US 160393

I'll verify this against live sources — USPTO/Google Patents, and any court dockets — before summarizing.

Let me target the specific sources the request names — USPTO/Google Patents for 160393 and any 2026 CAFC activity.

Two more checks: the parent patent cited in the specification, and any litigation/docket trace.

US 160,393 — Verified Summary

Bottom line: US 160,393 is a two-dimensional, long-expired 19th-century patent. Everything authoritative about it comes from the patent document itself (Google Patents mirror of the USPTO record); there is no abstract in the original, no assignee of record, and no CAFC docket trace in 2026 or any other year. Details below.

Bibliographic data (as recorded)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US160393](/patent/US160393)/en

Abstract

There is none. The document has no abstract — abstracts were not part of US patent practice in 1875, and the Google Patents abstract field is empty. The closest thing to a summary is the specification's own statement of invention: a baton or billet with a cylindrical recess in its upper end holding a candle urged outward by a spring, supported near its upper end by a metallic tube or ring containing a central ring of plaster-of-paris (or other poor heat conductor) to keep the candle from melting, in combination with an igniter-ring having a pivoted handle and a cap/cover.

Independent claims — plain-language overview

The patent has four claims, all drafted in the single-sentence combination style of the era. All four are combination claims; none recites a single element in isolation.

• Claim 1 — In a billet (the club/baton body), the combination of the recessed candle tube or holder A, the helical spring E, and the ring or cap C. Plain meaning: a club whose candle-holding tube, its spring, and its end ring are combined together. (Google's OCR prints the ring as "J" here; the specification's ring at that location is C, so this is an OCR/letter substitution artifact, not a different part.)
• Claim 2 — In a billet, the combination, with the tube A, spring E, and ring C, of the match-holders a and the igniter G. Plain meaning: claim 1's candle assembly plus the sockets that hold short matches and the rotating igniter ring that strikes them.
• Claim 3 — The handle O, pivoted to the igniter-ring G, in combination with a torch. Plain meaning: a folding/collapsible crank handle on the igniter ring — foldable so the cover can be screwed on — claimed as a subcombination in combination with a torch. This is the narrowest claim.
• Claim 4 — The tube A with a cylindrical recess at its upper end and the helical spring E, in combination with the screw-threaded cap [B]. Note the claim text as published is truncated: it ends at "in combination with the screw-threaded cap" with no terminal element or "substantially as specified." I cannot supply the missing words from an authoritative source; that is a gap in the record I have, not something to be guessed at.

Not claimed: Several described features appear to fall outside the four claims — the wrist strap P, the metal ball N on the helical spring, the india-rubber tube s over that spring, the braid covering, the "plaster-of-paris" heat-insulating ring as such, and the lamp/oil-reservoir alternative embodiment. The description says these exist, but the claim set as printed does not appear to cover them.

Background the specification gives

• Tube A is wood or metal, pocket-length, braid-covered, with an internally and externally screw-threaded metal cap B at one end.
• Ring C is screw-threaded with a milled edge and a central hole, with an annular elevation carrying small tubes/sockets a for short matches; plaster-of-paris sits inside ring C; a packing ring b sits between ring C and the tube end.
• Igniter ring G turns freely on the raised portion of ring C and carries serrated spurs g that strike the match tips when rotated. Cover J screws onto cap B to protect matches and wick.
• A lamp may replace the candle, with tube A metal-lined and used as the oil reservoir.
• The device is framed explicitly as a dual-purpose "billy" (defensive weapon) with a torch, "very useful in searches for burglars."

CAFC / USPTO search result — explicit negative finding

I found no Federal Circuit docket, appeal, IPR, or 2026 CAFC activity involving patent 160,393. I will not invent a docket number. The reasons are structural: the patent expired March 2, 1892, so there are no live rights to assert, and nothing about it would generate a modern appeal from the PTAB.

False positives to avoid — searching for "160393" returns same-numbered different things:

• US 2,636,821 (silver-halide process) shows application serial number 160,393 (US16039350A), i.e. a 1950 serial number, not patent 160,393.
• US 1,603,272 (Eaton), US 1,755,472, US 1,576,411, and other torch/flashlight patents are numeric near-misses, not this patent.
• The Google Patents line "241001622623 Coeliadinae species … 0.000" is taxonomy noise from the landscaping tool — not an assignee. Do not read it as one.

Uncertainty statement

High confidence: number, title, three inventors, no assignee, January 2, 1875 filing, March 2, 1875 issue, 1892 expiration, and the substance of claims 1–4.

Lower confidence / flagged: (a) the printed claim 4 is cut off mid-sentence; (b) the OCR renders the ring as both "C" and "0"/"J" and the pivoted handle as "0" where the intended character is ambiguous; (c) the parent patent No. 146,431 (Jan. 13, 1874, Clark and Richardson) is recited by the specification but my targeted search returned no independent record of it, so I can neither confirm nor correct that citation.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 160393.

Let me run additional targeted searches to confirm.

Result: No litigation involving U.S. Patent 160,393 identified

I searched for litigation specifically tied to U.S. Patent No. 160,393, and no court or PTAB proceeding asserting or challenging that patent was found. Below is what I searched, what I found, and — importantly — the near-number traps that appeared in the results.

1. The patent at issue

No case data exists to report in the plaintiff/defendant/jurisdiction/case-number/filing-date/outcome format you requested, because no case was located.

2. Why the answer is likely "none exists" — and an important caveat

• The patent expired March 2, 1892. Any enforcement action would necessarily have been brought between 1875 and 1892.
• PACER, CourtListener/RECAP, and the Unified Patents litigation portal are not useful for that window: modern PACER docket coverage effectively begins in the late 1980s, and the uniform case-numbering conventions you asked for (e.g., 6:20-cv-00973-ADA) did not exist in the 1875–1892 era. A "no results" return from those sources is therefore weak evidence of no historical litigation, not proof.
• The place to look for a 19th-century suit would be period sources: The Federal Reporter (began 1880), Offical Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office, Supreme Court reporters, and the annual Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents. I was not able to search those archives in this session, so I cannot rule out an unreported or state-court action from that era. I flag this as an explicit limit rather than asserting a definitive negative.

3. Near-number matches the searches returned — these are NOT U.S. 160,393

Per your instruction not to auto-correct or conflate identifiers, here is what appeared and why each is a different patent:

4. Bottom line

Known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 160,393: none identified. No plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome can be reported, because no proceeding was found in the litigation/PTAB sources searched, and the patent's term expired on March 2, 1892. If you need a negative-clearance statement you can rely on for a 19th-century patent, I'd recommend a targeted search of The Federal Reporter volumes 1–50 (1880–1892) and the Commissioner of Patents' annual decision volumes; I have not done that and cannot represent the absence of such a case as verified.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The canonical USPTO Open Data Portal block in this prompt returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding of any kind for US 160393 — no active trials, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials. The bottom-line defensive posture is not the usual "hardened patent" or "dead claims" question at all: US 160393 is a 19th-century patent that expired on 1892-03-02 and cannot be asserted against anyone today. Any demand letter, cease-and-desist, or litigation complaint citing US 160,393 is facially baseless, and the absence of PTAB activity is a structural artifact of the patent's age, not a signal about its strength or weakness.

No proceedings to report — and why that is the correct answer here

There is no ### {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} block to write, because there is nothing to enumerate. I will not invent proceeding numbers to fill the template. What follows is the factual scaffolding that makes the null result reliable and useful.

The patent's own record (from the authoritative full text):

Why no AIA trial could exist on this docket:

1. The statutory window is closed by age, not by outcome. AIA trials are creature of the America Invents Act (2011). This patent issued in 1875 and its term lapsed in 1892 — 119 years before the PTAB's first IPR. The Board has, in narrow circumstances, instituted IPRs on expired patents (claim construction under Phillips rather than BRI), but those are contemporary patents that expired during or shortly before a live dispute. A patent that expired in the 19th century has no live assertion to anchor a trial and no remaining commercial significance to fund one.
2. PGR is categorically unavailable. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329 reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. US 160,393's effective filing date is 1875-01-02.
3. CBM is categorically unavailable. Covered Business Method review (AIA § 18) sunset on 2020-09-16 and in any event required a "covered business method patent" tied to a financial-services practice; a candle-holder baton is neither, and the program no longer exists.
4. No petitioner has an incentive or a standing hook. IPR requires a petitioner who is not the owner and who has been sued or served with a complaint alleging infringement (35 U.S.C. § 315(a)(1), (b)) — or who otherwise establishes the statutory basis. No one can be sued on this patent today.

Search check (independent of the ODP block): Web searches for PTAB/IPR activity against US 160,393 returned only unrelated matters concerning different patents that happen to share digits — e.g., IPR2022-00996 and IPR2022-01427 on Netlist's U.S. 11,016,918 and U.S. 9,318,160, and ContentGuard's U.S. 7,225,160 proceedings (IPR2013-00134). None of those involve US 160,393, and none should be conflated with it. I found no PTAB proceeding, no Federal Circuit appeal, and no defensive-aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) filing touching this patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: not canceled, not sustained — simply lapsed. There is no PTAB claim-level verdict to quote, because no trial occurred. All four claims remain as printed in the 1875 specification (claim 1: the recessed candle tube/holder A with helical spring E and ring or cap C; claim 2: the addition of match-holders a and igniter ring G; claim 3: the handle o pivoted to igniter-ring G; claim 4: tube A with cylindrical recess and spring E in combination with the screw-threaded cap). The distinction between "canceled" and "sustained" is legally inert here: the patent's entire term expired 1892-03-02, so every claim is unenforceable as a matter of law regardless of validity. There are no "surviving claims" in any meaningful sense, and no "untested claims" that could ever be tested.

Estoppel landscape: inapplicable. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner who obtained a Final Written Decision. There has been no FWD, so no petitioner is estopped, and equally there is no IPR record a defendant could leverage. Practically, this means a defendant has no need for the IPR-estoppel playbook at all — the affirmative defense is older, simpler, and stronger: the patent has been expired for over 133 years, and an expired patent cannot be infringed. The only remedies ever available ran to acts committed on or before 1892-03-02, and any such claim is barred by laches, the statute of limitations, and the simple nonexistence of living parties.

Pattern signals: none, and none possible. No repeat petitioner, no PTAB-appeal history, no aggregator involvement, no litigation docket. This patent's only appearance in the record is as a historical improvement on US 146,431 and as ancestor art in the "policeman's billy / combination flashlight-baton" lineage — a lineage that runs through US 791,376 (1905-05-30, "Illuminating policeman's billy"), US 1,489,305 (1924-04-08, "Combination club and searchlight"), US 5,060,123 (1991-10-22), and US 5,287,255 (1994-02-15). Those later patents are the ones with any modern relevance; US 160,393 itself is prior art, not an assertion vehicle.

Recommended next steps

If you have received a demand letter or complaint citing US 160,393:

• Verify the number before you respond. This is the single highest-value step. The most plausible explanation for a demand citing this patent is a transcription or digit error, not a genuine assertion. Cross-check whether the sender meant US 1,600,393 (a seven-digit 1977-era patent), US 10,039,393, or another number entirely. Ask the sender, in writing, to identify the patent by number, title, inventors, and issue date, and to state the earliest act of alleged infringement. A demand built on a genuine belief that US 160,393 is enforceable will not survive that request.
• If the number is genuinely US 160,393: the patent expired 1892-03-02. Send a short, non-argumentative response stating that fact, cite the face of the patent (Anticipated expiration: 1892-03-02; Legal status: Expired – Lifetime), and demand withdrawal. Preserve the letter — a demand letter asserting an expired 1875 patent is strong evidence of bad faith and is a poor look under state unfair-practice statutes and Rule 11 if litigation follows. There is no PTAB FWD to link or quote, because there is no PTAB record; the citation you want is the patent's own front page: https://patents.google.com/patent/US160393/en
• Do not file an IPR. An IPR on this patent would be a waste of fees and would likely draw a discretionary-denial or no-standing challenge. There is no claim to cancel that isn't already dead by expiration.

If you are doing patent-landscape or freedom-to-operate work that surfaced this patent:

• Treat US 160,393 as prior art only, relevant for its 1875-03-02 prior-art date and its disclosure of a spring-loaded candle feed, a heat-insulating plaster-of-paris (calcium sulfate hemihydrate) barrier ring, a friction-match igniter ring with serrated spurs, and a helical-spring-and-rubber-tube baton handle. Those disclosures are squarely available as § 102(b)/§ 102(a)(1) art against later filings, including the club/flashlight patents listed above.
• Check the similarly-titled sibling patents rather than this one for any live rights: US 791,376, US 1,489,305, US 1,130,355 (1915-03-02, "Policeman's billy"), US 1,436,715, US 1,569,305, US 2,234,864, and US 3698318 are all expired as well, but they are the correct lineage to cite.

On the null PTAB result as a signal: the prompt notes that "the absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs." That heuristic applies to live, commercially asserted patents. For a patent that expired in 1892, the absence of PTAB activity carries no probative weight about the patent's validity or strength; it carries weight only about the fact that no one has tried to assert it in the AIA era, which is exactly what one would expect. Likewise, you should not read the missing ODP record as an ingest gap: the absence is corroborated by the patent's expiration, its pre-AIA filing date, and the sunset of CBM review.

Confidence and limits: I have high confidence in the null PTAB result (canonical ODP block plus corroborating searches plus statutory impossibility for PGR/CBM). I have high confidence in the 1892-03-02 expiration date and the 1875-03-02 issue date, both taken verbatim from the patent text supplied. I have not verified whether any 19th-century federal litigation over this patent exists — that predates the modern docketing systems I searched, and I will not speculate about it; it would in any event be legally irrelevant today.

I'll start by checking the authoritative sources for any recorded assignment activity on this patent.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US Patent 160,393

Patent: US 160,393, "Improvement in Policemen's Torches"
Issued: 1875-03-02 · Application filed: 1875-01-02 · Anticipated expiration: 1892-03-02
Verification links: USPTO Assignment Center · Legacy Assignment Search · Google Patents US160393

Analyst's note up front. The NPE/troll detection framework specified in this brief is built around post-1980 corporate patent-holding structures, Delaware/Texas single-purpose LLCs, and modern USPTO recording practice. US 160,393 issued in 1875 and expired in 1892 — it predates every corporate entity on the comparison lists by more than a century. I have applied the framework as instructed, but the honest result is that most signals are not applicable rather than merely "not present," and that distinction is flagged rather than blurred.

Inventors

Observations:

• All three inventors are named jointly on the face of the patent, and the specification is written in the first person plural throughout ("we have invented," "we securely attach"). No assignee is recited in the granting clause — the patent issued to the inventors as individuals. There is no "assignor to" language, which is the tell for an assigned patent of this era.
• The patent is expressly an improvement on an earlier Clark & Richardson patent, No. 146,431, dated January 13, 1874. That establishes a two-person collaboration (Clark + Richardson) at least a year before this filing, with John Foller added as a third joint inventor for the 1875 case. That is a growing, continuing inventor team, not a dissolving one.
• The "all inventors departing within 12 months of filing" fire-sale precursor pattern is not determinable and not meaningful here — there is no corporate assignee to depart from, no employment relationship recited, and no post-1875 record of any kind for these three men that I was able to locate. I am not going to speculate about whether they were Metropolitan Police officers, machinists, or independent inventors; the record does not say, and the search trail went cold.
• Note the collaborative pattern is corroborated across the family only in one direction — the prior 1874 patent — and I found no later patents by Foller. Confidence: low. This is an inference from naming overlap, not from a documented employment record.

Original assignee

None. US 160,393 issued unassigned to the three named inventors.

• No assignee appears on the patent front page or in the specification.
• Google Patents' legal-events record for this patent contains only three events: application filed 1875-01-02 (implicit), grant/publication 1875-03-02, and anticipated expiration 1892-03-02. There is no assignment legal event of any kind.
• Primary line of business: not applicable — no business entity is associated with the patent.
• Product embodying the claims: The specification describes the article itself as "an instrument of defense known as a billy, on one end of which is a torch, which instrument will be very useful in searches for burglars." Whether Clark, Richardson, and Foller manufactured and sold the device, licensed it, or simply patented it is not established by any source I could retrieve. I will not assert a product was shipped.
• Current status: The patent term expired 1892-03-02. Google Patents carries the status "Expired – Lifetime," which is a database artifact applied to all 19th-century patents, not a live legal status. Any individual or entity holding rights in 1892 has been dissolved, deceased, or both for well over a century. The asset has been in the public domain since 1892.

Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for US 160,393 — none at issuance and none post-issuance.

I could not confirm this by directly querying the Assignment Center's backend in this session (that interface is a JavaScript form and returns no crawlable record set), so my finding rests on three convergent indicators rather than a single screen capture:

1. The patent document itself recites no assignee in the granting clause — the strongest contemporaneous evidence, since 19th-century practice was to recite assignments on the face of the patent.
2. Google Patents' structured legal-events table contains no assignment entries, only the 1875 grant and the 1892 expiration.
3. No assignment record, reel/frame cite, or chain-of-title document for patent 160,393 surfaced in any indexed source.

Coverage caveat, stated plainly: The USPTO's electronic Assignment Search database covers recorded assignment information back to August 1980 (per USPTO's own Assignment Database documentation); pre-1980 records exist on microfilm and in reel/frame indexes with incomplete digital coverage. So the accurate statement is: no assignment has been recorded for this patent in any searchable record. It is theoretically possible an 1876–1892 paper assignment exists in microfilm never digitized. I found no evidence of one, and for a patent that expired in 1892 the practical consequence is nil either way.

Per the brief's instruction, the chronological enumeration ends here. The remaining sections are provided in condensed form because the requested verdict categories include a "no records" option that applies squarely.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 160393
    1875 : Application filed January 2 by Clark Richardson and Foller
         : Patent issued March 2 with no assignee named
    1892 : Patent term expired March 2
         : Asset entered the public domain

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal below is assessed against the recorded evidence. Because the chain is empty, each call rests on the absence of records plus the chronology.

Verdict

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

Justification. US 160,393 issued on 1875-03-02 with no assignee recited in the granting clause, and the Google Patents legal-events table for the patent contains only the 1875 grant and the 1892-03-02 anticipated expiration — not a single assignment event. No reel/frame cite, chain-of-title statement, or correspondent of record exists anywhere in the searchable record, so there is no transfer to characterize, no correspondent to flag for recurrence, and no assignee to compare against RPX or Unified Patents asserter directories. In substance the patent is unassigned and long expired — it has been unenforceable and in the public domain since 1892, which makes any NPE characterization moot irrespective of the analytical framework applied.

Caveat on confidence. My finding rests on (a) the absence of assignee language on the patent itself and (b) the absence of assignment legal events in Google Patents, rather than on a direct assignment-by-patent-number query of the Assignment Center, which I was unable to execute in this session. Because the USPTO's electronic assignment database is reliable only back to August 1980, an 1876–1892 paper assignment could theoretically sit un-digitized in microfilm. Anyone requiring certainty should run patent number 160393 directly at assignmentcenter.uspto.gov and, if the electronic record is silent, request a manual reel/frame index check from the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ · https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

Supplementary note — technology lineage, not ownership

Google Patents lists a cluster of "Similar Documents" for this patent that traces an unbroken line of police baton/flashlight combination art: US 791,376 ("Illuminating policeman's billy," 1905), US 1,130,355 ("Policeman's billy," 1915), US 1,489,305 ("Combination club and searchlight," 1924), US 5,060,123 ("Flashlight carrying baton," 1991), and US 5,287,255 ("Combination flashlight-baton," 1994). These are citation/classification neighbors, not assignees or successors-in-interest. US 160,393 was cited as prior art in that lineage — which is the ordinary way an expired 1875 patent still does work: as a §102 reference, never as an asserted asset.

No assignment records were fabricated in this analysis. Where the record was silent, I said so.

I'll verify the patent and its citation record through the authoritative sources.

Initial searches returned noise. Let me target the specific documents directly.

Prior‑Art Analysis — US Patent No. 160,393

0. Scope, sourcing, and an important limitation

I am stating this up front because the answer to the question you asked is partly a negative finding, and it matters that you know which sources I actually reached.

1. Verification of the target patent

Note the target is a pre‑1947 US patent. Its specification runs in a single unbroken narrative with four numbered claims appended; there is no modern front page.

2. The citation record — critical finding

US 160,393 has no "References Cited" list. There is no examiner-cited or applicant-cited prior-art section in the document. That convention did not exist on the face of US patents in 1875, and I retrieved no citation list from any database.

Two things on the Google Patents page are commonly mistaken for citations and are not:

1. "Similar Documents" — this is an algorithmic similarity ranking generated by Google, not a citation record. It contains no arrow from 160,393 to those documents.
2. "Prior art keywords" / concept tags (ring, tube, improvement, torches, candle; plus Coeliadinae, Ficus elastica, isoprene, polyisoprene, calcium sulfate, calcium sulfate hemihydrate, gypsum plaster) — these are machine-extracted concepts. Coeliadinae is a butterfly subfamily (a spurious tag), while the sulfate/gypsum tags correctly map to the plaster‑of‑Paris element and the rubber tags to the india‑rubber tube discussed below. These are extraction artifacts, not references.

Therefore: the sole prior-art reference appearing anywhere in the four corners of US 160,393 is one document, cited in the specification itself.

3. The one reference cited in the patent

US Patent No. 146,431

The specification's characterisation of 146,431 is a self-declared improvement relationship, i.e. an admission that the earlier Clark & Richardson patent occupies the field into which the new elements were introduced. The new elements recited as the invention are:

• a billet/baton with a cylindrical recess in its upper end receiving a candle;
• a helical spring E that urges the candle against a plaster-of-Paris (low-heat-conductivity) insert in ring C, exposing the wick through a central hole;
• match sockets a on an annular elevation of the threaded ring C, and a rotatable igniter ring G with serrated spurs g that strike the match tips;
• a pivoted, curved handle c on ring G that folds to permit a cover J to be screwed onto cap B;
• a wrist-strap P;
• a metal ball N joined to the tube by a helical spring O enclosed in an india-rubber tube s and covered with braid.

§ 102 problem with this reference: because Clark and Richardson are two of the three named inventors of 160,393, 146,431 is arguably not "by another" as to them. This raises the classic different-inventive-entity question (Clark + Richardson vs. Clark + Richardson + Foller) and, more practically, points toward double-patenting / obviousness-type analysis rather than clean § 102 anticipation. I could not complete that analysis because I could not obtain 146,431's disclosure.

4. Candidate prior art that is not cited (date-filtered)

For completeness, the Google "Similar Documents" list contains only three documents predating the January 2, 1875 filing date. None is a candle holder or a policeman's torch:

All remaining documents in that list postdate the patent and are therefore incapable of being § 102(a)/(b) art against it. This includes the items that sound closest in subject matter:

• US 200,987 (1878-03-05) — "Improvement in policemen's clubs" — 3 years after 160,393.
• US 791,376 (1905-05-30) — "Illuminating policeman's billy" — 30 years after.
• US 1,130,355 (1915) — "Policeman's billy"; US 1,489,305 (1924) — "Combination club and searchlight"; US 5,060,123 (1991); US 5,287,255 (1994) — all far downstream.

These are descendants of the art, not anticipatory references against it. Presenting them as § 102 art would be an analytical error.

Borderline: US 168,038 (1875-09-21) "Improvement in divers lamps" was granted after 160,393. It could only matter under a § 102(e)-analogue if its application was filed before January 2, 1875 — a date I could not verify. I flag it as unresolved rather than asserting anything.

5. Legal framework caveat

35 U.S.C. § 102 did not exist in 1875. The governing statute was the Patent Act of 1870 (Rev. Stat. §§ 4886, 4920), which required novelty and imposed two-year bars for public use, sale, and printed publication, and a two-year prior-patenting bar. Applying a § 102 analysis here is an anachronistic modern overlay. It remains useful as a framework, but two consequences follow:

1. Under the 1870 Act's printed-publication bar measured from the January 2, 1875 filing date, art printed before roughly January 2, 1873 would be a statutory bar. All three pre-filing documents above fall in that window.
2. The "improvement" framing in the specification was the standard 19th-century practice for a patentee to carve out a narrow claim over an earlier patent of his own — which is exactly what claims 1–4 do.

6. Claim-by-claim anticipation mapping

Because I have only one reference (146,431) and could not retrieve its disclosure, I can state the mapping only conditionally. Any confident claim-by-claim § 102 table would require fabricating 146,431's content, which I will not do.

Net assessment: the only document with any real § 102 exposure for 160,393 is US 146,431, and even that is compromised by the common-inventor issue and by my inability to read its disclosure. All four claims appear to be drafted as combination claims built around the helical-spring-fed candle and the igniter ring — the classic narrow-improvement strategy — which structurally protects them against the one available reference.

7. Most relevant prior art — ranked

1. US 146,431 (Clark & Richardson, January 13, 1874) — the only reference cited in US 160,393; expressly the patent being improved upon; potentially relevant to claims 1, 2, and 4, but subject to the "by another"/common-inventor objection and to verification of its actual disclosure.
2. US 35,089 (1862) and US 45,806 (1865) — pre-1873, therefore within the 1870 Act's printed-publication bar window, and the only other pre-filing documents surfacing in the record. Both are percussion/ignition art and only tangentially analogous. Not cited.
3. US 200,987 (1878) and the later flashlight-baton family — postdate the patent and cannot be § 102 art. Relevant only as evidence of the field's development.

8. What I could not establish — explicit gaps

• The title and disclosure of US 146,431. I will not reconstruct it.
• Any USPTO citation-of-record or examiner citation for 160,393. I do not believe one exists for an 1875 grant, but I did not confirm this against USPTO systems.
• The filing date of US 168,038, which would settle whether it is at most a § 102(e)-analogue reference.
• The full text of claim 4, which is truncated in the source I retrieved.
• Whether the OCR readings "ring or cap (J" in claim 1 and "ring G"/"ring 0" throughout the specification resolve to C (they almost certainly do, given the ring/igniter description, but I am flagging the ambiguity rather than silently correcting it, per your instruction).

If you can supply the text of US 146,431 — or grant me access to USPTO Patent Public Search — the conditional table in § 6 can be converted into a definitive § 102 determination for claims 1, 2, and 4.

I'll verify the references that could actually qualify as prior art before running the §103 analysis.

Two more checks: the parent patent's own record, and whether spring-fed candle holders were a known class before 1875.

§103 obviousness analysis — US 160,393

Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US160393](/patent/US160393)/en (full specification and claim text supplied above). Analysis builds on, and does not repeat, the previously generated Patent summary and Litigation summary.

Two flags before the merits, because they change what the analysis can even be:

1. 35 U.S.C. §103 did not exist in 1875. It was created by the Patent Act of 1952 (Pub. L. 82‑593, §103, 66 Stat. 797). US 160,393 was examined under the 1836/1870 Acts and the contemporaneous judge-made standard — Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1851) ("ordinary mechanic"), later hardened into the "flash of genius" test of Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941), which §103 was enacted to abrogate. What follows is therefore a retrospective, hypothetical §103 analysis, not a challenge anyone could bring. The patent expired March 2, 1892.
2. The page has no "Citations"/"Cited By" prior-art section. What it offers as a prior-art proxy is (a) "Prior art keywords" (ring, tube, improvement, torches, candle — keyword tags, not references), (b) a machine-generated "Similar Documents" list, and (c) the reference the specification itself names. I treat the Similar Documents list as the available prior-art section and flag that it is a similarity list, not an examiner-cited art list. It is heavily weighted toward later art.

1. Date admissibility — the threshold problem

Under the framework that would govern (pre-AIA §§102/103, the version in force had this patent ever been reexamined or litigated), filing was January 2, 1875. The §102(b) critical date is therefore January 2, 1874.

Consequence: ~22 of the ~23 listed documents are legally unavailable as prior art. The policeman's-billy lineage the page surfaces — US 200,987 (1878), US 791,376 (1905), US 1,130,355 (1915), US 1,489,305 (1924), US 5,287,255 (1994) — is evidence of subsequent development in the field. Under §103 that is irrelevant; if anything it is mild evidence that the 1875 combination did not immediately close the field. A hypothetical §103 rejection here is essentially a one- or two-reference case, not a multi-reference mosaic.

Also note an artifact: the page's metadata lists "Prior art date 1875‑03‑02." That is Google treating US 160,393 as prior art as of its own issue date. It is not this patent's critical date for §103 purposes.

2. The one real reference: US 146,431 (Clark & Richardson, Jan. 13, 1874)

Three points:

• It is admitted art. The specification states the invention "is an improvement on the patent granted to Clark and Richardson, dated January 13, 1874, No. 146,431." A statement in the specification identifying a prior patent by number and date is a binding applicant admission that can be relied on as prior art. See In re Nomiya, 509 F.2d 566 (CCPA 1975); Riverwood Int'l Corp. v. R.A. Jones & Co., 324 F.3d 1346 (Fed. Cir. 2003) (en banc). No independent record of US 146,431 was found in my searches, and I will not reconstruct its disclosure.
• It is not a §102(b) statutory bar. Issued January 13, 1874 — eleven days short of the one-year critical date of January 2, 1874. So it is not "more than one year prior to" filing.
• §102(a) status is arguable, not automatic. The inventive entity differs: 146,431 is Clark & Richardson; US 160,393 adds Foller. A patent to a different inventive entity that shares inventors can be "by others" (In re Land, 368 F.2d 866 (CCPA 1966)), so 146,431 is a plausible §102(a)/§103 reference — but its applicability would turn on an invention date I cannot establish, and there is no common-ownership exception that helps (three individual inventors, no assignee of record).

Practical net: the strongest §103 position is not "146,431 + three other patents." It is 146,431 (admitted) in view of the ordinary knowledge of a 19th-century mechanic — a combination that KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), expressly permits where the improvement is "a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way."

3. PHOSITA

A mechanic or machinist of ordinary skill circa 1874 in the manufacture of police batons, candlesticks, pocket match-safes, and friction lighters — a mechanical, not chemical or electrical, art. Capable of routine adaptation of spring feeds, screw threads, rotary strikers, and folding handles, and of selecting among a small number of known materials for a heat shield. The claims are drafted at exactly that level of mechanical generality.

4. Claim construction notes (needed before the comparison)

• Claim 1 as printed recites "the ring or cap J" while the specification's ring at that location is "C" — an OCR/letter substitution, not a different element.
• Claim 4 terminates mid-sentence at "in combination with the screw-threaded cap" with no terminal element. I cannot supply the missing words. It is construed here as directed to tube A (recessed upper end) + spring E + screw-threaded cap B, with the express caveat that this is reconstruction.
• Whether "ring C" imports the plaster-of-paris insert is the single most outcome-determinative construction question. The specification says "Inside of the ring C we apply plaster-of-paris." If claim 1's "ring C" reads on a ring with the non-conducting insert, claim 1 captures the only feature with a non-mechanical function. If "ring C" is the metal ring alone (the insert being unclaimed subject matter, as the prior summary noted), claim 1 is a purely mechanical combination.

5. Claim-by-claim

Claim 1 — billet + recessed candle tube A + helical spring E + ring/cap C.

• Difference over 146,431: if the parent already shows a policeman's torch/baton with a candle in a recess (which the admission concedes in substance), the additions are the spring feed and the end ring.
• Obviousness: a spring-biased follower that pushes a consumable charge outward as it is consumed is the classic solution to the burn-down problem and appears in the contemporaneous projectile/igniter art in the same list (US 33,835, 1861; US 45,806, 1865, which disclose spring- and primer-actuated ignition trains). Adding a threaded or seated end ring to retain the candle and expose the wick is a retention problem with a finite, well-known set of solutions.
• Confidence: moderate. The record on this page does not contain a direct spring-fed candle-holder reference, so this claim rests largely on 146,431 + common knowledge. That is a weaker showing than a two-reference rejection.

Claim 2 — claim 1's combination + match sockets a + igniter ring G. This is the claim most vulnerable to §103. It is a combination of (i) a candle torch and (ii) a match-safe with a rotary friction striker, each performing its own independent, known function, with the predictable aggregate result of a self-igniting torch. Under KSR, "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." The page's own extracted concepts — gypsum plaster, calcium sulfate, and calcium sulfate hemihydrate (i.e., plaster-of-paris and its chemistry) — confirm the materials side was entirely conventional. The 1862 night-signal and 1865 grenade references supply ignition of a charge by a striker/primer train in an analogous portable-signal context.

Claim 3 — handle O pivoted to igniter ring G, in combination with a torch. The narrowest claim, and the easiest. A folding crank handle to obtain leverage on a rotatable ring, folding flat so that a screw cap can close over it, is a stock mechanical expedient — the same solution used across valves, keys, and stopcocks. Motivation is supplied on the face of the specification itself: the handle is pivoted "so that when it is adjusted... a cover, J, may be screwed on the cap B." That is a design constraint stated in the claim's own description, and satisfying a stated packaging constraint with a pivot is routine. Strong §103 case.

Claim 4 — tube A (recessed upper end) + spring E + screw-threaded cap B. With claim 4's text truncated, this is analyzed as printed. Screw-threaded closures on tubular billy/baton ends were ordinary; cap B is described as threaded both inside and outside, i.e., a dual-thread adapter — a conventional expedient. Combining a spring-loaded recess with a threaded cap is the obvious way to close a spring-biased assembly. Caveat: because the claim text is incomplete, no rejection could responsibly be finalized on this claim without the original printed claim set.

6. Motivation to combine

Grounds that a PHOSITA would have had, independent of the applicant's own statement of purpose:

• Single-object requirement. The stated use — "searches for burglars" — demands one carried object that both illuminates and ignites. That objective problem (eliminate the need for a separate match and a separate light source) supplies motivation directly.
• Same field of endeavor and same problem. Candle holders, match-safes, and friction lighters all serve portable illumination; combining them is not an art-crossing.
• Finite number of identified solutions, predictable results. Spring feed, threaded seat, rotary striker, folding handle — each is a known answer to a known sub-problem with a predictable outcome and no change in the principle of operation of any element.
• Explicit design constraint in the reference itself. The pivoted handle/cover interaction (claim 3) is a stated constraint, which is the paradigm KSR case of a "design incentive" known in the field.

7. What would rebut the rejection

• Unexpected results / secondary considerations. The record on this page contains no evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others, copying, or licensing. The prior summary correctly notes the patent expired in 1892. Absent such evidence, there is nothing to rebut the prima facie case.
• The plaster-of-paris insulating ring is the only serious non-obviousness hook. Its function — preventing the candle from melting — is a genuine thermal effect, not a mere duplication of parts. But (a) it is arguably not claimed under the construction in which "ring C" is the metal ring alone, and (b) even if imported into claim 1, selecting a poor heat conductor as an interposed barrier is itself a known technique ("the use of old mechanical devices, without material change, to a use in which they were not employed before, but which was known and had been practised, does not constitute a patentable invention") — the principle applied in the 19th-century kerosene-stove line of cases, and equally the principle that an air-space or insulation layer added around a heat source is not invention. This is the strongest available argument, and it is a construction argument, not an evidentiary one.
• Teaching away / criticality: none identified in the record for any of the four claims.

8. Bottom line

• Claims 2 and 3 are the most vulnerable to §103 — claim 2 as a predictable aggregation of a candle torch and a match-safe/striker; claim 3 as a stock folding crank handle satisfying a stated packaging constraint.
• Claims 1 and 4 are vulnerable but on a thinner record — the admissible art on this page supplies no direct spring-fed candle-holder reference, so those claims depend on 146,431 (admitted) plus the ordinary knowledge of the art, which is a weaker though still usable KSR showing. Claim 4 is additionally compromised by its truncated printed text.
• The decisive variable is claim construction of "ring C." If the plaster-of-paris insert is read into claim 1, that is the only feature with a plausible non-obviousness story, and it would need experimental or secondary evidence that does not exist in this record.
• The exercise is moot as a practical matter. No live rights (expired March 2, 1892), no IPR/PGR vehicle, and no litigation identified in the prior section.

Confidence: high on the date-admissibility table and on claims 2–3; moderate on claims 1 and 4; low on the content of US 146,431, whose specification I could not retrieve — my characterization of it rests solely on the applicants' own admission and on the invention being expressly framed as an improvement on it, not on any inspection of its disclosure.