US 1206104

I'll verify the identifier and check for any litigation or docket activity.

Verification of the identifier

I searched for the literal string 1206104 as a US patent number. Important caveat: this string also appears as other identifiers that are not US Patent 1206104 — e.g., GB application No. 1206104.0 (IBM, "Coaxial through-silicon via") and an ASML US priority application "US 1206104 A 20041215" cited on EP1672432A1. Those are unrelated and I have excluded them per your instruction.

The US patent bearing the number 1206104 is confirmed as:

US 1206104 A — "Golf-club"

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1206104A](/patent/US1206104A)/en (authoritative text supplied; fetched 2026-09-29).

Abstract

There is no abstract in the original 1916 patent — the abstract requirement did not exist at that time, and the printed specification contains no abstract section. Google Patents provides a machine-derived summary in place of one:

"This invention relates to a golf club, the head of which is adjustable on the shaft enabling a person to move the same through different angles of adjustment dependent upon the particular shot which it is desired to play, the angle of the striking face of the head, of course, determining the loft imparted to the ball."

I am flagging this explicitly as a derived summary, not an original abstract.

Plain-language overview of the claims

All six claims are independent — there are no dependent claims in this patent. (Note: the supplied OCR garbles the numbering, printing claim 3 as "8.", claim 4 as "at.", and leaving claim 5 unnumbered. I read the literal sequence as claims 1–6.)

1. Claim 1 — Basic combination. A golf club with a shank carrying an integral extension; a club head pivoted to that extension; interengaging tongue-and-groove features on the extension and head that guide and help retain the head as it pivots; and multiple independent spring-loaded locking members mounted in the head that engage the extension to hold the head at various adjusted positions.

2. Claim 2 — Shaft-receiving shank + rearward-angled extension. A shank adapted to receive a shaft, with an integral depending extension angled rearwardly from the shank; a head pivoted to it; coacting tongue-and-groove members on the shank/head that retain and guide the head; and resilient means inside the head that interlock with the extension at different points to rigidly hold different adjusted positions. Adds the "angled rearwardly" limitation and places the resilient locking means inside the head.

3. Claim 3 — Locking elements parallel to the pivot axis. A shank and pivoted head with coacting tongue-and-groove guide members, plus a plurality of resilient locking means mounted within the head parallel to the head's axis of movement, engaging the shank to hold different adjustment positions.

4. Claim 4 — Geometry of the extension. A shank with an integral extension angled downwardly, laterally, and rearwardly; a head pivoted on that extension with the pivot axis at right angles to the plane of the extension; and means for locking the head in different adjusted positions. This claim is primarily about the three-dimensional disposition of the extension and pivot axis.

5. Claim 5 — Tilted contact face. A shank with a rearwardly angled extension; a head mounted on it whose contact surface with the extension is also angled rearwardly relative to an axis perpendicular to the striking face; and locking means enabling the striking face to be tilted into different planes for different shots. This captures the key structural insight that the angled interface lets the club resist impact loads while the face itself stays clean.

6. Claim 6 — Tongue-in-groove with arc curved about the pivot. A shank member with a rearwardly angled extension; a head pivoted on the extension; a tongue on the head engaging a groove in the extension, where the groove is curved about the pivot member as its center; the pivot member lying at right angles to the plane of the extension; plus locking means for different adjusted positions.

Common inventive thread: the head pivots on a stud/gudgeon on a rearwardly angled sector-shaped shank extension; tongue-and-groove/arc guideways retain the head during adjustment; and spring-loaded pins housed inside the head (not on the striking face) drop into complemental tapered recesses in the extension to lock each of the (nominally seven) positions. The specification stresses that this keeps the striking face "entirely free from projections or other deformations."

Alternative embodiments described (not separately claimed): Figs. 8–12 show the pivot reversed (stud on the head, aperture on the extension) with a supplementary retaining screw 27 and leaf springs 25/apertures 26 that snap over studs 24 to hold the locking pins in locked or unlocked position; Fig. 13 shows a threaded locking pin 28 driven by a knurled threaded collar 29.

Litigation / CAFC check — no results

I found no CAFC (or any court) docket activity, and no USPTO post-grant proceeding, involving US 1206104. That is expected: the patent issued in 1916, its term lapsed on November 28, 1933, and it predates the Federal Circuit (est. 1982) and modern AIA proceedings entirely. Any 2026 CAFC docket entry matching "1206104" would necessarily concern a different identifier (for example, a 2026 docket number or an unrelated application/publication number), not this patent. I cannot confirm the absence of any such docket with the tools available to me, so I note this as "no evidence found" rather than a certified negative.

Contextual note (with uncertainty flagged)

Two related early patents appear in the Google Patents record and are worth distinguishing, since the "Goodrich" name recurs:

• US 1206105 A — also titled "Golf-club," issued the same day (1916-11-28), listed among "Similar Documents."
• US 1083434 A — a 1914 golf-club patent attributed in one search result to "Latimer Goodrich"; a golf-auction listing (Jeff Ellis Golf Auctions, Lot #33) instead attributes US 1,083,434 to Charles Curry of Chicago and describes a "Goodrich Adjustable All-In-One Iron" marked "Goodrich Sales Co, Chicago," with a 1918 improvement patent by Latimer Goodrich.

These search results conflict on attribution of US 1,083,434, and I cannot authoritatively resolve whether Alonzo C. Goodrich and Latimer Goodrich are related, or whether the commercial "Goodrich" club corresponds to this patent. The patent face itself records only Alonzo C. Goodrich as inventor/individual assignee. Treat any commercial-embodiment linkage as unverified.

Confidence: High on bibliographic data, claim text, and expiry (all taken from the authoritative full patent text provided). Low/uncertain on the family relationships and commercial product attribution noted above.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 1206104.

Let me run a few more targeted searches to confirm.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent No. 1206104

Conclusion: No litigation is known or indexed for US Patent No. 1206104.

I searched patent-litigation aggregators and general web sources (including Google Patents/Justia patent pages, which surface litigation links, and queries aimed at PACER/CAFC/Unified Patents litigation records) for the specific number 1206104 and returned no case hits. I did not find any plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome to report. There is no known litigation involving this patent.

Why this is the expected result (context)

Three structural facts explain the absence of any recoverable litigation record:

1. The patent has been expired for over 90 years. Any term ran from 1916 to 1933. Because a patent's term ends at expiration, no infringement suit could have been filed after 1933 — and enforcement actions, if any, would necessarily have occurred between 1916 and 1933.
2. Electronic docketing (PACER) does not reach back that far. Federal court dockets in PACER are generally only complete from the late 1980s–1990s forward; pre-1933 district court and CAFC-predecessor records are not indexed in the modern systems you asked me to search. Whatever paper records may exist are not retrievable through the searched databases.
3. The only "US 1206104" hits in modern sources are citations, not litigation. The number appears solely as a prior-art citation on later patents (e.g., Nike/Karsten adjustable-golf-club patents such as US 9,517,391 and others in the "Cited By" list on Google Patents). Those are examiner/applicant citations, not litigation references, and I have not conflated them with litigation.

Caveats on method

• I interpreted the identifier 1206104 literally and did not substitute or auto-correct it to any other number. I also excluded results that merely contained similar digits (e.g., the Trademark Cancellation No. 92056833 referencing Registration No. 946,120, and the Ampex/Sampson record) because those are unrelated to US Patent 1,206,104.
• I could not query PACER, CAFC, or the Unified Patents litigation caselist directly as authenticated databases through these tools; I relied on indexed web results. Because those systems would not cover 1916–1933 in any event, my inability to reach them does not change the conclusion.
• I state explicitly, rather than speculate: I do not know of any litigation involving US 1206104, and I found none. If pre-1933 paper litigation records exist, they would have to be sought from archival court records (e.g., National Archives / Federal Records Centers) rather than electronic docketing — an avenue I could not access here.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before writing up.

PTAB / AIA-Trial Analysis — US 1,206,104 (Goodrich, “Golf-club”)

Verification performed: 2026-09-29. Structured ODP block reviewed; open-web search run against PTAB proceeding databases, Docket Navigator-style aggregator pages, and Google Patents/Justia litigation pages. No AIA trial proceeding naming US 1,206,104 was found in any source.

Proceedings overview

There are zero AIA trial proceedings on this patent — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM, no derivation proceeding — and there never could have been a meaningful one: US 1,206,104 issued 1916-11-28 and reached anticipated expiration 1933-11-28, roughly 79 years before the first IPR petition was even possible (AIA trials became available 2012-09-16). The breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not the usual “hardened” or “dead claims” one — it is standing on a public-domain document: all six claims are untested at the PTAB only because the patent is long expired and cannot be asserted against anyone. If a demand letter actually cites US 1,206,104, the correct response is not an IPR strategy but a demand for evidence of an enforceable right, because none can exist.

Proceedings

No proceedings to list. Per the canonical structured data block, the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest, and independent web verification on 2026-09-29 surfaced nothing further. Because the required format branches on proceeding numbers that would have to be invented, I am declining to populate this section rather than fabricate docket entries.

Why the list is empty (not merely un-indexed)

Notably, an IPR can technically be filed against an expired patent for claims of intervening rights, but no such filing exists here — and a 110-year-old expired patent has no commercial target worth the $30k+ petition cost.

Closest-adjacent signals in the record

These are not proceedings on this patent — they are the reason the patent shows up in search results, and they matter for prior-art strategy, not for estoppel:

• US 1,206,104 is cited as prior art on the face of a large contemporaneous adjustable-hosel family, including Nike’s and Karsten Manufacturing’s adjustable golf club filings (e.g., US 9,517,391 “Adjustable golf club and system and associated golf club heads and shafts,” and the US 9,536,299 / US 9,777,050 impact-influencing body-features family). Source: Google Patents “Cited By” listing at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1206104/en and https://patents.justia.com/patent/[9517391](/patent/9517391).
• A sibling patent by the same inventor, US 1,206,105, filed 1914-12-09 and granted the same day (1916-11-28), describes the same adjustable-head concept with a worm-and-gear adjuster instead of spring-loaded pins. It is likewise expired and PTAB-free. https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1206105A](/patent/US1206105A)/en
• Two further Goodrich adjustable clubs, US 1,250,301 (1917-12-18) and US 1,258,212 (1918-03-18), appear in the same prior-art tables.

Strategic summary

Claim status. All six claims of US 1,206,104 — independent claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 — are UNTESTED in any AIA forum. None has been canceled; none has been sustained. That is not staleness in the ordinary IPR sense (a lapsed petition, a settled trial, a denied institution). It is the total absence of any AIA proceeding, ever. Claim 1 recites a shank with an integral extension, a head pivoted thereto, coacting tongue-and-groove guides, and a plurality of independent spring-impelled locking means mounted in the head; claim 3 recites resilient means mounted within the head parallel to the axis of movement; claims 4–6 are directed to the rearwardly-angled-extension geometry with a pivot axis at right angles to the plane of the extension and a groove curved about that pivot as a center. All of that is now free public prior art, enforceable by no one.

Estoppel landscape. There is none to map. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel requires a petitioner that was a party to an IPR that reached a final written decision; no IPR exists, so no petitioner, privy, or real party in interest is estopped from anything. Equally, no AIA trial has narrowed these claims through amendment — there was no IPR, no motion to amend, and no substituted claims under § 316(d). If you are drafting a validity challenge against a modern adjustable-hosel patent, US 1,206,104 and its siblings (US 1,206,105; US 1,250,301; US 1,258,212) are fully available as printed publication prior art under § 102(a)(1)/pre-AIA § 102(b), with effective dates of 1916-11-28 — no estoppel, no § 325(d) discretionary-disregard risk of the “same art, same arguments” type, and no IPR-related restriction on using them in district court.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed even once, let alone multiple times. The patent owner (an individual; Alonzo C. Goodrich of Chicago, Illinois) never appeared before the PTAB and never filed a Federal Circuit appeal — the inventor died decades before the Board had jurisdiction over anything resembling an IPR. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, AST, LOT) appears in the chain, because the patent’s “cited by” footprint is entirely organic: it is cited by Nike/Karsten/Dunlop adjustable-club patents as background art, not challenged through any aggregator program.

One verification trap worth flagging. US 1,206,104 is a seven-digit, pre-1995-style number. Modern US grants are eight digits beginning in the 10–12 million range — e.g., the Halozyme patents US 12,049,652 and US 12,104,185 that are currently the subject of a live, high-volume PTAB campaign (MSD v. Halozyme, with seven PGRs already decided against the patent owner and more pending as of late September 2026). Any automated docket or Freedom-of-Information search run on the string “1206104” can cross-contaminate with US 12,061,04X-type modern numbers, and vice versa. The PTAB activity you may see reported in that number-space belongs to completely different patents and a completely different technology. Confirm the full eight-digit modern number before relying on any hit.

Recommended next steps

• If no PTAB activity exists — say so plainly, and say why. The absence here is not the usual weak signal (“well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs”). The stronger signal is temporal: no IPR can exist because the patent expired on 1933-11-28, well before the AIA created IPRs. Any assertion of US 1,206,104 is facially baseless; the patent has been in the public domain for over ninety years and cannot support a § 271 infringement claim, a § 284 damages theory, or an ITC exclusion request.
• Re-run the check at the source before you rely on this memo. PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov/) and the Board’s decisions portal (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/patent-trial-and-appeal-board/patent-trial-and-appeal-board-decisions) accept searches by patent number; a filtered query on patent 1206104 returns no proceedings. For any Federal Circuit history, CourtListener’s docket search returns nothing tying this number to an appeal. If your conflict system reports an IPR on “12,061,04-something,” verify the full number and the assignee before treating it as connected.
• Repurpose the analysis. The productive use of US 1,206,104 today is offensive prior-art work, not defensive IPR strategy. If a modern adjustable-loft or adjustable-hosel patent is being asserted against you, pull the 1916 specification and figures — particularly the sector-shaped tracking extension with tapered locking-pin recesses (Figs. 1–7) and the alternative groove-and-arcuate-tongue mount (Figs. 8–13) — and map them against the asserted independent claim. That mapping runs in district court and in an IPR petition alike, unencumbered by any estoppel or § 325(d) history.

Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction — US Patent 1,206,104

Scope note up front: This is a pre-1955 patent. The USPTO Assignment Center's online record is complete only from 1980 forward; paper-era records for this patent are on microfilm at the USPTO Public Search Facility and are not reachable through assignmentcenter.uspto.gov or assignment.uspto.gov. I could not query the authenticated Assignment Center directly with these tools, so my reconstruction rests on (a) the authoritative Google Patents legal-events feed for US1206104 (grant 1916-11-28, anticipated expiration 1933-11-28, "Current Assignee: Individual," no assignment event rows), and (b) indexed web results. I found no recorded assignment of any kind. I did not fabricate reel/frame entries to fill the schema.

Inventors

Pattern note: Sole inventor, pro-se prosecution era, no corporate filing — there is no "inventor departure" signal to assess because there was never a company assignee to depart from. Unusual for this period only in that the patent issued to the individual outright rather than being assigned to a manufacturer at filing.

Adjacent-family context (do not conflate): Alonzo C. Goodrich is the named inventor on a small cluster of same-era Chicago adjustable-club patents, including US 1,206,105 (filed 1914-12-09, granted 1916-11-28) and US 1,250,301 ("Adjustable golf-club," granted 1917-12-18), and a Latimer Goodrich obtained a further-improvement patent listed as issuing in March 1918. A surviving "All One" adjustable iron is marked "Goodrich Sales Co, Chicago" per a 2024 auction catalog (jeffellisgolfauctions.com, Lot #72) — but that catalog attributes the club to Charles Curry's 1914 patent and Latimer Goodrich's 1918 patent, not to US 1,206,104. I record this as context only; it is not evidence of an assignment of this patent, and I will not treat it as one.

Original assignee

None. The patent issued unassigned to the inventor, Alonzo C. Goodrich, as an individual.

• No assignee is printed on the patent front matter; Google Patents resolves the "current assignee" field to the placeholder "Individual."
• Google Patents legal events for US1206104 contain exactly two rows — 1916-11-28 Application granted and 1933-11-28 Anticipated expiration. There is no Assignment row, no Change of name, no Security agreement.
• Product embodying the claims: not established for this patent. No manufacturer, mark, or catalog attribution tied to US 1,206,104 surfaced in my searches.
• Line of business / current status: unknown and, practically, moot — a 1914 individual inventor is long deceased and any unincorporated proprietorship dissolved with him. No data on successor-in-interest.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for US 1,206,104. I found no executed assignment, license, security interest, merger, change of name, or release, and therefore no reel/frame, no conveyancer, and no correspondent of record to report for this patent. I am not able to invent one.

That silence in the paper-era record is itself the finding, and it is reinforced by three independent checks:

1. Google Patents legal events for US1206104 list only grant and expiration — no assignment entries (contrast the modern Nike/Karsten patents in the "Cited By" list, which do carry assignment events).
2. "Current assignee" resolves to "Individual," i.e., the original inventor, consistent with an unbroken chain of title from issuance.
3. No litigation naming this patent exists in indexed sources (see the previously generated litigation section), so there is no complaint-derived ownership allegation to triangulate against.

Consequence: under the instruction governing this task, no further chain reconstruction is possible and the assignment-timeline analysis terminates here. For completeness I give the only two transfer-relevant events the record actually contains, in diagram form, below.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1206104
    1914 : Filed by Alonzo C Goodrich
         : Application 850318 filed 11 July
    1916 : Patent granted 28 November
         : No assignee of record
    1933 : Patent term expired 28 November

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Not assessable — there is no chain to analyze. Recording the calls against available evidence only:

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No transfer of any kind is recorded; the patent name never leaves the individual inventor.
2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee exists to compare against any NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, Spangenberg entities, etc.). Zero overlap because there is zero chain.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Not present. No correspondent of record exists for this patent. The only attorney names appearing anywhere on US1206104 are the witness signatures on the inventor's oath — Charles W. Hills, Jr. and Leon M. Reissman — which are witness attestations, not assignment-recording correspondents, and must not be reported as such. There is no firm of record for a nonexistent recording.
4. Cascading transfers — Not present. Zero assignments in a 17-year term.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. No litigation, and no transfer to time against one.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. No corporate assignee ever existed to enter Chapter 7/11.
7. Privateering — Not present. No operating company held the patent, so nothing could be transferred to an NPE asserting on its behalf.
8. Defensive aggregator — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN; it terminated at statutory expiration on 1933-11-28.

Verdict

Insufficient data — no records, or only the original assignment.

US 1,206,104 issued on 1916-11-28 to Alonzo C. Goodrich as an individual owner, with no assignee on the face of the patent, no assignment rows in Google Patents legal events, and no paper-era assignment records retrievable through the online USPTO Assignment Center. The chain contains zero recorded conveyances and no correspondent, so none of the eight NPE signals can be marked "present" on evidence, and I decline to infer any from the inventor's surname or the presence of other Goodrich-era golf patents. The patent expired on 1933-11-28 and is unenforceable; there is no current owner to be an NPE.

Verification: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "1206104"); legacy interface https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. Google Patents legal events for the same patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1206104A](/patent/US1206104A)/en. If the paper-era record must be exhausted, the remaining avenue is the USPTO Public Search Facility microfilm collection or a National Archives pull of pre-1933 assignment records — neither of which I can reach with these tools, and neither of which would change the enforceability conclusion.

I'll start by pulling the authoritative USPTO/Google Patents record for US 1,206,104 and then examine its citation trail and the closely-related references.

Key finding: the fetched record shows a "Cited By" list (later patents citing US 1,206,104) but no "Citations" / prior-art-of-record section. Let me verify that and check the pre-1914 references in the "Similar Documents" list.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent No. 1,206,104 ("Golf-club")

1. What I searched, and what the record actually contains

I searched for the identifier 1206104 literally (no substitution, no auto-correction) and retrieved the authoritative bibliographic/full-text record that mirrors the USPTO data:

• US 1,206,104 A — https://patents.google.com/patent/US1206104/en (Google Patents; USPTO bibliographic + scanned full text)
• Cross-checked via Espacenet family/applicant data and the Justia prior-art tables of later patents that cite it.

Key structural finding, and it changes the shape of this task: the US 1,206,104 record contains a "Cited By" table (later patents citing it) but no "Citations" / "Patent Citations" block — i.e., zero prior-art references are of record against US 1,206,104, and none appear on its face. Two independent reasons:

1. Vintage practice. US 1,206,104 was filed July 11, 1914 and granted November 28, 1916. The statutory duty to disclose known prior art to the Office (37 C.F.R. § 1.56 and formal "References Cited" listings on the face of the patent) derives from the 1952 Act. Pre-1952 U.S. patents — especially 1916-era ones — routinely issue with no listed references.
2. The artifact matches that practice. The OCR/transcription does not parse an examiner citation list, and the Google Patents "Citations" field is empty. I am therefore stating explicitly, rather than guessing: there is no citable prior-art-of-record to enumerate for this patent.

So the honest reading of the instruction "look at each patent citation for 1206104" is: the only citations attached to this number in the indexed record run forward (they cite it), and there is no backward citation list to analyze. Below I (a) dispose of the forward citations, and (b) do the substantive § 102 work against the pre-July-11-1914 art that actually could anticipate it.

Basis-of-analysis caveat (flagged, not glossed over): a patent with a 1914 filing date is governed by the pre-1952 novelty statute, R.S. § 4886 (and R.S. § 4920), not by 35 U.S.C. § 102, which did not exist until 1952. You asked for § 102 mapping, so I give it, but strictly this is a § 102 analogue analysis. Note also that the OCR of the claim set mangles the numerals: "8." is claim 3, and "at." is claim 4; the unnumbered paragraph beginning "In a device of the class described a shank, an extension thereon…" is claim 5. The patent has six claims.

2. Forward citations ("Cited By") — none of these can anticipate

These are the only references the record ties to US 1,206,104 by citation. All postdate the patent and therefore are legally incapable of anticipating under § 102(a)/(b). The earliest are examiner citations of record against later applications, which is why this patent appears in their tables.

Counts as displayed: Cited By (20) in the condensed table; Cited By (41) in the expanded table (the difference is the examiner-cited vs. third-party-cited split).

§ 102 conclusion for this group: no claim of US 1,206,104 is anticipated by any of them — every one has a priority date 43–98 years after July 11, 1914. If anything, they are evidence of the opposite direction of citation (this patent as prior art against the modern Nike/Karsten adjustable-hosel families).

3. The prior art that actually matters for § 102 — pre-1914-07-11 references

Because there is no citation-of-record list, I built the § 102 candidate set from the pre-filing references surfaced in the record's "Similar Documents" table and contemporaneous sources. Only references with a date before July 11, 1914 can anticipate. Two strong candidates emerged, plus two unverified ones.

3.1 US 1,083,434 A — Curry — the most relevant prior art

• Full citation: Curry, C. N., "Golf-club," U.S. Patent No. 1,083,434 A.
• Dates: Filed April 25, 1913 (Ser. No. 763,539); granted/published January 6, 1914. Inventor of record: Charles N. Curry; applicants of record also include Latimer Goodrich and Charles Evans, Jr. (per Espacenet bibliographic data).
• URLs: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1083434 ; https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=[1083434A](/patent/1083434A)&KC=A&FT=D
• Disclosure: Shank with a bearing aperture set at an angle to the axis of the shaft, the lower end of the shank forming a segmental channel (n) concentric with the bearing aperture. The blade has a bearing (7′) through that aperture and a segmental flange (i′) with four apertures (h) that fits into the shank channel — an interlocking flange-and-channel (tongue-and-groove) pair that permits rotation only. A spring-biased plunger (e) in the shank, with a tapered lower end and a pin (g) riding an L-shaped slot (r), drops into one of the four apertures to lock the blade at a selected angle. Screw (l) is the pivot bearing; a set screw prevents its rotation. Curved, dirt-shielded adjustment slot.
• Why it is the closest art: It is the same invention-family problem — an adjustable-loft club where the head pivots on an angled bearing in the shank and is locked by a tapered pin entering one of several complemental recesses, with interlocking flange/channel surfaces to take the load off the pivot. Commercial corroboration: this is the "Goodrich Sales Co. / All-One" club marked "Pat'd January 6, 1914" (Bonhams lot 184; Jeff Ellis Auctions Lot #33), and Latimer Goodrich's own later patent US 1,258,212 expressly calls it "the above-mentioned Curry patent" and frames itself as an improvement on it (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/70/1f/e0/d51097339a7f64/US1258212.pdf).
• § 102 mapping against US 1,206,104's claims:

The only meaningful differentiator Curry lacks across the whole set is the head-mounted, plural, spring-impelled locking means (claims 1–3), and Curry's channel sides are parallel to the shaft axis rather than at right angles to the bearing screw — the precise point Latimer Goodrich later attacked in US 1,258,212.

3.2 US 1,058,463 A — Pringle

• Full citation: Pringle, A., "Gold-club." [title as it appears in the record; an apparent typographical rendering of "Golf-club," retained here without correction], U.S. Patent No. 1,058,463 A.
• Dates: Filed July 19, 1912 (Ser. No. 710,354); granted/published April 8, 1913. Inventor: Alexander Pringle, Everett, Massachusetts.
• URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1058463A](/patent/US1058463A)/en
• Disclosure: A club whose blade is adjustable on an axis set at an angle to the bottom edge, so that a single rotation simultaneously changes the face-to-handle angle and the sole-to-handle angle. The shank has an offset with a downwardly slanting conical socket receiving the blade's upturned shank; a plurality of insets/recesses (a) in the offset face cooperate with a lug (b) on the blade as a guide and anti-rotation feature; the blade is locked by a screw (B) and nut (C) (not a spring detent).
• § 102 mapping: Pringle directly addresses the "angle the head so the striking face tilts into different planes for different shots" concept, and its claims are drawn to a handle/blade rotatable on an axis at an angle to the bottom edge. It is therefore § 102 art of real force against the concept of claims 4 and 5 (angled extension + pivoted head whose rotation re-orients the striking face), and it also discloses a lug-and-inset interfit that is arguably a tongue-and-groove pair of claim 1/2/3/6. However, it does not anticipate claims 1–3 or 6 as written, because (i) its locking means is a threaded screw-and-nut, not a plurality of spring-impelled members, and (ii) its tongue/groove equivalent (lug/inset) is in the offset face rather than a groove curved concentrically about the pivot member as claim 6 requires. Treat Pringle as anticipatory against claim 5's substantive concept and strong § 103-type art against claims 4 and 6; it is not a clean § 102 kill of the head-mounted-detent claims.

3.3 Candidates I could not verify — flagged, not asserted

• US 723,534 A — "Golf-club," listed in the record's Similar Documents with publication date 1903-03-24. A decade pre-filing, so it survives the date screen; its disclosure was not retrieved in this session (I hit the tool-call limit). I cannot tell you what it discloses, whether its adjustable mechanism is a pivot-and-detent or merely a weighting feature, or which of Goodrich's claims it might read on. Do not treat this as analyzed.
• US 786,268 A — "Golf-club," publication date 1905-04-04. Same status: pre-filing by nine years, disclosure not retrieved. Requires verification.
• US 968,187 A — "Billiard-bridge" (1910-08-23). Off-field (billiards), no evident pertinence to golf-club head adjustment; listed only as an algorithmic "similar document."
• US 1,135,621 (Roberts, April 1915 — surfacing in Justia prior-art tables for later adjustable-club patents). Its publication date postdates the July 11, 1914 filing. It could only be prior art under a § 102(e)-type theory if its filing date preceded July 11, 1914, which I did not confirm. Unverified.

I am deliberately stopping there rather than padding the list. I did not fabricate disclosures for US 723,534 or US 786,268; their texts must be pulled (USPTO Patent Public Search full-text for 1903/1905 patents is image-only, so the citations/claims would need to be read off the scanned pages).

4. Related art that is not statutory prior art (but matters to the analysis)

• US 1,206,105 A — "Golf-club," Alonzo C. Goodrich (same inventor, Chicago), filed December 9, 1914, granted November 28, 1916 — the same issue date as US 1,206,104 (see the Justia prior-art tables at https://patents.justia.com/patent/[9517391](/patent/9517391)#6, which list "1206104 / November 1916 / Goodrich" and "1206105 / November 1916 / Goodrich" adjacently). Because its filing date is five months after US 1,206,104's July 11, 1914 filing, it is not § 102(a) prior art to US 1,206,104. Its relevance is as a likely sibling/divisional-type companion bearing on priority, common ownership, and potential double-patenting exposure between the two disclosures — not anticipation.
• US 1,258,212 — Latimer Goodrich, 1918 — the "improvement on the Curry patent," tying the commercial Goodrich Sales Co. line together. Postdates; lineage only.
• Other later "Similar Documents" (US 1,250,301 "Adjustable golf-club" 1917; US 1,361,258 1920; US 1,467,714 1923; US 1,546,612 1925; US 1,665,523 1928; US 1,995,928 1935; US 2,175,598 1939; US 3,473,720 1969; US 3,893,670 1975) — all post-date July 11, 1914 and cannot anticipate; useful only for tracing the art's evolution.

5. Bottom line

1. US 1,206,104 has no prior-art citations of record. Its record carries only forward citations (20 condensed / 41 expanded), and none of those can anticipate any claim — they postdate it by 43–98 years.
2. The most relevant prior art for § 102 purposes is US 1,083,434 (Curry), filed April 25, 1913 and published January 6, 1914 — squarely before the July 11, 1914 filing. Curry potentially anticipates claims 4, 5, and 6, and is the closest art against claims 1–3 (which survive Curry only because Curry's single plunger sits in the shank, whereas claims 1–3 demand plural, spring-impelled locking means mounted in the head).
3. US 1,058,463 (Pringle), filed July 19, 1912 / published April 8, 1913, is the second most relevant reference — strongly pertinent to the angled-extension/rotatable-face concept of claims 4 and 5 (and as art against the tongue/groove limitation), but not a clean § 102 read on claims 1–3 or 6 because its lock is a screw-and-nut and its guide is a lug-and-inset.
4. US 723,534 (1903) and US 786,268 (1905) remain unverified candidates that must be read from the scanned images before any § 102 conclusion is drawn from them. I did not analyze their disclosures.

Method caveats, stated rather than buried: I reached USPTO-derived data through Google Patents and Espacenet rather than authenticated USPTO Patent Center/Full-Text, because 1916-era U.S. patents exist there only as page images; and, as noted, the "§ 102" frame you requested is anachronistic for a 1914 filing — the operative provision was R.S. § 4886. If pre-1914 paper prosecution files (National Archives / Federal Records Centers) were retrievable, they would be the only source that could supply an authoritative examiner citation list for this patent; I could not access those.

I'll research the pre-1914 references from this page's prior-art/Similar Documents section, since only those can qualify as § 103 prior art against a July 11, 1914 filing date.

Now let me examine the two pre-1914 references in the Similar Documents list, plus check for the closest adjustable-head art.

Let me pin down a few remaining dates/contents: the sibling patent US1206105A, and two other pre-filing golf patents that appear in the citation network.

Obviousness Analysis — US Patent No. 1,206,104 ("Golf-club")

Analyst note on framing. US 1,206,104 was filed July 11, 1914 and granted November 28, 1916 (application US 850,318; inventor Alonzo C. Goodrich, Chicago). A literal § 103 analysis is therefore being applied hypothetically: the statute in force at filing was R.S. §§ 4886/4920, and inventiveness was judged under Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1850), not § 103 (which dates from the 1952 Act). The substantive inquiry — whether the differences over the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill — is materially the same, so I proceed under the requested framework while flagging the retroactivity.

1. What on this page actually qualifies as prior art

The page supplies four bodies of material. Only two are usable, and only partially:

Qualifying (pre-1914-07-11) references from the Similar Documents list:

Not prior art: US 1,206,105 A (granted 1916-11-28, but filed 1914-12-09, i.e., five months after the 1,206,104 filing) is Alonzo C. Goodrich's own sibling application on a worm-and-gear variant. It is a same-inventor, later-filed case — useful as evidence of the inventor's own design space, not as § 102/§ 103 art. All other Similar Documents (US 1,250,301 (1917), 1,361,258 (1920), 1,467,714, 1,529,959, 1,546,612, 1,605,140, 1,644,177 (1927), 1,665,523, 1,993,928 (1935), 2,175,598, 2,305,270, 2,520,701, 3,206,206, 3,477,720, 3,893,670, 6,203,444, 10,661,131, JP 2010-148652) also fail the date test.

Admission in the specification. The patent states: "Golf clubs with adjustable heads have been constructed heretofore, but they have been objectionable for many reasons, either due to the difficulty of effecting the adjustment, or the insufficient strength of the parts and the disadvantageous arrangement thereof." This is a binding characterization: the genus (an adjustable golf club head locked in plural angular positions) is old. The § 103 question therefore collapses to the specific arrangement of the pivot/guide and the locking detents, and to where they are housed.

I could not identify an examiner's "Patent Citations" table on the fetched page, so I cannot report the art the Examiner actually relied on. That is a genuine limitation of this analysis.

2. Claim-by-claim mapping

Note on claim 6: Curry's own words that the channel/flange "hold the two parts against any possible relative movement except that of rotation" describe precisely the "retain and guide" function the '104 specification ascribes to tongue 4/21 and its groove.

3. The combinations, and why the artisan would have made them

Ground 1 — Curry 1,083,434 in view of Pringle 1,058,463.
Both are adjustable golf clubs solving the identical problem stated in the '104 specification: replacing a set of clubs with one stick whose face angle varies by shot. Both place a pivoted blade on the shank, both use an interfitting projection/recess pair to guide and retain rotation, and both use a spring-loaded detent to lock discrete positions. The only meaningful structural delta from claims 1–3, 5 and 6 is housing the detents in the head instead of the shank. That is a reversal of parts with no change in function — the classic § 103 rationale (MPEP 2144.04(IV)(A)) — and it produces exactly the benefit the '104 specification touts: the striking face and the visible hosel are left "entirely free from projections or other deformations," with the pins hidden in a boss on the rear surface of the head.

Ground 2 — Curry + Pringle, further in view of Knight 723,534 and/or Corey 786,268 (for claims 4–6 geometry and the putting position).
Knight and Corey supply the head/shaft-axis relationship and the alignment feature that the '104 specification claims as a benefit ("with the head in the adjustment for putting the lower edge of the head is alined with the shank or shaft… so that the utmost accuracy… is secured"). Knight locates the shaft axis between heel and toe and forward of the center of mass; Corey puts the shank between the heel and toe with the axis in the plane of symmetry and adds parallel sighting edges. An artisan designing a club whose "putting" detent position must aline the head with the shaft has direct reason to consult this art.

Ground 3 — duplication of the locking means (claims 1–3).
Claim 1 requires "a plurality of independent spring-impelled locking means," and claim 3 "a plurality of resilient means… parallel to the axis of movement." Curry teaches one spring-pressed plunger in a bore that is already coaxial with the pivot. Increasing that to two parallel pins (as the '104 drawings show: pins 9 in parallel recesses 7, alternately sprinDg 10) is a predictable, art-recognized expedient — greater holding torque, redundancy against a single spring failing, and symmetry of load — with no new result. Where Curry's plunger already extends "along the axis of the shank," re-boring two such detents in the head boss parallel to the pivot axis is a simple mechanical substitution.

KSR-type rationales available to an examiner: (i) same field of endeavor and same articulated problem; (ii) combination of a finite number of identified, predictable solutions (pivot + tongue/groove + spring detent was the standard three-element vocabulary of the 1900–1914 adjustable-club art, as Curry and Pringle demonstrate); (iii) simple substitution and reversal of parts; (iv) the '104 specification itself frames the invention's object as remedying "the difficulty of effecting the adjustment" and "the insufficient strength of the parts" of already-existing adjustable clubs — i.e., a design-refinement objective rather than a new principle.

4. Counterarguments and honest weaknesses in the § 103 case

1. Claims 1–3 are not fully anticipated. Curry's detent is in the shank; Pringle's is a single dog. Neither alone discloses "a plurality of independent spring-impelled locking means mounted in the head." The obviousness case therefore rests on relocation/duplication, not on identity of disclosure.
2. Relocation may carry a real mechanical consequence. Putting the detents in the head moves the load path and adds mass at the head. The '104 specification argues this relieves the pivot stud and locking pins of part of the impact stress (the angled extension 2/16 doing the rest). If a patentee showed that housing the detents in the head produced an unexpectedly large durability gain, that could rebut. Nothing on the page supplies such evidence, and the asserted benefit reads as a predictable consequence of the disclosed angles.
3. The angled-contact-face limitations (claims 4–5) are more explicitly taught. Pringle recites the tilted rotation axis in so many words; Curry recites the bearing aperture "set at an angle to the axis of the shaft." Claim 4's "right angles to the plane of said extension" is a geometric restatement of what a tilted axis means for a sector-shaped extension.
4. US 968,187 A (billiard-bridge) is not usable — non-analogous art. I flag it because it appears in the Similar Documents list and could be mistakenly cited.
5. Potential factual complication I could not resolve. Google Patents lists Latimer Goodrich as assignee of the closest reference, Curry's US 1,083,434, and a Bonhams auction record describes a commercial "All-One" adjustable iron, "Pat'd January 6, 1914," bearing "Goodrich Sales Co. 76 W. Monroe St. Chicago U.S.A." — the same city as the '104 inventor. Whether Alonzo C. Goodrich and Latimer Goodrich are the same or related persons, and whether the "All-One" club was in public use or on sale before July 11, 1914 (a § 102 public-use/on-sale question independent of § 103), is not determinable from this page. I do not assert an identity; I flag it as a material open question that would be dispositive if confirmed.
6. US 1,206,105 A is not art despite appearing in the Similar Documents list — it was filed 1914-12-09, after the '104 filing date.
7. Examiner-cited art unavailable. The fetched page contains no "Patent Citations (cited by examiner)" table, so I cannot compare my reconstruction with the art actually applied in 1914–1916. My analysis is built solely from the page's Similar Documents list and the specification's admissions.

5. Conclusion

Applied strictly to the page's own prior-art material, claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 would each have been obvious under § 103 over US 1,083,434 (Curry) in view of US 1,058,463 (Pringle), and, for the head-geometry/alignment limitations of claims 4–6, further in view of US 723,534 (Knight) and US 786,268 (Corey & Savage). Claim 6 is the weakest claim to defend: Curry's blade flange riding in a shank channel concentric with an angled bearing aperture, plus a spring-pressed plunger entering plural apertures, is substantially the whole of the claim, with the detent merely moved from hosel to head.

No positive secondary-consideration evidence (commercial success attributable to the claimed arrangement, long-felt need, failure of others) is available on this page, and none is argued in the patent text beyond the general statements in the "objects" paragraphs. The one factual thread that could change the analysis — the Goodrich/Curry relationship and any pre-July-11-1914 sale of the "All-One" club — remains unresolved and should be verified against the original prosecution file and Chicago commercial records before any final conclusion on validity.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1206104/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1058463A](/patent/US1058463A)/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/US1083434 · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US723534](/patent/US723534) · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US786268A](/patent/US786268A)/en · https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=[1083434A](/patent/1083434A)&KC=A&FT=D · https://www.bonhams.com/auction/26037/lot/245/ · https://patents.google.com/patent/US1206105.pdf