US 1557835

I'll search for this specific patent number across the sources you named.

Let me check the authoritative patent page and the CAFC docket sources.

Let me run a couple of final targeted checks on litigation/docket activity and assignment records.

US 1,557,835 — Verification Summary

Search scope note. I searched for the literal string 1557835 in connection with USPTO records, the patent's own text, and CAFC 2026 dockets. One important finding: the bare number "1557835" is not globally unique. Unrelated documents share it — GB 1557835/A ("Dosemeter," published 1977) and EP 1557835 B1 ("Recording tape cartridge," 2009). Those are different patent documents in different jurisdictions and are not the patent you asked about. Similarly, US1557835A in Google Patents resolves to a single US document. All statements below relate only to the US document.

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Bibliographic data (US 1,557,835)

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Abstract

There is no abstract of record, and this is expected rather than an omission in my search. US patents of this era were not printed with a formal abstract; the Google Patents record has no abstract field for US1557835A, and none appears in the granted specification. Anyone who supplies you an "abstract" for this patent is paraphrasing the specification, not quoting it. The closest thing to an official statement of purpose is the object paragraph:

"The principal object of the present invention is to prevent breakage at the neck when tilting by placing a pivot joint at that point." … "Another object is to provide means whereby the hanger may be optionally employed either as an ordinary clothes hanger or as a trunk hanger." … "A further object is to provide means for strengthening the neck without increasing the thickness of the slab, thereby permitting a smaller neck to be used, so that the neck of the garment will conform more closely thereto."

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The invention in one paragraph

A trunk hanger whose wooden yoke (1) is fitted with a substantially triangular sheet-metal plate (4). The plate's side edge is reversely bent as a flange (5) over the top longitudinal edge of the yoke, and the plate's apex end is curled or rolled under the yoke to form a hinge (6), so the plate is clamped onto the yoke by its own two edges (optionally supplemented by screws/nails 7). A single wire loop (9), bent into garment-supporting shape, has its ends (10) pivoted in opposite ends of the rolled hinge. An aperture (8) through yoke and plate lets the same unit hang on a hook or nail outside the trunk — hence "optionally … an ordinary clothes hanger or a trunk hanger." The pivoting wire neck resists the breakage that the old one-piece wooden hanger (13, Fig. 4) suffered when trunks were packed, tilted by a follow board (15) and straps (16), and shocked in transit.

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Independent claims — plain language

This patent has two claims, and both are independent. Claim 2 is not a dependent claim; it is written as a separate "combination with" claim that repeats claim 1's structure and adds limitations.

Claim 1 — the mounting-plate sub-combination (with the garment support recited generically as a "loop"):

1. A yoke that has some means for supporting it (the trunk-rod seats).
2. A plate of substantially triangular shape mounted on the yoke, held on by two distinct edge treatments:
   • one side edge is reversely bent so it rests on one longitudinal edge of the yoke, and
   • the apex is rolled and binds against the other longitudinal edge of the yoke.
   • Functionally, those two edge engagements hold the plate against accidental displacement from the yoke — i.e., the plate grips the yoke without requiring separate fasteners.
3. A loop removably secured to the rolled portion of the plate.

Claim 2 — the same structure plus the specific garment-support element:

1. Same yoke-with-supporting-means.
2. Same substantially triangular plate, with the same reversely-bent side edge resting on one longitudinal edge of the yoke (here expressly stated to extend longitudinally along it) and the rolled apex binding the opposite longitudinal edge to prevent accidental displacement.
3. The "loop" of claim 1 is narrowed to a single piece of wire bent into coat-hanger form, hingedly secured to the plate, with its ends spaced apart and sized to be inserted into the rolled portion for a short distance, expressly "to facilitate removal" of the wire from the plate.

Practical scope difference: Claim 1 is the broader claim — the plate/hinge combination plus any "loop," with the loop only required to be removably secured to the rolled portion. Claim 2 adds (a) the wire must be one piece bent into coat-hanger shape, (b) it is hingedly secured to the plate, and (c) the wire end / rolled-portion geometry must cooperate by inserting a short distance, enabling tool-free removal. There are no dependent claims.

Claim-term ↔ disclosure mapping (useful if you are construing these):

• "yoke provided with supporting means" → yoke 1 with seats 2 for trunk rods 3.
• "plate of substantially triangular shape" → sheet-metal plate 4.
• "one side edge reversely bent to rest upon one longitudinal edge of the yoke" → curved flange 5 passing around the top of the yoke.
• "apex of the triangle rolled … binding against the remaining longitudinal edge" → the lower end of plate 4 curled under the yoke (element 6). Note the specification calls element 6 a "hinge" while the claims call it a "rolled portion" — the specification states the yoke "preferably fits tightly between flange 5 and hinge 6," which is the tight-fit source of the anti-displacement binding.
• "loop" → wire loop 9 with ends 10 pivoted in opposite ends of hinge 6.
• Additional disclosed but unclaimed subject matter: aperture 8 (hook/nail seat for closet use), screws/nails 7, and the stated advantage that wire presents a smoother surface to the garment than wood and that clothes "hang better."

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CAFC / litigation check

I ran targeted searches for the number against Federal Circuit 2026 docket and opinion material and found no CAFC or district-court activity involving US 1,557,835. This is the expected result and not merely a null search: the record shows an anticipated expiration of October 20, 1942 (the then-17-year term running from the 1925 grant), so the patent was long expired before any Federal Circuit existed (the CAFC was created in 1982) and cannot be asserted today. I found no reissue, no certificate of correction, and no assignment record for this patent.

Stated with appropriate uncertainty: absence of indexed results is not affirmative proof of absence. I could not query the USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment databases or PACER directly, only through web search. If you need a negative-clearance statement, an assignment/chain-of-title search and a PACER docket search on the exact number should be run directly.

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Other uncertainties and caveats

• The OCR text of this patent is badly degraded. In the Google Patents transcription, claim 1's numeral "1." is missing entirely, the specification's element 6 is rendered inconsistently ("torna a lfri'ngie 6" for "to form a hinge 6"), and a fragment reading "Having thus described this invention, 1 hereby reserve the beneiit of all' changes in form, arrangement, order, or use of parts" appears just before claim 1 — indicating text is missing between the specification and the claim section. My claim 1 reconstruction above treats the surviving text as the full claim body, which is consistent with the printed claim structure and with claim 2, but I flag it as a reconstruction. Verify claim 1 against the original printed patent image (the PDF linked from the Google Patents page) before relying on it for a validity or infringement analysis.
• "Expired – Lifetime" is an automated Google Patents status label, not a USPTO legal determination; treat it as an assumption per Google's own disclaimer.
• The Google Patents page lists "Similar Documents" (e.g., US2557627, US2569371, US2192167) — these are algorithmic similarity results, not cited prior art. This patent's specification cites no prior-art references at all.

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

Let me check specific litigation databases and search engines.

Findings: Litigation Involving US Patent 1,557,835

No litigation is known or recorded involving US Patent No. 1,557,835.

I searched litigation-focused sources — including the Unified Patents litigation portal, CourtListener/RECAP (which mirrors PACER dockets), and general web/patent databases — specifically for the number "1557835" and related terms. I found no case, complaint, docket entry, or judgment naming this patent as a patent-in-suit.

Why this is the expected result

A few contextual points explain the absence of any litigation record:

1. The patent is long expired. Per the Google Patents record, US 1,557,835 ("Garment hanger," inventor Morris A. Heimann, St. Louis, Missouri) was filed April 24, 1924, granted October 20, 1925, and reached anticipated expiration on October 20, 1942. It was never subject to the modern 20-year term regime and has been in the public domain for over 80 years.

2. Modern litigation databases do not reach this era. Unified Patents' litigation portal, CourtListener/RECAP, and PACER reliably cover roughly the 2000s forward (PACER's earliest electronic dockets date to the late 1980s/1990s). Any infringement suit on this patent would necessarily have been filed between 1925 and 1942 — a window that predates these systems. Such a case, if it existed, would only appear in print digests or the Federal Reporter/Federal Supplement of that era, which are not indexed by the sources I was directed to search.

3. Nothing in the patent record itself indicates litigation. The Google Patents page shows only a single family member (application US 708,605, the application that issued as the patent), a single "Individual" assignee (never reassigned), and no related litigation, reexamination, or assignment activity.

Important caveat on the search

The searches I ran returned false-positive matches on different numbers that share the digit string "1557835" but are unrelated to the patent in question — for example:

• EP 1557835 B1 — "Recording tape cartridge" (a European patent)
• French application No. 1557835 — a Hutchinson thermal-insulation filing

Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not conflate similar numbers, I have excluded these from the findings. They are not litigation and are not related to US 1,557,835.

Conclusion

I cannot state with absolute certainty that no suit was ever filed in the 1925–1942 window, because that period is outside the coverage of the litigation databases I was asked to search. However, based on all available sources, there is no known litigation involving US Patent 1,557,835. If you need to rule out pre-1943 cases definitively, you would need to search historical print resources such as the Decennial Digest or the Federal Reporter volumes of that era — sources that are not web-indexed.

Proceedings overview

Zero. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block for US 1,557,835 reports no AIA trial proceedings on file — not active, not instituted, not denied, not settled, not invalidated — and independent web searches for an IPR/PGR/CBM involving this patent returned nothing; there is no PTAB E2E docket to populate. That total is not a soft "none yet" signal: this patent issued 1925‑10‑20, expired 1942‑10‑20, and predates the PTAB (created by the AIA, IPR practice from 2012‑09‑16) by roughly 87 years. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is the strongest possible: US 1,557,835 is a dead patent with a two-claim, 1925-era claim set that has never been (and can never meaningfully be) asserted — if a demand letter cites it, the sender is not a troll with a case, they are either incompetent or running a document-processing scam.

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Proceedings detail

There are no proceedings to list. Rather than fabricate docket numbers or judge panels, here is the verified factual record that supports the null result:

(No proceeding) — no petitioner v. no patent owner

• Type: N/A — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM ever filed against US 1,557,835.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: Verbatim from the structured data: no AIA trial proceedings returned. The Google Patents record likewise shows legal status "Expired - Lifetime", an anticipated expiration of 1942-10-20, a single publication entry (US1557835A, published 1925-10-20), a single family member (US708605A), and no reexamination certificate, no certificate of correction, and no post-grant paper of any kind.
• Judge panel: none.
• Petition grounds: none asserted.
• Institution decision: none.
• Final Written Decision: none. No claim of this patent has ever been canceled by the PTAB — and, equally, no claim has ever been sustained by the PTAB. Both claims remain as issued (untested, not "hardened").
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: none. No CAFC appeal exists because no FWD exists. (A CourtListener query for the patent number returns unrelated hanger-litigation opinions — e.g., A&E Products Group v. Mainetti and Carlisle Plastics v. Spotless Enterprises — none of which involve this patent.)
• Defensive value: A defendant is not defending against US 1,557,835 at all. Its only practical value today is as printed prior art. Because it published 1925-10-20, it is a pre-AIA § 102(b) reference (under pre-AIA law) and, more usefully now, a § 102(a)(1) "printed publication" prior-art reference available against any modern hanger claim whose effective filing date is after 1925‑10‑20 — i.e., against essentially every hanger patent in force. It is cited as an anticipatory/obviousness reference, not asserted.

Note for anyone running a clearance or docket search: the numeric string "1557835" collides with at least two unrelated documents — GB 1557835 A ("Dosemeter," published 1977‑01‑05, GB) and EP 1557835 B1 ("Recording tape cartridge," granted 2009‑06‑24). Neither is related to US 1,557,835 by family, priority, or subject matter. Treat any "1557835" hit in a search report as jurisdiction- and title-checked before relying on it.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. US 1,557,835 has two claims, both as issued, both untested by the PTAB. Claim 1 recites a yoke with supporting means plus a substantially triangular plate whose one side edge is reversely bent over one longitudinal edge of the yoke and whose apex is rolled and binds against the other longitudinal edge "to hold the plate against accidental displacement," with a loop removably secured to the rolled portion. Claim 2 is the same combination with a single piece of wire bent into coat-hanger form, hingedly secured to the plate, with ends spaced apart and insertable into the rolled portion. (The OCR of the printed specification is heavily degraded at the claim-1 preamble; the numbering is visible only on claim 2, so treat "claims 1 and 2" as the claim count confirmed by the printed grant, not as a paraphrase.) The specification describes wood yokes, sheet-metal plate 4, curved flange 5, hinge 6, securing screws 7, hanging aperture 8, wire loop 9 with pivoted ends 10, and trunk-rod seats 2 — the 1924 state of the art in trunk hangers. There is no narrowed-through-IPR claim set and no "surviving claims" list to give you, because no IPR ever happened. Any assertion of these claims today would also face a threshold problem unrelated to validity: the 17-year term from the 1925‑10‑20 grant ran to 1942-10-20, so there is no enforceable term, and any damages theory is barred by the passage of time (and by the six-year lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286, which was not even enacted until 1952).

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel of any kind, because there has never been a petitioner. That cuts both ways and matters little: with no petitioner, there are no "grounds a petitioner raised or reasonably could have raised," so every prior-art ground remains theoretically available to a defendant — but the same is true in the reverse direction, and the patent owner has never had an opportunity to be estopped or to narrow its claims. Practical takeaway: if you are accused under this patent, you do not need an invalidity position at all. You need an explanation of why the assertion exists, because the patent cannot support one.

Pattern signals. None of the usual ones are present. The record shows a single individual inventor, Morris A. Heimann, of St. Louis, Missouri, filing a single application (No. 708,605, filed 1924-04-24) that issued as a single patent with a one-member family; the "current assignee" field reads Individual, i.e., there is no corporate patent owner, no assertion entity, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, no RPX) anywhere in the chain — there is in fact no chain, only an original grant. The patent has never been the subject of an IPR, PGR, CBM, ex parte reexamination, or an appeal; it does not appear in any modern docket. The only "pattern" is the one you would expect of a 1925 wood-and-wire trunk hanger: it is part of the historical literature of the art, alongside the other pre-1930 hanger patents listed as similar documents (e.g., US 1,510,737; US 1,783,578; US 1,770,159).

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Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and the patent is being asserted: you do not need an IPR. The patent expired 1942-10-20 (Google Patents legal status: "Expired - Lifetime"). Send a short letter citing the front page, the expiration date, and 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year recovery window, and demand the basis for the assertion. There is no Final Written Decision to link to — the instruction to "link explicitly to the FWD and quote the disposition" is inapposite here because none exists. Do not accept any representation that an IPR exists or that claims were "confirmed"; that statement would be fabricated. The authoritative record is the Google Patents page: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1557835/en
• If you are evaluating this patent as prior art: pull the full PDF from the Google Patents page above and cite it as a § 102(a)(1) printed publication (publication date 1925-10-20) against a modern hanger claim, or as § 102(b) art under pre-AIA law for older claims. The specification's disclosure of a pivoted wire loop on a sheet-metal plate (paras. describing elements 4–11 and Figs. 1–3) and the trunk-rod seat/follow-board packing context of Fig. 5 are the substantive disclosure to mine. Verify the OCR against the PDF facsimile before quoting claim language — the fetched text is corrupted (e.g., "torna a lfri'ngie 6" for "forms a flange 6").
• If you are checking for pending proceedings as part of diligence: there are none, and none are coming. For completeness, confirm the null result yourself at PTAB E2E / the PTAB Decisions database (https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-api/swagger-ui or the PTAB E2E portal) and run a CourtListener query for "1,557,835" (https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%221557835%22) — both will confirm the absence. PGR was never available to this patent regardless of anyone's intentions: its effective filing date of 1924-04-24 is far before the 2013-03-16 PGR cut-off, and it is not a covered business method patent (it is a garment hanger, not a financial-services apparatus).
• Do not invent a proceeding number. If a counterparty, a docket-report or an AI search tool hands you an "IPR20xx-xxxxx" for US 1,557,835, treat it as a hallucination until you can pull the paper itself from PTAB E2E.

I'll verify the assignment record against the named sources before writing anything.

Verification approach and one important refinement to the prior section

Before the deliverable, a correction that materially affects how the "no assignments" finding should be read. The earlier section stated "I found no … assignment record for this patent." That is right on the outcome but was imprecise on why it matters:

• The USPTO assignment database underlying Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center (AOTW) contains "all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" — see the USPTO's own assignment webinar deck: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf.
• US 1,557,835 issued 1925-10-20 and its term ran to 1942-10-20. The database window therefore opens 38 years after this patent expired.
• Consequence: a null result here does not establish that no assignment was ever executed. It establishes only that (a) no assignment was recorded in the digital database (i.e., none recorded from 1980 forward, which for an expired patent is expected and unremarkable), and (b) no assignment is printed on the face of the patent. Pre-1980 paper-reel recordings, if any exist, are outside the queried database and would require a manual reel/frame search at the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch. I am flagging this as a limitation of the record, not as an affirmative finding of "never assigned."
• Affirmative evidence that no assignment existed at issue: the patent's face names "MORRIS A. HEIMANN, OF ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI" with no "assignor to…" clause. A pre-issuance assignment under 37 CFR 3.11 practice would ordinarily have been printed there. Source image: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b1/ea/4b/ae0024416898b0/US1557835.pdf

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Inventors

Pattern notes.

• Sole inventor throughout. Serial No. 708,605 lists one inventor; there is no co-inventor to test for the "all inventors departed within 12 months" precursor pattern. That pattern is structurally inapplicable here.
• Independent-inventor profile, not corporate-inventor profile. Indexed data (GoodIP: https://goodip.io/iq/assignee/heimann-morris-a) attributes 12 US patents to "Heimann Morris A," all US filings, spanning roughly 1899–1931, with titles in the hanger / display-rack / display-motor space (e.g., US1223876 "Motor and support for display-forms"; US650680 "Rod for display-racks"; US1546489 "Reversible hanger"; US1494907, US1592107 "Garment hanger"; US1291870 "Necktie-display holder"). The database lists the inventor himself as the assignee across that set.
• Unusual-pattern call: none found. The absence of an assignee means there was no employer for him to "depart," so fire-sale-precursor screening does not apply.
• Caution: the GoodIP "main competitors" field (Batts John T Inc, John Algernon Launder, Vogel Peterson Co.) is an algorithmic co-classification artifact, not evidence of employment, partnership, or litigation. I did not treat it as a finding.

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Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventor personally.

• Google Patents records "Current Assignee: Individual" / "Original Assignee: Individual" (https://patents.google.com/patent/US1557835/en). That field is derived from the absence of any recorded assignment; it is not a verified present-day ownership determination.
• Product embodying the claims: I could not confirm with high confidence that Heimann or any entity manufactured a commercial product practicing claims 1–2 (the reversely-bent flange 5 / rolled apex 6 clamping a triangular sheet-metal plate to a wooden yoke, with wire loop 9 pivoted in the roll). The specification reads as a real trunk-hanger design with a described commercial context (trunk rods 3, follow board 15, straps 16), which is consistent with a genuine article of manufacture, but I found no corroborating catalog, trademark, or corporate record. Stated as unknown.
• Primary line of business: best inference from his portfolio (garment hangers, display racks, display motors, necktie display holders) is a St. Louis–area individual inventor in the garment-display / haberdashery-fixture field, possibly with an unincorporated or now-obscure shop. I could not identify a corporate entity of record.
• Current status: Moot. Any business entity that ever held rights is now unidentifiable in indexed sources, and the patent itself has been public domain since 1942-10-20. There is no subsisting asset for an assignee, operating or otherwise, to hold.
• No SEC nexus. A 1924–1942 individual-owned patent predates the modern 10-K/8-K disclosure regime's relevance here; no SEC filing referencing this patent was found.

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Assignment timeline

Plain statement: the USPTO Assignment Center has no recorded assignment for US 1,557,835 within its queryable coverage.

• Searches against the patent number and against "Heimann" on the assignment databases (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and the legacy https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) returned no conveyances, no reel/frame, no correspondent, no execution or recording dates.
• The patent's face carries no assignee and no "assignor to" clause.
• Therefore: no Assignment, Security Agreement, Merger, Change of Name, License, Release, or Correction record exists for this patent in the digital record.
• Scope limits, stated expressly: (i) digital coverage begins August 1980, decades after the 1942 expiry, so pre-1980 paper recordings cannot be excluded by this search; (ii) the USPTO's own disclaimer applies — recordation is ministerial, the Office "does not verify the validity of the information" and makes no determination of legality or of the recording party's right to act.

Per the stop rule for missing records, the sections below are included only in abbreviated, evidence-bounded form rather than omitted, so the deliverable is not truncated.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1557835
    1924 : Filed by Morris A Heimann
    1925 : Issued to the inventor personally
    1942 : Patent expired

No post-issuance events appear because no assignment, security interest, or name change is of record in any queried source.

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Negative-signal caveat per your constraints: none of the above "not present" calls rest on naming intuition — they rest on the fact that the ownership chain contains exactly one node (the inventor) and no recorded edge out of it. The one genuine gap is pre-1980 paper recordings, as noted.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — with the substantive note that the NPE question is moot.

Justification: the ownership chain consists of a single node. US 1,557,835 issued 1925-10-20 to Morris A. Heimann personally, with no assignee printed on the face and no recorded assignment of any conveyance type in the USPTO assignment databases, which by their own terms cover only August 1980 forward — 38 years after this patent's 1942-10-20 expiry. There is therefore no reel/frame to cite, no correspondent to profile, and no transfer to characterize as NPE-related; the absence of data is structural (a 1920s individual-owned patent long since in the public domain), not an evidentiary gap that further searching of the modern asserter directories could close.

Verify directly: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (patent-number search on 1557835) and legacy https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. For completeness on the pre-1980 window, a manual reel/frame and paper-record request to the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch would be required — I could not query that offline record, and I will not assert that no pre-1980 assignment exists.

I'll run targeted searches against USPTO-facing sources for this specific number, and separately check whether the patent record contains any cited prior-art references.

The first search returned only the GoodIP mirror and unrelated modern hanger patents; the citation-specific search returned nothing. Let me try the primary sources directly.

Let me check the two remaining angles: whether the patent has any recorded forward citations, and what the front-page/PDF record actually shows.

Direct answer

US Patent 1,557,835 has no cited prior-art references of record — zero. Search of the patent's own record (Google Patents entry and the full printed text as reproduced from the USPTO/Google PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b1/ea/4b/ae0024416898b0/US1557835.pdf) returns no "References Cited" section, no examiner citations, and no patent citations in the specification body. Consequently there is no reference for which I can give a § 102 claim-by-claim anticipation analysis, because there is nothing cited to analyze.

This is a "nothing found because nothing exists" result, not a failed search. I'll substantiate it below and then give you the near-miss material that a searcher would want flagged — clearly labeled as not citations of record.

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Why there are no citations (evidentiary basis)

1. The patent predates the front-page reference format. US 1,557,835 issued October 20, 1925. The enumerated [56] References Cited block on a US patent front page did not exist in 1925 — US patents of that era were printed without a front page entirely, and "References Cited" listings were added to the printed format roughly in the 1940s–50s. So the absence is a format artifact of the era, not an omission. (Confirmed by the fetched PDF text, which is title / inventor / specification / two claims / signature and nothing else.)

2. The specification cites no prior art by identification. Unlike later practice, the body of US 1,557,835 names no patent, no publication, and no inventor. Its only backward-looking statement is generic:

   "Hitherto such hangers have been cut in a single piece from thin slabs of wood, usually built up of veneer."

   and its Figure 4 depicts "the form of trunk hanger heretofore in use," there referenced by element 13 as "the old form of garment hanger … formed of a single slab of wood." That prior form is described but never identified or cited. It is the applicant's own characterization of the art, not a reference of record — there is no document to cite, no number, and no date.

3. No forward citations are recorded either. I found no later patent that lists US 1,557,835 in a [56] block. (Forward citations are not prior art in any event, but their absence reinforces that the document sits outside the indexed citation graph.)

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Table: prior art of record

Claims 1 and 2 (the only claims) therefore stand uncited in the intrinsic record. If you are building a validity chart, there is no [56] art to import into it.

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Material I explicitly exclude — do not let this be mistaken for citations

(a) Google Patents "Similar Documents"

The Google Patents page for US1557835A lists a set of documents (US2557627, US2569371, US2192167, US2895698, US1564930, US2214118, US4892238, US2127870, US2170319, US2037325, US1899942, US445099, US2889935, US3186609, US1510737, US3323697, US2212978, US2500641, US2072017, US2053633, US1783578, US1770159, US2270828, US1592107, US2065499 …). These are algorithmic similarity outputs, not citations. Two independent reasons they cannot be § 102 art against this patent:

• They are not of record — nothing in the patent file cites them.
• With the exception of US445099 (Jan. 20, 1891), every one of them post-dates the April 24, 1924 filing date (US1510737 issued Oct. 7, 1924 — after the filing date; the rest run 1926–1990). Later-issued documents cannot anticipate an earlier-filed claim.

(b) Same-inventor contemporaneous patents — context only, not citations of record

Index listings show Morris A. Heimann as inventor on related-era hanger patents, which is useful for a chain-of-inventorship or family picture but is not prior art cited against US 1,557,835:

Caveat: I obtained these three only from secondary index listings (a CPC/classification listing page and a citation block in an unrelated design patent). I did not retrieve or read their specifications. Do not treat my one-line titles as verified descriptions of what they disclose. If you need them for a validity analysis, pull the actual documents.

(c) Sibling numbers to keep out of the analysis

Consistent with the literal-identifier rule, the following are different documents in different jurisdictions and have no relationship to US 1,557,835: GB 1557835/A ("Dosemeter," 1977), EP 1557835 B1 ("Recording tape cartridge," 2009), and a French application No. 1557835 (Hutchinson thermal insulation). All are post-1924 and irrelevant both as citations and as art.

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If your real question is "what § 102 art exists against these claims"

Two framing corrections, because they change the answer materially:

1. 35 U.S.C. § 102 did not govern this application. US 1,557,835 was filed April 24, 1924, under the pre-1952 statute (R.S. § 4886), which required novelty plus a two-year public-use/on-sale bar. The modern § 102(a)/(b)/(e) categories — printed publications, patents "patented … before the applicant's invention," on-sale activity, and the 1952 Act's statutory bars — are the wrong statutory template for a 1924 filing. Any historical anticipation analysis has to run against the 1870/1922 Act framework, not § 102. (Even so, no anticipation reference is identified in the file, so this changes nothing numerically — it just means the "§ 102" label you asked for cannot be applied literally.)
2. The claims cannot be asserted today, so "anticipation" is only relevant as a historical/validity exercise, not as a live defense. Per the record, the patent reached anticipated expiration October 20, 1942 (17-year term from the 1925 grant) — no reissue, no certificate of correction, no assignment recorded.

Most relevant art, if you mean art in the field rather than art of record: the closest thing to a cited predecessor is the unnumbered, undated "old form" of one-piece wooden trunk hanger (element 13, Fig. 4) described in the specification itself. It is the patent's own admitted prior art — the single strongest candidate for an anticipation/obviousness argument against claims 1–2 — but it is identified by neither name nor number, so it cannot be cited, dated, or retrieved. If you need to convert it into citable art, the search would be for pre-April 1924 trunk hangers having (a) a one-piece wooden yoke with trunk-rod seats and (b) an integrally formed neck — the exact structure the claims' pivotal/rolled-plate arrangement distinguishes over.

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Caveats

• I could not query USPTO Patent Public Search, PatentCenter, or the Patent Assignment database directly — only via web search. The "no citations" conclusion rests on the Google Patents record and the full printed patent text of US1557835, both of which show no [56] block. A direct Patent Public Search on the number would be the confirmatory step; I found no indication anything would be added.
• The OCR of this patent is degraded (e.g., "to form a hinge 6" renders as "torna a lfri'ngie 6"), and the specification-to-claims transition appears truncated. The printed PDF text I retrieved is cleaner and contains no reference citations, which is why I rely on it over the OCR transcription.
• Date discrepancy to flag: your task header states the current date as April 26, 2026, while my system context gives 2026-09-30. I have not used either for any dated determination here — nothing in this analysis turns on it — but per the literal-interpretation rule I am noting it rather than silently reconciling it.
• One-line bottom line: for US 1,557,835, the correct citation list is empty; any tool or report that hands you a list of "references cited in US 1,557,835" is almost certainly serving you the algorithmic "Similar Documents" set, which is not prior art of record and is post-dated for § 102 purposes.

I'll ground this analysis in what the page actually provides as prior art before drawing any § 103 conclusions.

Two important facts are emerging. Let me verify the citation situation and check for any pre-1924 art in the same field.

§ 103 Obviousness Analysis — US 1,557,835 ("Garment hanger," Morris A. Heimann)

Two threshold findings must be stated before any § 103 reasoning, because they control the entire analysis:

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1. What the "Prior Art section of this page" actually contains

You instructed me to use the results from the Prior Art section of the Google Patents page for US1557835A. Having examined that page's content, here is what is actually there — and what is not:

This is a genuine negative finding, not a search failure. US 1,557,835 issued in 1925, the era of examiner-only, pre-IDS practice; the printed patent carries no "References Cited" front page at all (those were not standard until later). So the page simply has no prior art to give you.

Date-screening the "Similar Documents" list

Google's "Similar Documents" list is dominated by post-1924 documents. Applying the literal dates from the page:

One of twenty-five "Similar Documents" is legally available as prior art. That is the universe I have to work with.

What US445099A actually discloses (verified full text)

I pulled the Traut specification. It is a trousers stretcher/supporter — a coil-of-wire spring loop 2 with downwardly extending ends 3, 5 turning outward into arms 4, 6, to which pressure bars 12, 14 are pivoted at 8, 10 for gripping inside a trouser leg. It discloses:

• a bent-wire loop (spring loop 2) by which the device "may be suspended from a hook";
• a wire hook 42 formed of folded wire, parts 25/27 "extend downward to the upper end of the loop 2, which they encircle at 29 31," one part "passing down and being fastened at … to the lower side of said spring-loop 2," its end "flattened … so as to more securely … fasten the same … by swaging";
• a secondary hook 44 so a second supporter D can hang from the first;
• pivoted clamp bars.

What US445099A does not contain: any wooden yoke, any trunk-rod seats, any plate (triangular or otherwise), any reversely-bent flange, any rolled plate apex, any edge-clamping binding relationship, any coat-hanger wire form, or any removable loop. It is a garment-gripping stretcher for trousers, not a shoulder-supported coat hanger.

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2. The legal framework is anachronistic — flagging this explicitly

35 U.S.C. § 103 did not exist when this patent was filed (1924) or granted (1925). It was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952, effective January 1, 1953. For a patent filed in April 1924, the governing validity standard was the judicially created "invention" requirement from Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1850) — whether the variation was the work of an "ordinary mechanic," i.e., within the skill of the calling rather than the product of inventive faculty. The modern "obviousness" statute is a codification of that case law, and the courts of the era applied essentially the same "would a skilled mechanic have done this?" inquiry, so a § 103-style analysis is substantively transferable — but any actual adjudication of this patent would be decided under the 1924–1942 law, not § 103. (I am stating Hotchkiss from general legal knowledge, not from a retrieved source — my search for it was cut off by a step limit, so treat the citation as unverified for this session.)

Two further framing points:

• No live challenge is possible. Per the record already established: anticipated expiration October 20, 1942; status "Expired – Lifetime"; no reissue, no certificate of correction, no assignment, no reexamination, no IPR, no litigation. A § 103 challenge today would be an academic exercise — there is no vehicle (no infringement action, no AIA post-grant proceeding against a 1925 patent, no declaratory-judgment jurisdiction over an expired patent absent a concrete dispute).
• The Graham factors (Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966)) — scope and content of prior art, differences, PHOSITA level, secondary considerations — are the organizing structure I use below, again as an analytical scaffold rather than as the law that governed this patent.

Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA), as of April 1924: a mechanical designer/manufacturer of garment-support hardware working in wood-veneer slabbing, sheet-metal stamping/forming, and wire bending — a person who routinely joined a bent-wire garment loop to a wooden or metal body by hinge, rivet, or swage. Both US445099A and the admitted prior art are squarely within this person's field of endeavor.

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3. The only competent § 103 prior art on this record: the applicant's own admission

Because the page supplies no cited art, the only substantial prior art available is the admitted prior art in Heimann's own specification, which is competent § 103 art as a patentee admission. It is unusually explicit:

"Hitherto such hangers have been cut in a single piece from thin slabs of wood, usually built up of veneer."

"In packing the trunk, the hanger is apt to be tilted from its vertical position, and is especially liable to breakage at the neck when being so tilted, even though the neck be strengthened by making it too wide to enable the neck of the garment to fit properly thereto. The probability of such breakage is considerably increased when the trunk is subjected to severe shocks while in transit."

Plus Figure 4 / element 13 (the "old form of garment hanger formed of a single slab of wood"), Figure 5 (showing clothes 14, follow board 15, straps 16), and the "usual seats 2 for supporting it on the rods 3 inside of a trunk."

Admitted prior art ("APA") therefore discloses: a one-piece veneer/wood trunk hanger; a yoke with seats dimensioned for trunk rods; an integrally formed neck; a garment-supporting shoulder form; and — critically — the known problem of neck breakage on tilting, including the known partial remedy of widening the neck, and the known trade-off that a wider neck fits the garment's neck poorly. The APA also supplies the motivation for the whole invention (long-felt, unresolved problem).

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4. Element-by-element: claim 1 against the entire available record

Claim 1 (as reconstructed in the earlier section, with the noted OCR caveat) requires:

Result: no single reference, and no combination of the references available on this page, discloses or suggests elements (b), (c), (d), or (e). The closest combination — APA + US445099A — gets you to "a trunk hanger body with a bent-wire garment support connected by a pivot/joint," which is not claim 1 and is not claim 2.

The best available combination, stated defensibly

APA + US445099A, motivated because:

• Both are garment-support/suspension hardware — same field, same problem space; the artisan would consult Traut when designing a hanger with a wire element.
• Traut supplies, expressly, (i) a bent-wire loop for suspension; (ii) a wire element fastened to a body by encircling and swaging ("they encircle at 29 31 … fastened … by swaging"); and (iii) pivoted connections between wire parts (bars 12/14 pivoted at 8/10).
• The APA supplies a known, long-felt breakage problem at the hanger neck and the express design goal of avoiding it.
• The spec itself supplies the motivation for a pivot joint at the neck ("placing a pivot joint at that point").

But that combination renders obvious only the generalized concept of a pivoted wire support on a hanger body — not the claimed plate. Every limitation of claim 1 that distinguishes it from the APA (the triangular sheet-metal plate, the reversely-bent flange edge, the rolled apex, the two-edge gripping/binding relationship that "hold[s] the plate against accidental displacement," and the loop removably secured to the rolled portion) is absent from every document on this page. The "reversely bent flange + rolled apex binding opposite longitudinal edges" is not a predictable substitution of a known fastener for a known fastener on this record; it is a specific clamping geometry, and KSR's "substitution of known elements" rationale still requires that the substitute element and its function be known in the art. Here it is not shown.

Therefore: on the record provided, claim 1 is NOT rendered obvious.

5. Claim 2 is a fortiori non-obvious

Claim 2 adds to claim 1: (a) the loop is a single piece of wire bent into coat-hanger form; (b) it is hingedly secured to the plate; and (c) its ends are spaced apart and adapted for insertion in said rolled portion for a short distance — expressly "to facilitate removal." Elements (b) and (c) are a cooperating structural pair (the wire ends and the rolled hinge eye of the plate) that no reference on this page shows or suggests. A reference that fails claim 1 cannot render claim 2 obvious.

6. One genuine near-miss I could not fully resolve: US1510737A (Busch)

US 1,510,737A is dated October 7, 1924 — after Heimann's April 24, 1924 filing, so it is not prior art as a printed publication. However, pre-1952 practice permitted a U.S. patent to be treated as evidence of prior invention where the patentee actually invented/reduced to practice first (the "prior invention" and patent-vs-patent date-of-invention doctrines). To determine whether Busch could be relied on at all, one would need Busch's filing date and date of invention — a patent publishing in October 1924 was likely filed in 1921–1922, which could place Busch's invention earlier than Heimann's.

I could not verify Busch's filing date or content — my search for it was terminated by a step limit. I am flagging this as an unresolved lead rather than an assertion. Note that even if Busch qualified, its title "Hermann Busch" carries no subject-matter hint on the page, and the one page where I did see it cited (US2006/0249549A1) lists it only as an "Apparel hook with extension" citation — suggesting a hanger-family document, but I have no verified content. Do not treat this as established.

7. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

8. Bottom line

9. What a real § 103 analysis of this patent requires (and which this page cannot supply)

1. A proper pre-1924 prior-art search in CPC A47G25/14, A47G25/28, A47G25/32 and predecessor US classes (hanger classes ~223/85–98; trunk-luggage classes ~190/… under the old classification), plus "trunk hanger," "follow board," "garment support neck," "sheet-metal hanger plate," and "reversely bent flange yoke."
2. Non-patent printed publications from before April 24, 1924 — mail-order catalogs, hardware trade journals, and the 1920s trunk-manufacturer literature — which are § 102(b)-era printed publications and often the true anticipatory art in low-technology consumer goods.
3. Espacenet / USPTO Patent Center "cited documents" for US1557835A directly (I reached them only via web search; the Google page's citation section is empty, which is itself the answer).
4. US1510737A's filing date and content, to determine whether the Busch patent can be reached as prior invention — the one loose thread I could not close.
5. Verification of claim 1 against the printed patent image. The OCR of this document is badly degraded (as flagged earlier: the "1." is missing, "torna a lfri'ngie 6" for "to form a hinge 6," and there is a text gap before the claim section). My element breakdown in § 4 uses the reconstructed claim 1; confirm against the PDF linked from the Google Patents page before relying on it.

Caveat on my own searches: my verification of US445099A's full text succeeded, but my follow-up searches (for US1510737A's filing date, for Google's citation list, for the Hotchkiss standard, and for additional pre-1924 trunk-hanger art) were terminated by a tool step limit before returning results. Nothing above relies on those unreturned searches, but the corresponding statements are flagged where relevant.