did not cite US 1,103,545. Treating them as a § 102 citation table would be the same species of error already flagged in the earlier sections of this analysis as the "‘354 Patent" / EP 1103545 confusion — a number or list mistaken for something it is not.

That said, the pre-1913 members of that list are the most useful candidate prior art, because only art published before the 1913-04-02 filing date can anticipate under pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b).

4. Candidate prior art — pre-1913 references (§ 102(a)/(b) eligible)

⚠️ Confidence caveat, stated plainly: I retrieved titles, numbers, and publication dates for these from the Google Patents "Similar Documents" table. I did not retrieve or read their full texts or claims. Title and date alone cannot establish anticipation, which requires that a single reference disclose every element of the claim. I therefore identify them as verification candidates, and I do not assert any of them actually anticipates.

Mapping to the claims. The anticipation question for this patent turns on whether one reference discloses, together:

• Claim 1: a sleeve; an interior seat adjacent its lower end; a uniform internal diameter from the seat through the sleeve's upper end; a pair of substantially semicircular, conically shaped jaws; bases resting on the seat; outer faces of the bases loosely resting against the inner circumference; capability of movement both longitudinally and circumferentially and to gravitate inwardly; and means (a threaded pipe) closing the upper end to restrict outward jaw movement.
• Claim 2: the same structure with a plurality of substantially semicircular conical jaws, plus jaw-gravitation and the upper-end closure.

The narrowest and most likely point of novelty is the combination of loose (non-fixed) seating of the jaw bases, permitted circumferential as well as longitudinal movement, and the internal-diameter uniformity / upper-end closure limiting outward escape. A reference that fixes its jaws against rotation (as most later overshots do, via keys or anchors) would not meet those limitations — which is precisely why the later RE23,557-type art retrieved in search (a C-shaped resilient gripping sleeve in a tapered body with a stationary anchor keyed against rotation) is structurally different, and in any event postdates 1913 by four decades.

5. Post-1913 references — not prior art to this application

These appear in the Similar Documents list and/or in a contemporaneous bibliography of fishing-tool patents, but postdate the 1913-04-02 filing and therefore cannot anticipate under § 102(a)/(b). They are useful only as evidence of the crowdedness of the art and of how the overshot developed:

US 1,142,460 A (1915-06-08, Drill-bit clutch); US 1,208,846 A (1916-12-19, Fishing-tool for wells); US 1,252,426 A (1918-01-08); US 1,314,484 A (1919-08-26, Baash, Two-prong compound fishing tool); US 1,363,226 A (1920-12-28, Pipe-fishing tool); US 1,347,203 A (1920-07-20, Combination rod socket and overshot fishing tool); US 1,360,328 A (1920-11-30); US 1,776,024 A (1930-09-16, Pipe-unscrewing socket); US 1,816,991 A (1931-08-04, Fishing tool); GB 340,292 A (1931-01-08); US 2,285,838 A (1942-06-09, Fishing tool); US 2,577,994 A (1951-12-11, Overshot); US 2,945,720 A (1960-07-19, Grappling tool); US 3,003,561 A (1961-10-10, Free-wheeling wash-over spear mechanism); US 3,082,831 A (1963-03-26, Combined wash-over and well tubing retriever); US 3,105,555 A (1963-10-01, Casing scraper); US 3,191,981 A (1965-06-29, Overshot-grappling tool); US 3,820,611 A (1974-06-28); EP 0086582 A1 (1983-08-24, Oil well packer retriever).

One exception to check, flagged rather than assumed: US 1,066,000 A ("Tubing-catcher") carries a publication date of 1913-07-01, i.e. after the 1913-04-02 filing. If — and only if — its underlying application was filed before Snow et al.'s invention date, it could theoretically be pre-AIA § 102(e) art. I did not retrieve its filing date, so I make no § 102(e) assertion. That is the single reference on the list most worth a direct look-up.

6. Contradictions and cautions

• No contradiction with the previously generated litigation and PTAB sections. Both concluded "nothing found"; the prior-art record is similarly barren, for the same historical reason. Consistent.
• Caution — expiration makes all of this academic. Per the earlier sections, US 1,103,545 expired 1931-07-14 (over 67 years before the AIA created IPR/PGR/CBM). § 102 is an invalidity defense to an infringement claim; there is no live claim to infringe and damages are independently time-barred under 35 U.S.C. § 286. Spending budget on prior art here buys nothing. The defense is the expiration date, not the prior art.
• Caution — do not accept a citation list for this patent at face value. The three recurring false-positive traps, all already documented in the earlier sections, apply with equal force to prior art: (i) "Similar Documents" ≠ citations; (ii) the Luhn v. Armor "‘354 Patent" hay rake is a different patent; (iii) EP 1103545 A1 is a European publication number for an unrelated 2001 Hoffmann-La Roche NK-1 antagonist compound, and any "prior art for 1103545" hit referencing fosnetupitant or palonosetron is that document, not this one.
• Caution — digitization quality. The specification OCR is heavily corrupted ("ceram, can'trosiiin," "7559,36?"), and two Similar Documents entries render as inventor names rather than titles (US 571,279 and US 366,914). Absence of a "Cited By" for a 1914 patent may partly reflect pre-digital coverage gaps, though the stronger explanation is simply that examiner citation practice did not yet exist.
• Minor date discrepancy, noted not corrected: this task states the current date as 2026-04-26, while the authoritative fetch timestamp on the Google Patents record is 2026-09-28. Immaterial to prior art; recorded for completeness.

7. Bottom line

Citations of record for US 1,103,545: none — no backward citations, no forward citations. The examiner-citation regime did not exist when this patent issued in 1914. If the request is genuinely for a § 102 anticipation analysis, the honest and complete answer is: there is no citation set to analyze, and the candidate art that could theoretically qualify under pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b) is the pre-1913 well-tool art (US 776,523; US 823,974; US 808,378; US 648,920; US 473,910) — none of it a citation of record, none of it verified against the full claim language, and all of it moot given a patent that expired in 1931.

I'll ground this § 103 analysis in the prior-art references actually surfaced on the patent page (its "Similar Documents" list), and verify their dates and disclosures before combining them.

Now let me pull the other dated references from the page's Similar Documents list, focusing on those that pre-date the 1913-04-02 filing date.

Let me check the remaining pre-filing-date items on the list and probe for the closest analogous "slip-on-seat" overshot art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 1,103,545 ("Fishing-tool") under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Two record flags before the analysis begins.

1. Date inconsistency. The session header states today is April 26, 2026, while the system context and the source fetch timestamp give 2026-09-28 (Fetched: 2026-09-28T07:12:52.102Z). This does not change any conclusion below — the operative dates are 1913 and 1914 — but I am flagging it rather than silently picking one.
2. Specification vs. claim mismatch. The specification (as OCR'd on the page) places the annular seat "in the center portion" of sleeve 2, while claim 1 recites the seat "adjacent its lower end." That is a claim/specification divergence that matters for claim scope and is noted again in the weakness section.

This analysis builds on the prior sections (no litigation; zero AIA proceedings; expired 1931-07-14) and does not repeat them. Obviousness here is academic — there is no live claim to invalidate — but the requested § 103 analysis is performed on the merits.

1. Governing law and what the page actually supplies as prior art

The application was filed 1913-04-02 (US75836713A) and granted 1914-07-14. The AIA first-inventor-to-file provisions apply only to applications filed on or after 2013-03-16, so this patent is governed by pre-AIA § 103, assessed under the Graham v. John Deere framework with KSR supplying the flexible "predictable combination of known elements" rationale.

Importantly, the Google Patents page for this patent has no "Patent Citations" section — that is expected for a 1914 grant, and it means the "Prior Art" content on the page consists of exactly two things: the "Prior art keywords" block (tool, sleeve, section, fishing, lost) and the "Similar Documents" list. I use the Similar Documents list as the candidate art pool, filtered by date.

2. Candidate art pool from the page, with § 102 status

Two dating points control everything:

• US 1,066,000 (Crumpton) is usable only as § 102(e) art, and only if Snow's date of invention is after 1912-03-16. There is nothing on the page establishing an earlier invention date, and the applicants filed 1913-04-02, so on this record Crumpton is available — but a diligent challenger must plead and prove the invention date. Flagging, not assuming.
• The several 1915+ "fishing tool" patents on the Similar Documents list are not citable against these claims. They are nonetheless probative of one thing: the slip-in-a-sleeve overshot became the conventional design within a few years of this grant, which is weak KSR-style evidence of predictability, not § 102 art.

3. Level of ordinary skill

A rig-floor mechanic or well-tool designer with several years' hands-on experience building and running fishing tools (overshots, spears, grapples) for oil- and water-well drilling — no engineering degree, no advanced fluid-dynamics skill. The problem to be solved was already old and explicitly stated in the art itself: Lukins states the object of recovering "pipes that have been broken off or dropped into tubular or Artesian wells"; Johnston states the object of recovering "a lost piece of piping or casing." Both also state the release problem — Lukins: the tool must be releasable "where such pipe is so firmly held in the well as to prevent its removal."

4. Claim breakdown

Claim 2 is the broader claim (any plurality, no straight-bore limitation, generic closure) and is therefore the easier target. Claim 1's only narrowing features over claim 2 are the "pair" count, the "adjacent its lower end" seat location, and the uniform-diameter bore.

5. Combination 1 (primary): Johnston + Lukins + Matula

Proposed ground: US 808,378 to Johnston as base, in view of US 776,523 to Lukins and US 700,216 to Matula.

• Johnston supplies elements a, b (the tapered head 4 carrying gripping structure), e/f (movable gripping member mounted so as to slip upon and seat on the head), g (longitudinal movement — the ring "slips up on said head"), the well-boring setting, the top-end support (head 4 "screwed into the end of drill-tubing, as 6"), and — notably — the hydraulic flushing that Snow relies on ("water being forced downwardly through the drill-rod 6 and passing out through the apertures 3 ... to clear away the material").
• Lukins supplies the sleeve-carried plural gripper concept in a fishing tool, and expressly in the recovery of broken pipe from a well. Lukins' wedges are plural and symmetrically arranged (its head 11 is "quadrilateral, so as to accommodate four wedges"), demonstrating that distributing grip across multiple elements was known and beneficial.
• Matula supplies plural jaw-type grippers (jaws C) mounted to a cylinder for grabbing drill pipe and tools in oil wells, i.e., the substitution of jaws for wedges, and shows jaw grabs operating in engagement with a coupling — precisely the structure Snow grips (Snow's coupling 10 "enters between the gripping jaws 4").

Motivation to combine. All three are in the same field and address the identical problem (retrieving lost pipe/tools). Johnston's single split ring is a closed annulus: (i) it must be forced into the pipe end and is defeated by an out-of-round, burred, or partly collapsed pipe end; (ii) it is keyed against rotation by a rib and therefore cannot self-seat circumferentially; and (iii) its release requires dogs, slots, and a separate expanding rod lowered on a cord — added parts and added failure modes. A POSITA seeking a simpler grab with a broader field of utility (Snow's stated object: to attach to "any form of tool which is provided with projections, shoulders, or the like") would replace the single ring with independent segmental jaws, a substitution already conventional in the very art Lukins and Matula occupy. Likewise, once the jaws are independent, the taper that Johnston put on the head can be moved to the jaws' outer surfaces and the wedging reaction taken on a fixed internal shoulder — leaving the sleeve's bore straight, which is the "uniform internal diameter" element c. That is a rearrangement of known shapes, not a new principle.

Result. Elements a–j all appear across the three references, with the sole genuinely thin spot being element g's circumferential freedom — Johnston's rib defeats it and Matula's jaws are hinged. A challenger must argue that omitting the anti-rotation key is an obvious simplification, which is defensible but is the pivot point of the whole ground.

6. Combination 2: Johnston + Titus (the tightest conceptual fit, but unverified)

US 823,974 (Titus, filed 1906-03-05, granted 1906-06-19), "Well-tube safety-catch," is classified in later citations on the same page as "Slips for drill pipe or other tubular goods." If that characterization reflects the disclosure, Titus is the closest art in the entire pool: circumferentially arranged, tapered gripping slips seated in a bowl/sleeve and biased inward — which is the screw-jaw-and-seat concept of both claims.

Motivation. Slips are literally the rig-floor standard for gripping pipe by taper-and-wedge action; a fishing-tool designer looking to make Johnston's one-piece ring more robust would naturally look to the slip art, the closest and most well-developed source of "plural tapered elements that grip on a seat."

Caveat (stated rather than papered over). I retrieved the Titus title, dates, and classification but not its specification. This combination should not be written up formally until the US823974A PDF is pulled and the jaw/seat structure, bias direction, and closure are confirmed. I will not describe Titus's disclosure as though I had read it.

7. Combination 3 (secondary): Lukins + Crumpton (§ 102(e))

US 1,066,000 (Crumpton, filed 1912-03-16, granted 1913-07-01) discloses tubing sections fitted with a sleeve, a cylindrical member having grooved beveled surfaces, and jaws slidably disposed on the beveled surfaces with ribs riding in grooves, connected by rods, with bow-spring bias. This maps to: sleeve (b), seat/bevel surface (e), slidable jaws (d, g), and inward bias (h) — with a spring substitute for gravity.

Motivation. Substituting gravity for a spring as the inward-bias source is the paradigm of a predictable mechanical substitution (KSR), and Snow's own specification treats gravity as the advantage ("the tapered formation ... is great enough to give the inner edges of the sections sufficient weight to always drop back into position"), i.e., the inventors themselves characterized the choice as an elimination of parts, not a discovery.

8. Why the combination rationale holds up broadly

• Same field of endeavor / reasonably pertinent. Every reference relied on is a well-fishing or pipe-gripping tool from the same sub-art (the patent itself classifies at E21B31/12 and E21B31/18, grappling tools/overshot). No In re Clay-type non-analogous-art argument is available to the patentee.
• Stated, not inferred, motivation. The problem was articulated by the art itself (recovering broken-off pipe; the tool must be releasable if the pipe won't come). There is no teaching away: nothing in Lukins, Johnston, or Matula criticizes gravity-actuated or segmental jaws.
• Predictable result. Wedging a tapered element between two surfaces to grip pipe, and letting the pull increase the grip ("the grip ... will be increased to a great degree ... by the pulling of the spear upwardly" — Johnston), is the oldest, most predictable mechanism in the art. KSR applies directly: "combination of familiar elements according to known methods ... when it does no more than yield predictable results."
• Reasonable expectation of success. Johnston demonstrates the taper-and-grip principle works in a wellbore; Lukins and Matula demonstrate that sleeve-carried grippers retrieve broken pipe. Combining them yields the claimed tool with no new or surprising result.
• No secondary considerations of record. No commercial-success, long-felt-need, failure-of-others, or copying evidence appears on the page or in the earlier sections, and any such evidence would face a nexus problem given that the patent expired in 1931.

9. Where the § 103 case is weakest — the honest counterweight

1. Element g (circumferential freedom). No verified reference discloses jaws free to rotate circumferentially within the sleeve. Johnston deliberately keys its ring against rotation ("prevented from turning upon the head ... by a rib"); Crumpton uses ribs in grooves. Snow's loose, untethered jaws — retained only by a threaded pipe at the top — are a genuine structural difference, though it looks like an omission of a known keying feature rather than an addition.
2. Element c (uniform internal diameter). Every verified reference either puts the taper on the bowl (Johnston) or uses beveled jaw surfaces (Crumpton). Snow's straight-bore sleeve with the gripping cone carried entirely by the jaws is unusual. It is, however, exactly the kind of limitation that reads on a piece of pipe with an internal stop, and forming a shoulder by threading or by a collar at a pipe's lower end is ordinary pipe-fitting.
3. "Loosely" (element f). This is a relative term of degree; it is both a § 112(b) candidate and, for § 103 purposes, so broad that Matula's hinged jaws arguably still "'loosely rest" at their bases. Either reading helps a challenger.
4. Seat location mismatch. The specification's "center portion" versus claim 1's "adjacent its lower end" gives the patentee little room to argue a narrow construction that distinguishes the art.
5. Claim 1's "pair." Lukins' four wedges and Matula's plural jaws make the selection of two a routine optimization of a known count, and Snow identifies no criticality for exactly two.

Net: claim 2 is more likely obvious than claim 1, and the strongest ground is a Johnston-based combination that explicitly addresses the anti-rotation/circumferential difference.

10. Bottom line

Recommendation for anyone actually litigating this (which, per the earlier sections, they cannot): the § 103 case is not the efficient path. Both claims were untested and both are expired; the dispositive facts are the 1931-07-14 expiration and the § 286 limitations bar. If a paper invalidity position is nonetheless needed, pull the US823974A specification first — Titus is the one reference in the page's own prior-art pool whose title and classification place it squarely on the screw-jaw-and-seat concept, and its unverified status is the single largest gap in this analysis.