US 1364500

The initial searches returned no results. Let me try broader variations.

The first hit is the earlier hand-operated patent (US1,217,886) referenced by US1364500, not the target patent. Let me refine further.

Based on the authoritative full-text record (Google Patents/USPTO source in the materials) and the live searches performed, here is the summary. Important caveat up front: My live searches returned no USPTO database excerpt and no CAFC 2026 docket entries for the literal number 1364500 (both targeted queries returned empty; the only live hit was the predecessor hand-pump patent US1,217,886 cited inside this patent's specification). The summary below therefore relies on the authoritative full text provided, which does not conflict with any search result.

US Patent 1,364,500 (US1364500A)

• Title: Power-operated vacuum massage apparatus
• Patent / publication number: US1364500A (application serial no. 262,522)
• Inventor: Harvey L. Hopkins, of Chicago, Cook County, Illinois
• Assignee: Hopkins assigned one-third each to Gustavus A. Smith (Marshalltown, Iowa) and George E. Gibeault (Chicago, Illinois) — i.e., the recorded original/current assignees are George E. Gibeault and Gustavus A. Smith (each one-third; the inventor retained the remaining third by implication)
• Filing date: November 14, 1918
• Issue / publication date: January 4, 1921
• Legal status: Expired — Lifetime (anticipated expiration January 4, 1938)
• Classification: A61H9/00 and A61H9/005 (pneumatic massage)
• Abstract: None exists. Patents of this era (1921) did not carry formal abstracts, and the Google Patents record shows no abstract text. I cannot fabricate one.
• Prosecution notes: The specification states that the claims in this patent are specific, with generic claims filed separately in application No. 353,863 (filed January 24, 1920) — evidently the companion patent US1364501A ("Hyperemia apparatus"). The patent builds on Hopkins's earlier hand-operated vacuum massager, US Patent 1,217,886 (Feb. 27, 1917), and is cited by a later reference, US2646038A (passive vascular exerciser).

Plain-language overview of the invention

The invention replaces the labor-intensive hand-operated reciprocating-piston vacuum massager (his earlier US1,217,886) with a continuously driven rotary vacuum pump. A motor drives the pump, which produces a steady, constant vacuum on a massage cup. Because a constant vacuum left on the skin too long bruises tissue, the patent adds an automatic relief-valve trip mechanism that releases the vacuum periodically (adjustable from about every 1 second up to ~15 seconds, or indefinitely). The timing mechanism consists of a worm on the pump shaft driving a worm gear, whose shaft carries a friction disk that frictionally turns a cam disk; cams on the cam disk lift a lever that opens the relief valve. Sliding the friction wheel along its splined shaft changes the cam-disk speed, and a spring-loaded plunger lets individual cams be folded out of action — both giving adjustable release intervals.

Independent claims (all four claims are independent combination claims; claim language is OCR-garbled in spots, noted below)

• Claim 1 — Core combination: a rotary pump driven continuously in one direction; a cup connected by a passage to the pump intake; a worm on the pump shaft driving a worm wheel; a shaft for the worm wheel; a friction wheel on that shaft; a cam disk frictionally engaged by the friction wheel; and a lever connected to the relief valve that engages the cam. (Effect: timed periodic release of a continuously generated vacuum.)
• Claim 2 — Adds to Claim 1's combination that the friction wheel is splined on the worm-wheel shaft and includes means for adjusting and securing the friction wheel longitudinally on the shaft (i.e., repositioning it to change the cam-disk speed, and hence the interval between vacuum releases).
• Claim 3 — Adds a specific adjustment mechanism: a second lever that engages at one end an annular groove in the friction wheel and at the other end an index sector (graduated scale), plus means for securing the lever in the selected position. (Note: the OCR reads "any adjacent adjustment," which is likely "any adjusted position"/"any desired position of adjustment" per the specification; minor wording is uncertain.)
• Claim 4 — Adds a plurality of cams on the periphery of the cam disk and means for throwing some of the cams out of operation, allowing the operator to select how many times the valve trips per disk revolution.

Uncertainty notes

1. No CAFC 2026 docket activity for this patent number was found (searches returned no results) — consistent with a patent that expired in 1938, long before any modern Federal Circuit case.
2. No formal abstract exists for this patent; none is provided above.
3. Claims 1 and 3 contain OCR defects in the source text (e.g., Claim 1 trails off as "a lever connected so 1the relief valve and engaging the cam is r."), so the exact wording of those claims is reconstructed from context and may differ slightly from the certificate copy. Claim numbers and their substantive elements, however, are clear.

I'll search for litigation involving US Patent 1,364,500 using the specific patent number.

The initial searches returned no results. Let me try additional sources including the Unified Patents portal and Google Patents litigation links.

Litigation Search Results: US Patent 1,364,500 (US1364500A)

No litigation is known involving US Patent 1,364,500.

What I searched

• Unified Patents litigation case list portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — targeted query returned no results.
• General web searches for "1364500" combined with "patent," "litigation," "infringement," "lawsuit," "docket," and "US1364500" — all returned empty result sets.
• USPTO PatentCenter / assignment-oriented searches — no docket or litigation entries surfaced.

One false-positive hit, expressly excluded

A single web hit for the bare number "1364500" was found, and it is not this patent and must not be confused with it:

• EP1364500 (EPO grant; WO02071708), titled around network/communications technology, applicant Alcatel Internetworking, Inc., filed February 27, 2002, granted November 30, 2005, lapsed in the Netherlands for non-filing of a translation. This is a European patent on entirely different subject matter and has no relationship to US1364500A (the Hopkins vacuum massage patent). It is not litigation and not the target patent.

Conclusion

No plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome can be reported because no litigation record exists for US Patent 1,364,500 in the sources searched.

This result is fully consistent with the patent's history and status: US1364500A issued January 4, 1921, on an application filed November 14, 1918, and expired (anticipated expiration) January 4, 1938 — more than 85 years before the current date (April 26, 2026), and decades before the modern PACER/CAFC electronic docket era. It is also consistent with the earlier sections of this analysis, which likewise found no CAFC 2026 docket activity for this patent number.

Caveat on completeness: Patent litigation records from the pre-electronic era (pre-~1990s) are not comprehensively indexed in the modern databases searched, so the absence of a record cannot be treated as a mathematically absolute guarantee that no suit was ever filed in 1921–1938. However, based on all available searchable sources, I can state with high confidence that no known litigation involving US Patent 1,364,500 exists in any accessible record.

Proceedings overview

There are zero AIA trial proceedings (IPR / PGR / CBM) on file for US Patent 1,364,500. The USPTO Open Data Portal ingest contains no PTAB proceedings for this patent, and independent web searches for PTAB/CAFC activity tied to Hopkins's "Power-operated vacuum massage apparatus" returned nothing (the only "1364500" hits are an unrelated Alcatel European patent, EP1364500, which is a different document entirely). The defensive posture is absolute and needs no IPR at all: the patent expired by operation of law on 1938-01-04 and has been in the public domain for roughly 88 years — it cannot be asserted against anyone for any act today, and any demand letter citing it is frivolous on its face.

No per-proceeding entries follow because none exist. That absence is not a research gap — it is a statutory inevitability:

• CBM — the transitional program (now expired) was limited to "covered business method" patents directed to financial products/services. A vacuum massage apparatus is not eligible.
• PGR — only available within 9 months of grant for first-inventor-to-file patents. This patent issued 1921-01-04, nearly a century before PGR existed.
• IPR — even in the narrow circumstances where an IPR may be brought against an expired patent (e.g., a live royalty dispute), there is no record of any petition ever being filed, and the patent lapsed into the public domain in 1938 — 74 years before the AIA's review procedures took effect on 2012-09-16.

Strategic summary

Claim status: All four claims of US1364500A (Claims 1–4, all independent combination claims directed to the rotary-pump/cam-timed relief-valve massage apparatus) are UNTESTED by any AIA tribunal — but equally, all four are unenforceable and in the public domain. No claim has been "canceled" by a PTAB Final Written Decision because none was ever challenged; no claim has been "sustained" by a FWD either. The distinction is immaterial to a defendant: the patent's statutory term ended 1938-01-04 (its 17-year term from grant, the standard pre-1995 U.S. term). There is no patent right left to assert, license, or settle over. Even pre-AIA Ex parte reexamination records would be moot for the same reason; none are identified here.

Estoppel landscape (§ 315(e)(2)): No § 315(e) estoppel attaches to anyone, because no petitioner ever existed. This is beside the point for a defendant, however — the better defense is not an IPR at all but the patent's plain non-infringement/expiration posture. The patent expired three years before the Federal Register even existed as a daily publication; no prior-art hunt is necessary.

Pattern signals: There are none — no serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or otherwise), no patent-owner PTAB litigation history. The only related filings in the family record are its immediate predecessors and siblings: Hopkins's hand-operated vacuum massager US1,217,886 (1917-02-27, cited in the specification) and the companion US1364501A ("Hyperemia apparatus," issued 1921-01-04 from the separately-filed generic-claims application No. 353,863). The sole forward citation of note is US2646038A (passive vascular exerciser, 1953), which merely cited the expired patent as prior art — the normal lifecycle of a 1920s mechanical patent.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant facing a demand letter citing US1364500A: treat it as a bad-faith threat. The patent expired 1938-01-04 (anticipated expiration per the USPTO record; status "Expired — Lifetime"). Send the asserting party the USPTO assignment/status record and the Google Patents file wrapper showing the expiration, demand withdrawal with prejudice, and put them on notice that continued assertion of a public-domain patent may support a sanctions motion, an action under 35 U.S.C. § 292 (false marking is inapplicable to expired patents, but frivolous assertion theories invite Rule 11 exposure), or a declaratory-judgment action for non-infringement.
• Do not file an IPR. The PTAB would reject any petition as moot — the patent's claims expired decades before the AIA's effective date, and there is no live controversy a petition could cure. Filing would waste client funds and could expose the filer to sanctions as an improper use of the proceeding.
• Document the chain of title defensively: the patent was assigned one-third each to George E. Gibeault and Gustavus A. Smith (inventor Harvey L. Hopkins retaining one-third). If anyone claims standing to assert the patent today, demand recorded-chain-of-title evidence from the USPTO Assignment Database — none can exist for a patent expired in 1938, and the "current assignee" fields on aggregator sites are historical labels, not live ownership.
• Confirm no state-law end-run: a 1921 patent cannot be revived, and no state unfair-competition theory can resurrect expired patent rights (the Dastar line of authority bars using trademark/Lanham Act theories to claim exclusive rights in expired intellectual property). If the letter is dressed up as something other than patent infringement, address it on those separate terms — but the patent itself is dead.

Bottom line, stated plainly: There is no PTAB history because there could not be one. US1364500A has been public domain since 1938-01-04. Any current assertion of it is not something an IPR defense can fix — it is something a motion to dismiss, a sanctions motion, or a swift cease-and-desist reply should end.

Inventors

• Harvey L. Hopkins, of Chicago, Cook County, Illinois — sole named inventor. No corporate employer at the time of filing is determinable from the record; he appears as an independent inventor who also held the predecessor hand-operated vacuum-massage patent US 1,217,886 (issued Feb. 27, 1917). He is the only inventor, so the "all inventors depart the assignee" pattern is not applicable. He retained one-third of the rights personally (see below), which is unusual for a corporate employment context and consistent with an individual/partnership arrangement rather than an employer-assignee model.

Original assignee

The entity named on the issued patent (per the patent face and the Google Patents "Original Assignee" field) is not a single company but two individuals:

• George E. Gibeault, of Chicago, Illinois (one-third)
• Gustavus A. Smith, of Marshalltown, Iowa (one-third)

The inventor Harvey L. Hopkins assigned one-third to each and retained the remaining one-third by implication ("assignor of one-third to Gustavus A. Smith … and one-third to George E. Gibeault"). There is no evidence either assignee was an operating company that shipped a product embodying the claims; they appear to be private individuals/financiers associated with Hopkins. Their current status cannot be determined and is effectively moot — the patent expired January 4, 1938, and both assignees would be individuals from the 1918 era. No assignment records identify any corporate successor.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for this patent. Per the protocol, this is stated plainly and the NPE-pattern analysis stops here.

Supporting facts:

• The USPTO's searchable patent-assignment database (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov, formerly assignment.uspto.gov) contains only records recorded from August 1980 to the present. US 1,364,500 issued January 4, 1921, and expired January 4, 1938 — roughly six decades before the database window opens. Pre-1980 assignment records are maintained in a separate historical database that is not searchable online and requires direct contact with the Assignment Recordation Branch (see MPEP 301.01).
• Searches for assignment records tied to "1364500" / "US1364500" / "1,364,500" / "Hopkins" returned no reel/frame entries in any indexed or live source.
• The only known conveyance is the pre-issuance assignment of two-thirds of the application from Hopkins to Gibeault and Smith (one-third each), which is evidenced on the face of the issued patent itself. That transfer occurred in the 1918–1921 prosecution era, predates the electronic database, and carries no online reel/frame number. I will not fabricate one.
• Google Patents' legal-events list for US1364500A shows only filing (1918-11-14), priority, grant/publication (1921-01-04), anticipated expiration (1938-01-04), and "Expired — Lifetime" status — no assignment events after issuance.

Finding: The absence of post-issuance recorded assignments indicates the patent was never transferred in the modern recordation era; title effectively rested with the original parties (Hopkins, Gibeault, Smith, and their heirs) until the patent expired in 1938. There is no chain of title, no correspondent of record, and no assignee to evaluate for NPE activity. Consequently:

• NPE / troll-pattern signals: Not assessable — every signal (shell-entity transfer, known asserter, repeat correspondent, cascading transfers, pre-litigation transfer, bankruptcy fire-sale, privateering, defensive aggregation) requires recorded chain-of-title events that do not exist for this patent. No reel/frame can be cited because none exists in the database window.
• Verdict: Insufficient data (no records) — the formal rubric category that applies when only the original, pre-1980 ownership is known and no Assignment Center records exist. A patent that expired in 1938 cannot be the subject of modern assertion campaigns, and nothing in the record suggests any 21st-century ownership event.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1364500
    1918 : Filed by Harvey L Hopkins
         : Assigned to Smith and Gibeault
    1921 : Patent issued
    1938 : Patent expired

Verification: run a patent-number search at the USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "1364500" or "US1364500") — which will return an empty abstract of title, consistent with the above. For the historical pre-1980 record of the Hopkins → Gibeault/Smith conveyance, contact the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch directly, as pre-1980 documents are not in the online database.

I'll research this systematically. First, let me search the USPTO records for patent 1364500 and its cited references.

The first search surfaced the predecessor patent referenced inside US1364500's specification (US1,217,886). Let me dig deeper into the USPTO record and any formal citation list.

Let me verify the citing patent's identity and look for any discussion of US1364500's citation network.

USPTO database search for PN 1364500 (literal)

I ran live searches for the literal number 1364500 (and variants such as "1,364,500") against USPTO-hosted sources. Result: no USPTO-hosted database page (PatFT/Patent Public Search) was returned for 1364500. That is expected for a patent of this era: USPTO's free full-text search (PatFT) covers 1976–present, so a 1921 patent exists only in the USPTO image/Public Search collections, which live search engines did not surface for this query. I did not substitute any "similar" number — the only Hopkins massage patent returned by the searches was US1,217,886, which is the patent cited inside US1364500's own specification, not a case of number confusion. Note also the legal context: because US1364500 was filed November 14, 1918 and issued January 4, 1921, "anticipation" would formally be judged under Revised Statutes § 4886 (the pre-1952 Act), not the 1952 Act's § 102 — I apply the § 102 framework you requested, with that caveat.

The citation record for US1364500

The authoritative Google Patents/USPTO record for US1364500 contains no formal backward "References Cited" list — front-page citation lists were not printed on U.S. patents in 1921. The only citations that exist in the record are:

1. Backward (cited in the patent text): US1,217,886 (Hopkins's own earlier patent, expressly identified in the specification).
2. In-specification mention of a later, related application: serial No. 353,863 (filed Jan. 24, 1920) → issued as US1364501A "Hyperemia apparatus" on the same day as US1364500 (Jan. 4, 1921). This is a sibling/generic-claims case, not prior art.
3. Forward ("Cited By"): US2646038A — a later patent that cites US1364500. Not prior art.
4. The long "Similar Documents" list on the Google record (clutch/friction-drive patents, US1354865A, etc.) is algorithmic similarity matching, not a citation list, and I have not treated it as prior-art citations.

Reference-by-reference § 102 analysis

1. US Patent No. 1,217,886 — Harvey L. Hopkins (the only true backward citation)

• Full citation: US 1,217,886, Harvey L. Hopkins (Chicago, IL), issued February 27, 1917 (URL confirmed by live search: patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/7a/af/1f/3813b48d83f136/US1217886.pdf). The exact title and U.S. filing date were not verifiable from the snippets retrieved; the specification of US1364500 describes it as a "hand operated" vacuum-massage device of the same class.
• Brief description (confirmed from the live search snippet of the PDF): A hand-operated vacuum massage apparatus. A cylinder contains a piston positively moved in both directions by a T-handle and hollow piston rod. Detachable bell-shaped cups of graduated sizes seat on the piece via a ground conical taper (~1/8″/ft). Larger cups have a shallow portion and rounded edge so flesh is drawn in only a limited distance without bruising. A manually operated, spring-loaded conical relief valve (button 26, valve 23) on the handle releases the vacuum at any point in the stroke, so the operator creates rapid suction–release cycles producing "internal or deep massage" (artificial hyperemia). The valve release is entirely manual, and suction is generated by a hand-driven reciprocating piston, not a power-driven rotary pump.
• Which claims does it potentially anticipate under § 102? None of claims 1–4. Each independent claim requires, at minimum: (a) a rotary pump adapted to be driven continuously in one direction; (b) a cup connected by a passage to the pump intake; and (c) an automatic timing train — worm on the pump shaft → worm wheel → worm-wheel shaft → friction wheel → cam disk frictionally engaged → lever connected to the relief valve and engaging the cam. US1,217,886 discloses a reciprocating piston pump moved back and forth by hand, and a manually actuated valve — it lacks every element of the automatic worm/worm-wheel/friction-wheel/cam/lever mechanism and the continuously driven rotary pump. Claims 2, 3, and 4 add further limitations (splined longitudinally adjustable friction wheel; annular-groove/index-sector adjustment lever; multiple cams throwable out of operation) that are likewise absent. So under § 102(a)/(b)/(e) it does not anticipate; it is, however, the most relevant prior art in the sense of being the closest acknowledged starting point (relevant to obviousness under § 103, not anticipation). It also cannot be a § 102(b) statutory bar here in any event, since it issued Feb. 27, 1917 — less than two years before the Nov. 14, 1918 filing date (critical date ≈ Nov. 14, 1916).

2. US Patent No. 2,646,038 — Lillian V. Iwan, "Passive vascular exerciser" (forward citation — not prior art)

• Full citation: US 2,646,038, Lillian V. Iwan, filed July 21, 1950; published July 21, 1953 (per the Google Patents "Cited By (1)" record, examiner-marked).
• Brief description: A later passive-vascular-exercise apparatus that cites US1364500 as a reference — evidence that Hopkins's timed vacuum-release concept remained relevant in the field decades later.
• § 102 analysis: Not prior art to US1364500. It postdates the 1364500 filing (1918) and issue (1921) by roughly three decades, so under any version of § 102(a)/(b)/(e) it anticipates no claim of 1364500.

3. US Patent No. 1,364,501 — Hopkins, "Hyperemia apparatus" (sibling, not a citation)

• Full citation: US 1,364,501, Harvey L. Hopkins, issued January 4, 1921 (same date as US1364500), from application No. 353,863 filed January 24, 1920 — the case the 1364500 specification says contains the "generic" claims.
• § 102 analysis: Filed and published after US1364500's Nov. 14, 1918 filing date, so it anticipates no claim of US1364500. It is mentioned only because the specification itself calls it out.

Bottom line

• Most relevant prior art: US1,217,886 (Hopkins, Feb. 27, 1917) — the only genuine prior-art patent citation in the 1364500 record, and the device the invention was designed to motorize.
• Anticipation: No claim (1–4) of US1364500 is anticipated by any located reference. The gap between US1,217,886 and claims 1–4 is precisely the patented advance: substitution of a continuously driven rotary pump for the hand reciprocating piston, and an automatic, adjustable cam-and-friction-wheel relief-valve timer (with splined speed adjustment and selectable cam lugs) for the manual release valve.
• Confidence caveats: (1) I could not retrieve a USPTO-hosted page for PN 1364500 itself; the analysis rests on the authoritative Google Patents full-text record provided and the live US1,217,886 PDF snippet. (2) The exact title and filing date of US1,217,886 are unverified. (3) Claims 1 and 3 contain OCR garbling in the source text (e.g., claim 1 trails off "…engaging the cam is r."); the substantive element sets are nonetheless clear from the specification and parallel claims 2–4.

Obviousness Analysis — US Patent 1,364,500 (US1364500A), "Power-operated vacuum massage apparatus"

Prepared: April 26, 2026 · Claims analyzed: 1–4 · Statute: 35 U.S.C. § 103 (Graham / KSR framework)

I. Threshold observations and evidentiary scope

1. This is a retrospective, largely academic exercise. US1364500A issued January 4, 1921, from an application filed November 14, 1918, and expired (anticipated) January 4, 1938. § 103 did not exist in 1921 (it was added in the 1952 Act). Any modern obviousness challenge would therefore be hypothetical, and no CAFC 2026 docket activity exists for this number (see the patent summary). I nevertheless apply the modern Graham/KSR framework as instructed.

2. What the "Prior Art section of this page" actually contains. The fetched Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US1364500A/en) does not reproduce an examiner's "References Cited" list. The only prior-art-related content is:

• Cited By (1): US2646038A (Lillian V. Iwan, filed 1950-07-21, pub. 1953-07-21, "Passive vascular exerciser") — not prior art (30 years post-filing); usable only, if at all, as weak evidence of later recognition.
• Similar Documents (algorithmic, ~25 entries) — dominated by friction-clutch/drive and machine-control patents; several postdate the filing.
• Prior art acknowledged inside the specification itself: (a) Hopkins's own hand-operated device, US Patent 1,217,886 (Feb. 27, 1917) — the patent's stated starting point; and (b) an admission that "[i]n power operated vacuum massage apparatus heretofore used or proposed … the vacuum has always been produced by reciprocating piston pump, driven continuously," with short, intermittent effective pulls. Under MPEP § 2129, applicant admissions are usable as prior art, but this one names no document.

3. Temporal screening is dispositive for most of the list. Only references publicly available before November 14, 1918 qualify under § 102(a)/(b)-type analysis. Applying that screen to the page's pool:

Bottom line on the pool: only five usable references, of which exactly one is in the massage/vacuum field (US1,217,886), and none of the five discloses a motor-driven rotary vacuum pump, an automatic interval-release valve, a worm/friction-wheel/cam timing train, or any combination of them. This scarcity — not any analytical subtlety — is the single most important fact for the § 103 analysis.

II. Person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A circa-1918 POSITA would be a designer of small therapeutic or massage appliances (or of light power machinery adapted for medical use) with working knowledge of: hand and power vacuum pumps and their physiological effects (hyperemia, tissue bruising from prolonged suction); electric motors and fractional-horsepower drive trains; spring-loaded relief valves; and conventional machine elements — worm gearing, friction drives/clutches, cams, and lever trips. The field drew on both massage-device art (A61H9/00) and general machine-element art (the friction-drive documents in the page's list), so the POSITA would be comfortable reading both.

III. The claims in issue (elements)

All four claims are independent combination claims; the specification explains they are the "specific" claims, with "generic" claims reserved for the companion application No. 353,863 (US1364501A). The inventive core is: a continuously driven rotary pump providing a constant vacuum on a massage cup, plus an automatic, adjustable cam-and-lever mechanism that periodically lifts the relief valve (release every ~1 s up to ~15 s, or indefinitely), overcoming both the labor of the hand device ('886) and the short, weak, inevitably intermittent pulls of prior motor-driven reciprocating-pump devices. (Claim 1's OCR-garbled ending — "a lever connected so 1the relief valve and engaging the cam is r." — is properly read, per the specification's lever 39 / roller 38 / valve stem 21, as "a lever connected to the relief valve and engaging the cam.")

IV. The strongest available § 103 combinations

Because no single pool reference is close, any prima facie case must be a multi-reference combination. The strongest constructible grounds are:

• Ground A (base, against claim 1): US1,217,886 + the specification's admitted power-driven reciprocating-pump vacuum massage apparatus + one or more of US1193490A / US984253A / US1009836A / US1159717A for the motorized friction-drive/cam-trip details.
• Ground B (claims 2–3): Ground A + adjustment/graduation teachings arguably present in US984253A (spring-pressed adjustable friction plugs, set-screws, lock-nuts, adjustable levers).
• Ground C (claim 4): Ground A + multi-lobe/throw-out cam reasoning — not supported by any pool reference.

Element-by-element mapping for Ground A (Claim 1)

The motivation story a challenger would tell (KSR)

1. Market pressure / design need to eliminate labor. The '500 specification itself concedes the hand device "necessitate[s] the laborious hand manipulation." US1193490A shows that motorizing formerly hand- or treadle-driven machines was an established, predictable engineering move by 1915–16 for "sewing machines and the like." A POSITA reading '886 would be motivated to attach a motor to the pump — the most conventional solution to the admitted labor problem.
2. Known problem with constant suction. '886 teaches that therapeutic value comes from "rapidly repeating the formation of a vacuum and releasing it," and the '500 specification states that holding vacuum too long bruises tissue. Once a continuously rotating pump is substituted, constant suction on the cup is the inevitable result, and the known bruising hazard creates a plain design need for periodic release. The admitted prior reciprocating-pump devices solved this only crudely (release every stroke, with a long dead portion of each stroke spent re-establishing vacuum). A POSITA would therefore look for a way to hold a constant vacuum for a selectable dwell and then auto-release — the claimed objective.
3. Conventional solution space. Periodically lifting a spring-closed valve with a cam-and-lever, slowing the cam with worm gearing, and using a spring-pressed friction disk (US1009836A/US984253A/US1159717A) were textbook 1918 machine elements. Tapping the timer off the pump shaft (worm 24 on shaft 12) keeps the release synchronized with pump speed using no extra motor — an obvious design choice. Under KSR, combining known elements for their known purposes with a predictable result is obvious; the "obvious to try" branch fits: a finite set of known timing mechanisms (cam timer being the most obvious) applied to a known problem (bruising from unrelieved vacuum).
4. Adjustment to 1–15 s (claims 2–3). Once a cam timer is chosen, making the interval adjustable is the obvious next step; a disk-and-roller friction drive whose ratio changes when the roller slides radially is the era's standard infinitely-variable drive, and sliding the splined friction wheel 31 longitudinally on shaft 26 is precisely that. Graduated scales, levers engaging annular grooves, and clamping nuts (US984253A shows the analogous adjustable-and-lockable lever/set-screw culture) are conventional means for setting and locking a control.

V. Why the case is nevertheless weak — and per-claim assessment

A. Missing primary art. The fatal defect in any Ground A–C case is that no usable reference discloses a power-driven vacuum massage apparatus with automatic interval release, let alone one with a rotary pump. The only massage-device art in the pool ('886) is hand-powered, with operator-controlled release — the opposite of automatic timed release. The admitted prior power devices are unidentified (no patent, no printed publication) and used reciprocating pumps whose release was inherent, not controlled. A challenger must therefore bridge: (i) hand device → motorized device; (ii) reciprocating → rotary pump; (iii) manual/inherent release → adjustable cam-timed release; and (iv) general friction-drive/cam machine art → therapeutic vacuum-timing use. Steps (i)–(iii) are supported only by admissions and general knowledge; step (iv) requires showing the machine-art references would have been consulted for a medical timing purpose, for which the pool gives no suggestion.

B. No teaching, suggestion, or reasonable expectation of success for the claimed dwell cycle. The claimed regime — constant vacuum held for seconds (adjustable ~1–15 s), then auto-released — is not taught or suggested by '886 (which releases whenever the operator presses button 26 and which the applicant characterized as producing "instantaneous" release for rapid repetition) or by the reciprocating-power devices (which release at every stroke). Nothing in the pool suggests holding a constant vacuum for a therapeutic dwell. This is a meaningful distinction, not mere design choice.

C. Per-claim bottom line:

• Claim 1 is the most vulnerable. A court applying KSR could find that motorizing '886's pump, choosing a rotary pump for constant suction (well-known interchangeability), and adding a conventional spring-closed relief valve tripped by a cam driven from the pump shaft through worm and friction gearing is a predictable combination of known elements. But on the page's record alone — no rotary-pump massage reference, no automatic-release massage reference — the prima facie case rests heavily on admissions and general knowledge. A challenger would realistically need to supplement the pool with pre-1918 rotary-vacuum-pump patents and, especially, intermittent-vacuum ("pulsator") art from milking machines, which had long solved the identical problem of rhythmic vacuum release to avoid tissue congestion. That art is not in the page's pool.
• Claims 2 and 3 add the splined longitudinally adjustable friction wheel and the indexed adjusting lever. These are conventional refinements if the base combination is obvious — but no pool reference confirms a splined sliding-roller variable-speed friction drive, and title-level evidence from US984253A/US1009836A supports only spring-loaded friction clutches and adjustable lockable levers, not a disk-and-roller speed variator. The added limitations are thus not squarely met by any reference; their obviousness depends entirely on the strength of Ground A.
• Claim 4 (a plurality of peripheral cams with means for throwing some out of operation — the pivoted lugs 37 with spring-pressed plungers 56 and recesses 57) is the strongest claim against obviousness. Nothing in the pool teaches fold-away/selectively disabled cams, and the multi-range adjustability it provides is a specific structure with no counterpart in the cited machine art. Even under an aggressive KSR "obvious to try" approach, the specific throw-out mechanism is not a predictable variation of anything in the record.

D. Secondary considerations. Sparse and mostly neutral: the patent drew one later citation (US2646038A, 1953), showing modest downstream recognition; there is no commercial-success evidence in the record. The '500 specification's own recital of prior-device deficiencies cuts both ways — it evidences a known, long-felt need (supporting a challenger's motivation theory) but also shows that the identified problem (short, intermittent pulls) had persisted, which can support non-obviousness if the record shows failed or absent attempts. The examiner allowed the claims in 1921 over the then-available art (which would have included '886), and issued patents carry a presumption of validity that a § 103 challenger must overcome with clear and convincing evidence — a heavy burden given the gaps above.

VI. Conclusions and recommendations

1. On the page's prior-art results alone, no claim of US1364500A is clearly obvious under § 103. The usable pool contains only four machine-element references (US984253A, US1009836A, US1159717A, US1193490A) and one hand-operated massage reference (US1,217,886), plus an admission of unpatented power-driven reciprocating-pump massage devices. No reference discloses a rotary pump, a worm/friction/cam timing train, or an adjustable automatic vacuum-release mechanism in a massage apparatus.
2. The strongest — but incomplete — combination is US1,217,886 in view of the admitted motor-driven massage apparatus and the friction-drive/cam machine art (US984253A, US1009836A, US1193490A), targeting claim 1, with claims 2–3 falling only if claim 1 falls and the splined-sliding-wheel/indexed-adjustment features are supplied by general knowledge. Claim 4 would very likely survive.
3. To build a real prima facie case, a challenger would need to go outside the page's list and add: (a) pre-1918 rotary vacuum-pump patents; (b) pre-1918 intermittent-vacuum "pulsator" or vacuum-regulator art (e.g., milking-machine art), which directly teaches rhythmic vacuum release to protect tissue; and (c) pre-1918 variable-speed friction-drive (disk-and-roller) patents to nail claims 2–3. Full texts of the five usable references should be pulled from USPTO to confirm (or refute) the title-level inferences above, and the filing dates of the post-1918-published Similar Documents (notably US1342762A, filed by 1920) should be checked for any earlier effective date.

Analyst's note: characterizations of US984253A, US1009836A, US1159717A, and US1193490A rest on their titles, dates, and partial text retrieved from Google Patents (e.g., patents.google.com/patent/US984253A, patents.google.com/patent/US1193490A); full-text review is recommended before reliance in any adversarial proceeding. No identified reference or combination contradicts the patent's own account that the rotary-pump-plus-timed-release combination was new to vacuum massage in 1918.