US 1475576

I'll verify this specific patent number against live sources before summarizing.

Verification note (read first)

Two caveats before the summary, per your strict-identifier instruction:

1. I could not confirm this record through a live USPTO PatentCenter / CAFC query. My searches for the bare string "1475576" in a patent-litigation context returned no CAFC 2026 docket and no PatentCenter hit. The only "1475576" result returned in a non-patent context was an FMCSA motor-carrier ID, MC-1475576 (Speedy Drop Offs LLC, Loganville, GA) — plainly unrelated. A CAFC docket would also be implausible on its face: the patent expired 1940-11-27, so it has been unenforceable for ~86 years and cannot be the subject of a 2026 infringement appeal.
2. The authoritative text I am relying on is the Google Patents full-text/OCR of US1475576A, fetched 2026-09-30, and pasted into this task. That OCR is imperfect (see "Data-quality flags" below). Where I quote, I quote the record as given.

Also note the literal-number point: the digits 1475576 correspond to granted patent US 1,475,576 (publication US1475576A), application US 304,986. I have not "corrected" anything — no other document in the record bears this number.

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Bibliographic summary — US 1,475,576

De facto abstract / stated object (verbatim): "The object of the invention is to provide a simple and efficient combination device which can be quickly and easily attached to a window frame and can be used for supporting shades of varying widths, and also capable of use upon windows of varying widths."

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Plain-language overview of the sole independent claim

The claim is a single combination claim (Jepson-style preamble: "In a device of the kind described, the combination with a support comprising…"). Broken into elements:

1. The support body — a vertical arm plus oppositely disposed horizontal arms projecting from the upper end of the vertical arm (i.e., a T-shaped/double-sided bracket, the central support of Figs. 1–3).
2. A recess at the juncture of the horizontal and vertical arms.
3. An aperture near the lower end of the vertical arm.
4. Shade brackets that are adjustable along the horizontal arm — so the same fixture can hold shades narrower or wider than the window frame. (In the description these are the shade-holding brackets (referenced "C" in the original, OCR'd as "O") with a foot piece D and a set screw E, riding on a dovetail-section horizontal arm A.)
5. A curtain pole bracket having (a) a hook at its upper end engaging the recessed portion of the horizontal arm, and (b) a lug at its lower end engaging the aperture in the lower end of the vertical arm — making the pole bracket detachably, but two-point, connected to the support.
6. A curved outer end on the curtain pole bracket, shaped to cradle/receive a curtain pole.

In one sentence: a screw-mounted metal corner bracket whose horizontal arm carries a width-adjustable shade bracket and whose corner recess plus lower-arm hole receive a hooked/lugged, detachable curtain-pole bracket — the combination being adjustable so a given shade fits window frames of differing widths.

Scope observations worth flagging:

• The claim recites "oppositely disposed horizontal arms" (plural), which tracks the double/central support embodiment described for double and triple windows (Figs. 1–3) — not the single-horizontal-arm right-and-left end support described for Fig. 4. The specification describes both; the claim appears to cover the double-arm form.
• The claim recites a "recess" at the juncture, whereas the description discloses both a notch F and a recess G at the corner. The claim's reference to "the recessed portion of the horizontal arm" is therefore slightly narrower/looser than the disclosure.
• Because there is only one claim, there is no independent/dependent distinction to report; there are no dependent claims narrowing it.

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Prosecution / citation landscape (as recorded)

Cited by (6, per the fuller list): DE202013008581U1 (Peter Peters, 2013, "Holding and operating device for curtains or curtains"); US20170361288A1 (Outotec (Finland) Oy, mixing/delivery of suspended particles — plainly a mis-classified citation); and a Kenney Manufacturing Company cluster: US20220386800A1 (tool-less fast fit bracket), US11690467B2 (rod bracket), US12193588B1 (fast fit bracket), US12213610B1 (methods for installing curtain rod brackets).

Similar documents (selected): US1216277A (Window shade and curtain support, 1917); US1344298A (Combined curtain and shade support, 1920); US1341562A (Window-shade and curtain-pole bracket, 1920); US2234099A (Combined unitary curtain and shade support, 1941); US1150693A (1915); USD43140 (F. W. Fay design, 1912).

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Data-quality flags in the source record

The OCR of the printed specification contains errors I am not silently correcting, but you should know about them when quoting:

• "ourtain pole" / "Ourtain" → curtain (Figs. 1, 4 descriptions, title line of the drawing).
• "shade holding brackets O" — almost certainly reference letter C in the original drawing.
• "the lower end of the vertical member is also provided with within the opening L" — garbled; sense is "with the opening L."
• "acombination" (missing space) and "aflix" → affix.
• "thesupport", "irrespectiveof" — missing spaces.

Explicit uncertainties

• I have not verified this against the USPTO PatentCenter or the original printed patent PDF from a live query; my searches did not surface US1475576A directly. The bibliographic data above is taken from the Google Patents record supplied, which is internally consistent (application, filing, issue, expiration and family all agree).
• No assertion of any 2026 litigation, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC appeal can be supported; I found none, and the 1940 expiration makes such proceedings implausible absent a highly unusual correction-of-inventorship or term-restoration scenario, of which I have no evidence.
• I do not have independent confirmation of whether Stephen Good ever assigned the patent to a manufacturer; the record shows no assignee, which for a 1919–1923 individual filing typically means the inventor retained ownership, but I state that as inference, not fact.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 1475576.

Initial searches returned only unrelated patents (e.g., Blue Spike's 7,574,556 and a Korean patent KR10-1475576). Let me run more targeted searches.

Let me check additional litigation-specific databases.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent No. 1,475,576

Analyst note on the identifier: I interpreted the number literally as US Patent No. 1,475,576 (US1475576A), "Combination curtain pole and shade holder," inventor Stephen Good (Cleveland, Ohio), application Ser. No. 304,986 filed June 18, 1919, granted November 27, 1923, legal status Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration November 27, 1940), current assignee: Individual. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1475576](/patent/US1475576)/en. Classification: A47H1/13 (brackets or adjustable mountings for both roller blinds and drawable curtains).

Result: No litigation found

I located no litigation — past or pending — involving US Patent No. 1,475,576. No district court case, Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit appeal, ITC Section 337 investigation, PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM), or Unified Patents litigation entry naming this patent was identified in any of the sources searched.

Because no cases exist to report, the requested fields (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, outcome/status) cannot be populated:

Sources searched

• Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — no entry for 1,475,576
• Google Patents / USPTO PatentCenter / Espacenet / Global Dossier records for US1475576A — no litigation (35 U.S.C. § 290) filings, no "Cited By" litigation references, and no adversary proceedings of any kind associated with the patent
• Open web searches for "US patent 1475576 litigation," "1,475,576 CAFC," "1475576 lawsuit/case," and "Stephen Good" + patent 1,475,576 — no relevant hits

False positives identified and rejected (do NOT mistake these for the patent)

Several searches returned numbers that resemble but are not US 1,475,576. Consistent with the instruction not to auto-correct identifiers, I flag them explicitly as unrelated:

Caveats on completeness (stated with appropriate confidence)

1. Databases searched are modern and do not reach this patent's enforceability window. US 1,475,576 expired in 1940. Commercial litigation databases (Unified Patents Portal, Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP, PACER, Lex Machina) generally index only 20th-century-late onward dockets; PACER's coverage is largely from the late 1980s–1990s forward. Any infringement or validity suit over this patent would have been tried under the pre-1952 Patent Act, and would appear only in archival sources (e.g., Federal Reporter volumes, territorial/district court archives, or the Commissioner's annual reports) — none of which I was able to search here.
2. I do not know with high confidence whether any unindexed historical litigation exists. I am not asserting there was none in 1923–1940; I am stating that no such litigation appears in any source I searched, and I found no evidence of any.
3. The patent is long expired, so current active litigation is legally impossible on this patent itself.

Bottom line: No known litigation is associated with US Patent No. 1,475,576. If a truly complete historical answer is required (e.g., for a freedom-to-operate or chain-of-title diligence file), the next step would be a manual archival search of Federal Reporter/digests for 1923–1940 and the USPTO Commissioner's decisions, which is outside the scope of the searches performed here.

I'll verify the structured data with a quick search before finalizing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 1475576: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block returned no ipr, pgr, or cbm proceedings, and independent web searching surfaced no IPR/PGR/CBM petition, institution decision, FWD, or Federal Circuit appeal involving this patent. Accordingly there is no breakdown into active / invalidated / sustained / settled / denied — there is nothing to break down.

The bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB record because there cannot meaningfully be one. US 1475576 issued on 1923-11-27 to Stephen Good (Cleveland, Ohio), was filed 1919-06-18, and reached its anticipated expiration on 1940-11-27. The patent has been expired and unenforceable for roughly 86 years. No per-proceeding sections follow, because writing them would require fabricating proceeding numbers, panels, and dispositions — which the task constraints forbid.

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Why there are zero proceedings (and why that is the whole answer)

1. The patent lapsed before the AIA existed. IPR (§ 311), PGR (§ 321), and CBM (§ 18 of the AIA) were created by the America Invents Act, effective 2011-09-16. US 1475576 expired in 1940-11-27. AIA trials are inter partes challenges to live claims — the Board does not institute against a patent whose term has run, because there is no claim scope left to cancel and no live infringement exposure to cure.

2. PGR is categorically unavailable. § 321 PGR reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. This patent's filing date is 1919-06-18.

3. CBM is doubly unavailable. US 1475576 claims a mechanical curtain-pole/shade-holder bracket (IPC A47H1/13), not a "financial product or service," and the CBM transitional program sunset for petitions filed after 2020-09-16.

4. No assertion pressure, therefore no IPR pressure. PTAB petitions are filed defensively against live assertions. The Google Patents record lists the current assignee as simply "Individual" with legal status "Expired - Lifetime." An expired patent cannot be enforced, so a defendant has nothing to defend against and no reason to petition.

5. No appeal chain. With no FWD there is nothing to appeal, and I found no Federal Circuit docket or CourtListener entry referencing US 1475576 as a decision below.

Two numbering collisions to be aware of (do not conflate)

• IPR2015-01632 (institution denied, 2016-01-29, denial grounded in part on 35 U.S.C. § 325(d)) concerns a patent the panel calls "the '756 patent" — a cordless window-shade control system with counterbalancing springs. That is a modern window-covering patent, not the 1919 curtain-pole patent. The "756" suffix overlap is coincidental. I could not confirm the underlying U.S. patent number from the available snippet, so I am not asserting one. This proceeding is not a proceeding on US 1475576.
• KR 10-1475576 B1 is a Korean metallocene-catalyst registration (Borealis AG), unrelated.

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Strategic summary

Claim status on US 1475576. The patent has a single claim, and it is the only claim ever granted: a combination claim to a support with a vertical arm and oppositely disposed horizontal arms extending from the upper end of the vertical arm, a recess at the juncture of the horizontal and vertical arms, an aperture near the lower end of the vertical arm, shade brackets adjustable on the horizontal arm, and a curtain pole bracket with a hook at its upper end engaging the recess and a lug at its lower end engaging the aperture, with the outer end curved to receive a curtain pole. That claim was never tested at the PTAB and never canceled, but it is also no longer enforceable — the 1940-11-27 expiration extinguished it as a cause of action. Operationally: 0 claims canceled by the PTAB, 0 claims sustained by the PTAB, 1 claim expired. Do not describe it as "survived IPRs" or as "hardened." It survived nothing; nobody challenged it, because there was no term left to challenge.

Estoppel landscape: not applicable. Under § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner that obtains an FWD. There is no petitioner, no FWD, and therefore no estoppel on anyone — no defendant is barred from any ground. The corollary is the useful part: US 1475576 itself is available as prior art to anyone defending against a modern curtain-rod or shade-bracket patent. Its 1923-11-27 publication date predates effectively everything in the field, and Google Patents' "Cited By" record shows it sitting in the prior-art citation chains of contemporary Kenney Manufacturing curtain-rod bracket filings (e.g. US20220386800A1 "Tool-less fast fit bracket," US11690467B2 "Rod bracket," US12193588B1, US12213610B1), plus the German utility model DE202013008581U1. If you are a defendant in a modern window-furnishings fixture case, that citation lineage is a lead worth pulling — though note the cited-by relationship proves only that they cited it, not that any examiner relied on it substantively. That distinction needs to be checked claim-by-claim before you build a § 102/§ 103 theory on it.

Pattern signals. There are none to read: no repeat petitioner, no serial-filing patent owner, no PTAB appeal practice, and no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or otherwise) in the chain. The "Cited By" list contains only product manufacturers citing it as background art. This is the profile of a long-dead, unowned-in-practice mechanical patent, not an assertion vehicle.

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Recommended next steps

• If a demand letter cites US 1475576, treat it as a red flag, not a merits question. The patent expired 1940-11-27 and cannot be enforced by anyone. Quote the record: the Google Patents page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US1475576/en) shows legal status "Expired - Lifetime," application US304986A, filed 1919-06-18, granted 1923-11-27, with anticipated expiration 1940-11-27. There is no live claim to license and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to analyze.
• Do not search for a FWD, panel, or appeal. None exists. If a counterparty represents that this patent "survived PTAB review," ask them for the proceeding number. There is none to produce, and that is the answer.
• If instead your dispute involves a modern curtain-rod or shade bracket, redirect your PTAB work there. The genuine AIA activity in this technology space is the Kenney Manufacturing family (US20220386800A1, US11690467B2, US12193588B1, US12213610B1) and DE202013008581U1 — those are live, assertable assets and are where IPR analysis would actually pay. US 1475576 is relevant to that fight only as prior art, not as a target.
• No PTAB E2E or CourtListener link is provided for a US 1475576 proceeding, because there is no proceeding to link to. Verified against the ODP structured block and independent search on 2026-09-30. If you want an independent confirmation, a docket search on PTAB E2E for "1475576" returns no AIA trial matters.

I'll verify the assignment record and ownership history against the live sources before writing up.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US Patent 14,755,76

⚠️ Scope caveat, read first. This patent is not an NPE-relevant asset and the requested analytical frame largely does not apply:

• Patent number formatting. The number as given, "1475576," resolves to US 1,475,576 A, "Combination curtain pole and shade holder." Per the operating rule to interpret numbers literally, that is the patent analyzed. It was filed 1919-06-18 and granted 1923-11-27 — a pre-Depression, 17-year-term utility patent.
• Term expiry. Google Patents records an anticipated expiration of 1940-11-27. This patent has been in the public domain for ~86 years as of today (2026-09-30). There is no live asset to assert, license, or securitize.
• Assignment database coverage. The USPTO Assignment Center database contains recorded assignments back to August 1980 only (USPTO Assignment Database webinar, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). Any assignment of this patent would have had to be recorded between 1923 and 1940 — i.e., structurally outside the electronic database's coverage window. A null result on assignment.uspto.gov for this patent is therefore expected and is not evidence that no assignment ever occurred.

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Inventors

Notes:

• Sole inventor. The specification is signed "In testimony whereof, I hereunto affix my signature. STEPHEN GOOD." — signed pro se, with no attorney or agent of record named on the face of the patent. This matters for the correspondent analysis below.
• No "inventor departure" pattern is checkable and none is suggested. The signal you flagged (all inventors leaving the original assignee within 12 months of filing) is unmeasurable here: there was no corporate assignee to depart from, and no employment relationship is disclosed. Recording a "not present" here would be a false precision — the correct call is unclear / not applicable.
• Searches for Stephen Good's biography, employer, or a Cleveland curtain-fixture business returned no relevant results. I could not corroborate any commercial entity behind him.

Original assignee

None. There is no corporate original assignee.

• Google Patents lists both Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual. The patent issued to Stephen Good personally.
• Product embodying the claims: the specification describes a physical, manufacturable article — right-and-left right-angle metal supports with dovetailed horizontal arms (A), vertical arms (B), adjustable shade brackets (C) with foot pieces (D) and set screws (E), a notch (F) and recess (G) receiving a hooked curtain-pole bracket (I) with lug (K) engaging aperture (L), and curved outer arms receiving curtain pole (M). A design this specific to window-frame retrofitting was plainly intended for manufacture, but no evidence of an actual commercial product, brand, catalog, or manufacturer surfaced in any search. I cannot confirm the claims were ever practiced in commerce.
• Primary line of business: individual inventor, Cleveland, Ohio. Undetermined trade or profession.
• Current status: not applicable — individual, deceased by elapsed time. The patent expired 1940-11-27. Google Patents legal status reads "Expired - Lifetime."
• Unusual-pattern check: none. No corporate entity, no bankruptcy, no reorg, no acquisition.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for this patent.

Checked against:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 1475576)
• USPTO Patent Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US1475576/en

Google Patents' recorded legal events for this patent are exhaustively:

1. 1919-06-18 — Application filed by Individual
2. 1919-06-18 — Priority to US304986A
3. 1923-11-27 — Application granted / Publication of US1475576A
4. 1940-11-27 — Anticipated expiration

There is no "Assignment" event, no reel/frame entry, and no "Changed owner" event of any kind. The only ownership datum in the chain is the original 1919 filing by Individual with no assignee named.

Important interpretive note — this is a null that is partly an artifact, not purely a finding. Per the stated rule, "no post-issuance assignments" normally signals the original assignee still owns the patent. Here that inference is only partly safe. The electronic record genuinely shows no post-issuance transfer recorded after August 1980, and none is plausible given the 1940 expiry. But because USPTO's electronic assignment index begins in 1980, I cannot exclude that a 1923–1940 assignment to a manufacturer or distributor was recorded on paper and never digitized. I am not asserting one existed — I found zero evidence of one — but the absence is a database-coverage limitation as much as a substantive fact. Stating otherwise would overclaim.

Because this section is empty of recorded conveyances, the assignment-chain analysis below terminates here per your instruction.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1475576
    1919 : Filed pro se by Stephen Good
    1923 : Patent granted to Stephen Good
    1940 : Patent term expired
    1980 : USPTO electronic assignment records begin

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Cross-references attempted and returned nothing on point: SEC EDGAR (no public-company assignor exists), RPX and Unified Patents asserter directories (no matching entry), and USPTO PEDS/ODP (pre-1980 prosecution records not retrievable electronically). Note the two counter-considerations that reinforce the null: the "Cited By" list on Google Patents shows only modern curtain-rod bracket art from Kenney Manufacturing (e.g., US 11,690,467 B2) citing this patent as background — citations are not ownership transfers; and the "Similar Documents" list (US 2,334,809; US 2,234,099; etc.) is similarly evidence-free as to chain of title.

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records beyond the original filing).

Justification. The chain of title consists of a single link: filing by an individual, Stephen Good, on 1919-06-18, issued 1923-11-27, with no recorded assignment, no assignee entity, and no correspondent attorney anywhere in the record. No NPE signal in your checklist can be evaluated — let alone satisfied — because shell-entity transfers, repeat correspondents, cascading transfers, pre-litigation transfers, bankruptcy sales, privateering, and defensive aggregation all require at least one recorded conveyance, and this patent has none. The only reason this is not a clean "original assignee still owns it" finding is the coverage gap: USPTO's electronic assignment index begins August 1980, while this patent expired 1940-11-27, so any paper assignment from that era is structurally invisible to the database rather than affirmatively absent. Independently, the asset is worthless for assertion — it has been expired and in the public domain for roughly 86 years.

Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center, searching patent number 1475576: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — and the parallel index at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. The Google Patents legal-events record is at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1475576/en.

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Methodological flag for your pipeline. If this patent came to you as a candidate for NPE-chain reconstruction, the selection criterion is misfiring. US 1,475,576 predates the entire modern NPE economy by six decades and expired before the USPTO's assignment index was created. I'd recommend gating future assignments on grant year — anything granted before ~1980 cannot be substantively analyzed from Assignment Center records, and the null results it returns will be systematically mistaken for affirmative findings of "original assignee retains ownership."

I'll research the prior-art record for US 1475576, starting with the patent's own front page and citation data.

The generic searches returned noise. Let me target the specific documents and check whether the patent's own front page lists any cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent No. 1,475,576

Task date note: The task block states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the authoritative patent text was fetched 2026-09-30. I flag the discrepancy rather than silently pick one; all findings below are stated as of the fetched (2026-09-30) record.

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1. The record I searched (literal identifier, no auto-correction)

US 1,475,576 — "Combination curtain pole and shade holder," Stephen Good (Cleveland, Ohio). Application US304986A, filed 1919-06-18, granted 1923-11-27, legal status Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 1940-11-27), assignee listed as "Individual," classification A47H1/13 (brackets or adjustable mountings for both roller blinds and drawable curtains). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1475576/en

Explicitly excluded as different numbers (not auto-corrected, not analyzed as the patent): US 5,574,556, US 5,745,246, KR 10-1475576 (KR101475576B1), and the several Blue Spike numbers already identified as false positives in the litigation section. Also note US 3,049,86 is the application number, not the grant.

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2. Threshold finding: the patent's face carries no prior-art citation list

This is the single most important thing to report honestly, because it reframes the task.

The authoritative Google Patents record for US1475576A contains only two citation-type blocks:

• "Cited By" — 5–6 entries (DE202013008581U1, US20170361288A1, US20220386800A1, US11690467B2, US12193588B1, US12213610B1)
• "Similar Documents" — ~25 entries

It contains no "Patent Citations" / "References Cited" / "(56)" block, and no "Cited By" literature field, and no examiner citation table. I searched specifically for a references-cited listing for this patent and retrieved nothing that contradicts that. In other words: US 1,475,576 has no printed prior-art citations on its face for me to walk through one by one.

Two consequences:

1. I cannot give you a list of "each patent citation for 1475576" as cited references, because the record does not disclose one. Inventing a citation list would violate the task constraints. The honest answer is: none listed.
2. "Cited By" and "Similar Documents" are not prior art to this patent. The arrow of time runs the wrong way. Everything in "Cited By" post-dates 1919 by roughly 80–95 years; the Kenney Manufacturing entries were already identified (in the PTAB section) as consumers of this reference, not sources for it. Correspondingly, they cannot anticipate claim 1 under § 102 — a reference must predate the applicant's invention. One entry, US20170361288A1 (2014-12-12, Outotec (Finland) Oy, a mixing/delivery pump arrangement), is plainly a spurious similarity mapping, not window-furnishings art; it is listed here only to be rejected.

Direction-of-citation caveat carried forward from the PTAB section: the cited-by lineage proves only that those applicants/examiners cited US1475576 as background. It does not show substantive reliance. That caveat applies equally to using any of it as § 102/§ 103 support.

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3. The controlling legal frame for this patent (pre-1952 Act)

US1475576 was filed 1919-06-18 and prosecuted under the pre-1952 Patent Act (R.S. § 4886 and § 4920), not the 1952 Act's § 102(a)–(g). Two differences matter for the anticipation mapping:

• Statutory bar date = 1917-06-18 (two years before filing). Patents and printed publications that issued/published before 1917-06-18 are absolute bars regardless of Good's invention date.
• References published between 1917-06-18 and 1919-06-18 are prior art only if they predate Good's actual date of invention — an evidentiary question.
• There was no § 102(e) analog giving a reference prior art effect as of its filing date, so publication date is what counts for these documents. This matters below.

Claim scope to map against: the patent has exactly one claim, and (as the PTAB section correctly noted) it is a combination claim. It requires, in substance: a support having (a) a vertical arm and (b) oppositely disposed horizontal arms extending from the upper end of the vertical arm; (c) a recess at the juncture of the horizontal and vertical arms; (d) an aperture near the lower end of the vertical arm; (e) shade brackets adjustable upon the horizontal arm; and (f) a curtain pole bracket with a hook at its upper end engaging the recess and a lug at its lower end engaging the aperture, with the outer end curved to receive a curtain pole.

Analytical consequence worth stating plainly: because element (b) requires oppositely disposed horizontal arms, only the double/central support embodiment (Figs. 1–3, described for double and triple windows) satisfies the literal claim. The single-arm end support of Fig. 4 does not read on claim 1 on its own.

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4. Most relevant prior art

4(a) References I independently retrieved and verified (full text seen)

These are the strongest hits I could actually read, and they are closer to the claimed subject matter than anything in the "Similar Documents" list:

4(b) The "Similar Documents" list, filtered by the critical date

These are Google Patents' algorithmic neighbors, not citations made by Good or his examiner. Filtering by date is what makes the list usable:

Published before the 1917-06-18 statutory-bar date (candidate § 102 art — full text not retrieved in this session):

Published after the critical date but likely filed near it (date check required): US1341562A (1920-05-25, "Window-shade and curtain-pole bracket"), US1344298A (1920-06-22, "Combined curtain and shade support"), US1350623A (1920-08-24, "Shade and curtain fixture"), US1405958A (1922-02-07, "Extensible bracket for window-drapery rods").

Plainly post-dating Good's filing and therefore not prior art to US1475576 (relevant only as evidence the field kept developing): US1530276A (1925), US1561990A (1925), US1565734A (1925), US1578000A (1926), US1594268A (1926), US1779612A (1930), US1795657A (1931), US2200740A (1940), US2234099A (1941), US2334809A (1943), US2383104A (1945), US2870918A (1959), US2914286A (1959), US3241684A (1966).

Note this especially: US 2,234,099 ("Combined unitary curtain and shade support," 1941-03-04) is frequently mis-cited in this space as if it were the origin of the combined unit. It post-dates US1475576 by 18 years and is not prior art to it. If you are building a validity picture, the date direction on that one matters.

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5. § 102 mapping — bottom line

Because there is one claim, every potential-anticipation statement resolves to claim 1, and the pre-1952 standard applies ("not known or used by others… not patented or described in any printed publication… before his invention… or more than two years prior to his application"). The results:

Provisional conclusion: on the evidence I actually read, no reference is a clean § 102 anticipation of claim 1. The claimed two-point detachable curtain-pole bracket — hook H into recess G at the top and lug K into aperture L at the bottom — is the element that the width-adjustable shade-fixture art (Nowlin, Hover, Bell) does not show. What that art does show is a crowded field of width-adjustable combined shade-and-pole holders stretching back to at least 1899–1902, which is highly probative of lack of invention/obviousness — the pre-1952 § 103-equivalent inquiry — particularly against the sole asserted point of novelty, the "accommodate given widths of shades to varying widths of window frames" object quoted in the specification.

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6. Confidence and caveats (stated explicitly, per the operating rules)

1. High confidence: the record contains no cited prior-art references on the patent's face; the two existing citation blocks run forward in time; US1475576 has one claim and expired 1940-11-27; the dates and titles in the tables above are as retrieved.
2. Low / unverified: element-by-element coverage for US756361A, US1026652A, US1087611A, US1150693A, US1211719A, US1216277A, US1270634, US1215032, and US1216277. I ran out of retrieval capacity before reading their specifications and claims, and I will not assert element coverage I did not read. Treat the § 102 verdicts for those as open, not as negative findings.
3. I did not retrieve the patentimages PDF of US1475576 itself. If the printed copy carries a "(56) References Cited" list that Google Patents did not render into text, my Finding #1 would need revision. This is the one gap that could change the framing of the answer, and it is the first thing to close.
4. The OCR of historical PDFs is imperfect (see the US726,944 vs. URL "US726244" discrepancy in row 2 of § 4(a)). Where I quote figures/letters, they come from the retrieved OCR text.

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7. Recommended next steps

1. Pull the US1475576 grant PDF (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US1475576.pdf) and inspect the printed front page for a citation list — this is the only way to definitively answer "look at each patent citation for 1475576."
2. Retrieve full text + claims for the six pre-bar "Similar Documents" (US756361A, US1026652A, US1087611A, US1150693A, US1211719A, US1216277A) via USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter. Priority order: US1150693A, then US1216277A, then US1211719A — their titles map most directly onto "combined window-shade and curtain-pole holder."
3. Verify filing dates (not just publication dates) for US1270634, US1341562A, US1344298A, US1350623A to determine whether any is prior art at all, and confirm Good's invention date if any of them falls inside the 1917-06-18 → 1919-06-18 window.
4. If the goal is attacking a modern curtain-rod patent, use US1475576 as prior art, not as a target. Its 1923-11-27 publication date is a § 102(b) printed publication against essentially any modern claim, and — as the PTAB section noted — it already sits in the citation chains of US20220386800A1, US11690467B2, US12193588B1 and US12213610B1. The Nowlin US 706,093 and Bell US 726,944 references above are better § 102 art for that fight than US1475576 itself, because they disclose the width-adjustable shade-holder concept 17–20 years earlier.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the actual prior-art references listed on the patent page (the "Similar Documents" and "Cited By" records) plus contemporaneous curtain-fixture art.

Obviousness Analysis — US Patent No. 1,475,576 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Two flags before the analysis begins.

1. Date inconsistency. This task states the current date as April 26, 2026. My system date is 2026-09-30, and the Google Patents page was fetched 2026-09-30T14:02:42.930Z. I am proceeding on 2026-09-30 and flagging the discrepancy rather than silently adopting one.
2. The "Prior Art section of this page" needs disambiguation. The Google Patents record for US1475576A contains no examiner-cited "Patent Citations" block. It contains a "Cited By" list and a "Similar Documents" list. The Cited By entries are dated 2013–2025 (Kenney Manufacturing, Peter Peters, Outotec) and therefore cannot be prior art against a 1919-06-18 filing — they are forward citations, relevant only as evidence of field awareness. The only section on the page that can function as prior art is "Similar Documents," and only the seven of its twenty-nine entries that predate the filing date. I analyze those below, and supplement with contemporaneous art I located independently (clearly labeled as off-page).

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1. The claim under analysis

One claim issued, and only one. Decomposed into elements (E1–E6), verbatim from the grant:

Threshold observation that shapes everything below. E1 requires "oppositely disposed horizontal arms" — plural, opposed. That reads only on the double/triple-window central support of Figs. 1–3. The right-and-left end supports of Fig. 4 (one horizontal arm each) are outside the claim. So the claim is narrower than the specification, and the prior-art search should be directed at the central, double-window configuration. That narrows the field but, as shown below, does not rescue the claim.

Legal-standard caveat, stated prominently. US 1,475,576 issued 1923-11-27, i.e. 29 years before the Patent Act of 1952 created 35 U.S.C. § 103. In 1923 the operative test was the judge-made "invention" requirement (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1850)), later hardened into the "flash of creative genius" language of Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941). A modern §103/KSR analysis is therefore anachronistic as applied to the patent's own validity at grant — it is a stricter-in-some-ways, looser-in-others lens that the 1923 Examiner never applied.** I perform the §103 analysis as requested, but the reader should not treat "obvious under §103" as equivalent to "invalid as of 1923."

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2. The prior-art universe on this page

2a. "Similar Documents" that actually predate the 1919-06-18 filing (potential §102(a)/(b) art)

I must be candid: four of these seven I could not retrieve text for. I will not characterize their disclosures. They are candidates whose full texts need pulling; the two I did retrieve (US 1,026,652 and US 1,211,719) turn out to be the most damaging of the group anyway.

2b. "Similar Documents" that post-date the filing (NOT prior art)

US 1,341,562 (1920), US 1,344,298 (1920), US 1,350,623 (1920), US 1,405,958 (1922), US 1,528,910 (1925), US 1,530,276 (1925), US 1,561,990 (1925), US 1,565,734 (1925), US 1,578,000 (1926), US 1,594,268 (1926), US 1,779,612 (1930), US 1,795,657 (1931), US 2,200,740 (1940), US 2,234,099 (1941), US 2,334,809 (1943), US 2,383,104 (1945), US 2,870,918 (1959), US 2,914,286 (1959), US 3,241,684 (1966). These are useless as prior art on §102(a)/(b). A subset could theoretically qualify under pre-AIA §102(e) as of their US filing dates if a filing predates Good's invention date — but I do not have their filing dates, and the 1920 grants make it unlikely. I am not relying on any of them.

2c. Off-page contemporaneous art located during this analysis

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3. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — US 1,026,652 in view of US 1,092,424 (and/or US 706,093)

US 1,026,652 (Curtain-fixture, 1912) discloses a support secured to a window/door/alcove frame by hangers, having a longitudinal groove in which a plate is slidably mounted, the plate and support having registering slots through which a screw with a winged thumb nut passes to lock the plate in adjusted position. An arm carries a bracket slidably mounted thereon with its own slot and locking screw, and on that bracket is a pole holder having a hook-shaped end to receive the end of a pole. The arm also has "a slot or aperture to accommodate one of the pintles of" the shade roller. Its stated objects are to be "adjusted for supporting curtain poles and shade rollers of various lengths" and to be installed "easily and quickly."

US 1,092,424 (Bobbing, filed 1913) discloses a base plate secured to the window casing with guide members forming a recess, a shade roller bracket adjustably mounted in that recess and locked by a thumb screw permitting "lateral adjustment of the bracket throughout the entire length of the slot," and a curtain pole support comprising an arm and a semicircular hook-shaped portion, "detachably and adjustably secured to and supported by said bracket." Bobbing expressly claims the combination "used as a combined shade roller and curtain support."

Mapping to the claim:

Gap analysis. Ground 1 gets E2, E4, E6 cleanly and E1/E5 substantially. The residual gap is the specific E5 architecture: a hook at the upper end seating into a recess combined with a lug at the lower end entering an aperture. Ground 1's pole brackets are attached by screws/thumb nuts (US 1,026,652) or a pin in a slot (US 1,092,424).

That gap is closed by Ground 2 or Ground 4 below. It is not an inventive gap, because the "hook over an edge + lug/stud into a keeper" two-point joint was a recognized, named expedient in this exact art before 1919 (§4 discusses the motivation).

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Ground 2 — US 726,944 (Bell, 1903) in view of US 1,026,652 / US 1,092,424

US 726,944 discloses a shade/curtain-pole holder whose stated aim is a pole-and-shade holder "which can be readily fastened or taken down from the window-casing." Its rod is secured to the plate by a groove portion on the inner end placed over the upper edge of the plate, the rod then moved longitudinally, then lowered so that a stud at the lower end engages a rack on the plate, "thereby locking the rod in its adjusted position."

Why this is the reference that kills E5. Bell discloses precisely the inventive concept of the E5 limitation, expressed in different vocabulary:

• Bell's grooved portion hooking over the upper edge ≈ Good's hook H engaging the recess G (upper engagement, gravity-seated, no fastener).
• Bell's stud engaging the rack ≈ Good's lug K engaging the aperture L (lower engagement, anti-swing).
• Bell's express purpose — tool-less fastening and takedown of the pole holder as a unit — is exactly the functional result Good's "detachably connecting the curtain pole bracket to the support" produces.

A person having ordinary skill in 1919, seeking to make the pole bracket of US 1,026,652 removable without tools (something US 1,026,652 itself does not achieve — its holder is screw-locked), would look to the standard two-point detent mount of the type Bell discloses. That is a substitution of one known fastening expedient for another known fastening expedient in the same field, with a predictable result. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398, 416–17 (2007) ("the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results").

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Ground 3 — US 1,211,719 (Lamberson, 1917) in view of US 1,092,424

US 1,211,719 is on this page's own list and is, element for element, the most structurally proximate reference I retrieved.

Its disclosure: a plate 4 secured to each side of the window, with a bracket 6 extending outwardly at right angles, the bracket having a rectangular opening 8 adjacent its upper edge and a further opening 9 offset below the same; a rectangular bar 10 for supporting the curtain rod, locked by thumb screw 11; a rectangular bar 13 with a socket for the shade roller trunnions, locked by thumb screw 14; separate arms 15 with curved portions 16 for the reception of the [portiere] pole, each arm having a pair of openings 17 adapted to align with the openings 8 and 9 in the bracket 6 so that the arm is attached "by the passing of the bars 10 and 13 through the openings in the arms." Stated objects: support shades of various widths "without necessitating the changing of the position of the device on the trimming," and make "the supports for these decorations removable so that any or all of them may be used."

An element-by-element comparison with the claim is uncomfortable for the patent owner:

The only material difference is that Lamberson secures his arm 15 by passing the bars 10 and 13 through the aligned openings, whereas Good secures his bracket I by a hook H and a lug K. Both are two-point, upper-and-lower, detachable engagements between a pole-holder arm and a support — the difference is the form of the detent (through-bar vs. hook-and-lug), not the mechanism or result. Under §103 that is the definition of an obvious substitution of equivalents. Good's hook-and-lug is also less secure than Lamberson's through-bar (a hook can be lifted off; a bar cannot), which under KSR tends to reinforce obviousness rather than rebut it — a mere change in the degree of permanence of a known joint, with all other advantages unchanged.

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Ground 4 — US 706,093 (Nowlin, 1902) in view of any of the above

US 706,093 is worth separating out because it anticipates the patent's stated problem. Nowlin's object is "to provide an inexpensive and reliable device whereby a shade may be fitted to windows of varying widths without cutting it, and a lace curtain be readily hung to suit the position of the shade"; the fixture "can be adjusted to suit the width of the shade, and the pole-brackets are adjusted with the fixtures."

Compare Good's specification: "it frequently happens that the possessor of shades of definite widths is confronted with frames of different widths and unless some provision is made to accommodate such variations it is necessary to procure new shades of the proper width."

That is the same problem, recognized and stated seventeen years earlier. This has two consequences:

1. It defeats any "long-felt but unsolved need" argument at the threshold. The need was felt, articulated, and solved before 1919.
2. It supplies, from the prior art itself, the motivation to combine. Where references in the same field expressly state the same objective, motivation is not speculative — it is documented. In re Fulton, 391 F.3d 1195, 1200 (Fed. Cir. 2004) (motivation may be found in the references themselves); In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977, 987–88 (Fed. Cir. 2006).

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4. Why a person of ordinary skill would have combined these references

Level of ordinary skill. A bench mechanic or sheet-metal worker in the window-fixture trade, familiar with the standard vocabulary of the art: guide members, ways, grooves, dovetail slides, thumb screws, pintle sockets, hook-shaped pole seats, and gravity-seated detent joints. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 17 (1966). No advanced degree; no unpredictable science. The art of A47H1/13 was, by 1919, mature and dense — the sheer volume of same-class art in the page's own "Similar Documents" list (29 entries spanning 1904–1966 in a single narrow subclass) is itself evidence of a crowded, incremental field where solutions were routinely borrowed and recombined.

Specific motivations, each documented:

1. Same field, same problem, same solution space. All of US 1,026,652, US 1,092,424, US 1,211,719, US 706,093, and US 1,150,693 are directed to a combined shade-and-curtain-pole fixture adjustable to accommodate varying widths. Combining references within a single, narrowly defined art to solve the art's own recognized problem is the paradigm of obviousness.

2. Express statement of the objective in the prior art. Nowlin (US 706,093) and Lamberson (US 1,211,719) both recite the very object Good recites — accommodating shades and poles of various widths on frames of various widths without remounting. Motivation is therefore explicit, not inferred.

3. The two-point hook-and-lug joint was a known, named, tool-less fastening. Bell (US 726,944) discloses a groove-over-edge plus stud-in-rack mount expressly for "readily fastened or taken down" pole holders. Good's hook H + lug K is that concept in a different vocabulary. Using a known detachable joint in place of a known screw-locked joint, to achieve ready takedown, is an improvement in degree only — the classic non-invention. Blackmore v. Ford Motor Co., 56 F.2d 806 (6th Cir. 1932) ("improvement in degree is not invention").

4. Mechanical predictability. Every element is a rigid metal part interacting with another rigid metal part; there is no unpredictable chemical, biological, or electrical behavior. The combined result — a bracket that slides to any width and locks, plus a pole bracket that hooks on and lifts off — is exactly the sum of the parts, with no emergent property. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417 (predictable results from combining known elements).

5. Design incentive from the shade-roller standard. The patent's own premise — "the possessor of shades of definite widths is confronted with frames of different widths" — describes an ordinary market condition (standardized shade widths vs. non-standard casings) that would have driven any skilled artisan to the adjustable-slide-plus-adjustable-pole-bracket architecture. Both halves of the claimed combination answer the same market fact, which is itself a reason to put them in one fixture rather than two.

6. The double-window configuration (E1) is not an inventive addition. Good's contribution for double/triple windows is, in his own words, simply to add "two oppositely extending horizontal arms A" to the same central support and to place "the notch F and recess G as previously described" at the center rather than the corner. That is a duplication of a known part and a relocation of a known formation along the same member — the very "duplication of parts" reasoning the Blackmore court (above, discussing Dunbar v. Meyers, 94 U.S. 187) treated as non-inventive over eighty years ago.

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5. §103 / Graham factor analysis

No secondary consideration is available to the patent owner. This is not a case of strong objective indicia overcome by weak art; there are no objective indicia on the record at all. Where the patent owner must rely solely on the structural differences between the claim and the art, and those differences are a known joint substituted for a known joint, the §103 case is strong.

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6. Where the obviousness case is weakest — read this before relying on it

I am not going to overstate the record. Three genuine weaknesses:

1. I could not retrieve four of the seven pre-filing "Similar Documents." US 756,361, US 1,087,611, US 1,150,693, and US 1,216,277 are only titles and dates to me. Any one of them could anticipate the claim outright under §102 and make the §103 analysis moot — or could be cumulative. This is the single highest-value next step, and it changes the analysis in the patent owner's favor if they turn out to be remote from the claim.

2. No reference I retrieved discloses the exact literal combination of a plural, oppositely disposed horizontal arm pair (E1) with a notch-and-recess at the center juncture (E2) and the hook-and-lug pole bracket (E5). Obviousness in 1919 was decided by courts applying a demanding "invention" standard, and a contemporaneous court could plausibly have found the specific combination, as a combination, to be a sufficient exercise of the "skill of the calling" to avoid invalidation — or equally plausibly the reverse. My confidence that the claim would be held obvious under the 1923 legal standard is moderate; my confidence that it is obvious under modern §103/KSR is high. Those are different questions and I am not conflating them.

3. The Examiner in 1919 considered and allowed this claim. The grant carries a presumption of validity. Whatever art the Examiner had before him, he did not consider it sufficient. I have not seen his references — the Google Patents record does not reproduce the examiner's citation block. Do not treat this analysis as having already overcome that presumption.

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7. Practical significance — why this analysis matters despite the 1940 expiration

The prior sections of this report establish that US 1,475,576 expired 1940-11-27 and cannot be enforced, and that it has zero PTAB proceedings and no litigation history. Consequently this §103 analysis is not directed at invalidating a live claim. It matters in exactly two scenarios:

(a) Historical/academic validity assessment. Purely retrospective.

(b) Prior-art use against modern curtain-rod bracket art. The earlier section correctly identifies US 1,475,576 as available prior art against the modern Kenney Manufacturing family (US 11,690,467 B2; US 2022/0386800 A1; US 12,193,588 B1; US 12,213,610 B1) and DE 20 2013 008 581 U1, on which it appears in the forward-citation record. An important corollary the earlier section did not reach: if you assert US 1,475,576 as prior art, opposing counsel may respond by attacking its validity under §103 along the lines above — and that attack would be legally irrelevant to its prior-art effect. A reference patent's own claims may be invalid, obvious, or unenforceable, but its disclosure remains prior art for everything it describes and enables. Validity of a reference is not a prerequisite to its use as art. So the obviousness analysis in this section does not diminish US 1,475,576's utility as a §102/§103 reference — it only means the patent cannot be relied on for its claims as such. What matters for prior-art purposes is whether the specification discloses and enables the structure, and it plainly does (Figs. 1–4 and the accompanying text).

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8. Bottom line

Recommended verification actions before filing or relying on any of this:

1. Pull the full texts and drawings of US 756,361, US 1,087,611, US 1,150,693, and US 1,216,277 — the four unretrieved pre-filing references. One may be anticipatory under §102 and render this entire §103 analysis unnecessary.
2. Pull the original 1919–1923 file wrapper (if retrievable) to identify what the Examiner actually cited and why the claim was allowed over it. The Google Patents record does not reproduce it, and that omission is the largest evidentiary hole in this report.
3. Pin down filing dates for every 1920–1922 "Similar Document" to test each under pre-AIA §102(e). I have not done so and am relying on none of them.
4. Treat US 1,475,576 as prior art only (per §7 above), never as an assertable claim — consistent with the earlier sections' findings of 1940 expiration, zero PTAB proceedings, and no assignment history beyond the original filing by Stephen Good.