US 171192

I'll run searches against the identifiers you specified before summarizing.

Let me try more targeted searches, including the CAFC docket angle.

Search results for the literal identifier "171192"

Searches run: (a) Google Patents/USPTO full text for "US patent 171192 bow and arrow"; (b) USPTO-oriented query for 171192 + Teed + 1875; (c) "171192" + CAFC/Federal Circuit docket 2026; (d) "Colby F. Teed" + assignee. Only two sources proved responsive: the Google Patents record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US171192A](/patent/US171192A)/en (whose full text I treat as authoritative) and the patent's own specification. The other "171192" hits returned were false positives — e.g., a brief cite formatted "171192, at *2" in an unrelated MDL fee memorandum, and modern compound-bow patents that merely share the subject matter "bows." No result links the number 171192 to any Federal Circuit docket.

Bibliographic data for US 171,192 (literal ID: US171192A)

Abstract

There is no abstract to report. US 171,192 is an 1875 grant, predating the statutory abstract requirement; the specification contains only drawings, background, description, and claims. Any "abstract" for this patent would be an invention of the summarizer rather than a record document. The nearest thing to an abstract is the specification's own summary sentence:

"This invention has relation to bows and arrows; and it consists in the construction and novel arrangement of a perforated handle for the admission of an arrow, in combination with a shoulder or support rigidly secured near the upper end of the handle, and flat wire springs provided with a guide-loop at their tops…"

Independent claim(s): exactly one, and it is independent

The patent contains a single claim — one independent claim, with no dependent claims. As printed:

"The bow and arrow herein described, consisting of the tubular handle A, cross-piece 1), spring B, having guide-loop O, and the arrow 1) with shoulder 12, combined to operate substantially as set forth."

(The numerals/letters here are OCR artifacts — "1)" and "12" are the letter "D" and the lower-case "b" — consistent with the reference letters used throughout the description: handle A, board D, springs B, guideway/loop C, arrow D, shoulder b.)

Plain-language overview of the sole claim: It covers, as one combination, a spring-powered arrow launcher made up of (1) a tubular handle with a bore running end to end; (2) a flat cross-piece/board fixed near the top of the handle; (3) a flat or wire spring (or springs) mounted on that cross-piece; (4) a guide-loop at the top of the spring, aligned with the handle bore; and (5) an arrow whose shaft passes through the guide-loop and into the bore, with a shoulder that seats against the spring. The arrow is held in firing position by the spring; compressing the spring and releasing it drives the arrow forward. The claim is a classic single-element "combination" claim of the era, and its scope is limited accordingly — the elements must cooperate "substantially as set forth."

Description notes relevant to claiming

• Preferred handle A is wooden, bored through from end to end (a) for the arrow to pass through.
• Board D is stapled (d) to the handle top; one or more flat/wire springs B, bent into an annulus (ring) form, are fixed to the board spaced apart "to prevent them being unduly separated and getting out of order."
• Metal guideway C is clinched under the spring ends and lies in line with bore a.
• A single-spring alternative is disclosed in the body of the specification — "I may sometimes use a single spring… secured to the board to one side of perforation a… with a guide-loop, U" — but that embodiment is not separately claimed; only the combined assembly is.
• The arrow D carries an enlarged spear-head and a shoulder that the springs bear against; the springs "react with considerable power when the arrow is let go."

CAFC 2026 docket check

I found no Federal Circuit docket, appeal, or 2026 CAFC proceeding involving the identifier 171192, and I state that as a negative finding rather than a confirmation of absence. Two independent reasons make such a docket structurally implausible: (i) the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was created in 1982, and (ii) US 171,192 expired December 14, 1892, so it cannot support a live appeal in 2026. Searches for "171192" plus CAFC/Federal Circuit returned no matching case; the only "171192" string hits were unrelated citations in other litigation documents.

Explicit uncertainties

• Assignee/bankruptcy or chain-of-title records: none appear on the Google Patents record, and I did not retrieve USPTO PatentCenter or Assignment records within these searches. Absence of a listed assignee is consistent with an 1875 inventor-owned grant, but I cannot affirmatively certify that no assignment was ever recorded.
• No abstract exists — do not expect one in any database that presents a field for it.
• OCR quality: the sourced text is badly OCR'd at several points (e.g., "annulus,-nud," "gnidewa y," "aro ther," "nieans"), and the claim's reference characters are corrupted. My reading of "cross-piece D / arrow D / shoulder b" follows the internal logic of the description; a paper copy of the printed patent should be consulted if exact claim wording is critical.
• Drawings: Figures 1–3 ("side view of my bow and arrows"; "edge views") were not retrieved as images, so I cannot verify element placement visually.
• Geographic spelling "Ghemung" in the source is an OCR corruption of Chemung County, New York; I flag it rather than silently correcting the record.

Bottom line: The literal ID 171192 resolves to US 171,192, "Improvement in Bows and Arrows," invented by Colby F. Teed of Elmira, New York, filed November 6, 1875, issued December 14, 1875, with no named assignee and no abstract, containing one independent combination claim to a bored tubular handle, a cross-piece, ring-form wire springs, an arrow guide-loop, and a shouldered arrow. There is no CAFC 2026 docket for this number.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 171192.

Answer: No litigation found involving U.S. Patent 171,192

I searched litigation-oriented sources (including the Unified Patents litigation/PTAB portal pattern cited in your instructions, CourtListener/RECAP, Docket Alarm, RPX Insight, Justia federal dockets, and the CAFC opinions/orders site) for the specific identifier 171192 / 171,192. I found no case — district court, CAFC, ITC, or PTAB — in which U.S. Patent 171,192 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue.

Requested table (verified entries): none.

Why this is the expected and correct result

1. Identity of the patent (interpreted literally). US171192A, "Improvement in bows and arrows," granted December 14, 1875 to Colby F. Teed of Elmira, New York; application filed November 6, 1875. Per the Google Patents record, the "anticipated expiration" is December 14, 1892 (17-year term under the law then in force). The patent is Expired – Lifetime and has been unenforceable for roughly 134 years.

2. No modern litigation is legally possible. Because the term lapsed in 1892 and no maintenance/reissue continuation exists, there is no live right to assert. Modern PAE/NPE assertion databases therefore will never show a case for this number.

3. Distinguish from the false positives returned. Every "192" hit I retrieved concerns a different patent, and under your rule I am not conflating them with 171192:

   • Headwater Research LLC v. Samsung (E.D. Tex. 2:23-cv-00103-JRG-RSP) — U.S. Patent No. 9,615,192 (dismissed with prejudice as to that count, April 29, 2025).
   • Norman International v. Hunter Douglas — IPR2014-01174 on U.S. Patent No. 6,283,192.
   • Corning / Wilson litigation (D. Minn. 0:20-cv-00700) — a different "'192 Patent" (cell-culture device); unrelated number.
   • Wilus v. HP/Samsung (E.D. Tex. 2:25-cv-00069/00070) — U.S. Patent No. 11,716,171, a different patent entirely.
   • WAPP Tech cases referencing a "'192 Patent" (software tooling).
     None of these is U.S. 171,192.

Scope and limitations of the search (stated expressly, per your rules)

• I cannot affirm a universal negative with certainty. No U.S. litigation reporting database covers 19th-century infringement suits systematically; PACER begins in the late 1980s–1990s, and Unified Patents/PTAB coverage begins around 2012. There may be unreported or non-digitized 1875–1892 infringement proceedings involving this patent that would exist only in contemporaneous court records, newspaper reports, or Official Gazette notices. I did not locate any such record, and cannot confirm or deny their existence.
• Nothing on the Google Patents page constitutes litigation evidence. Its "Similar Documents," "Classifications," and "Family" sections are bibliographic, not litigation data. No "Litigation" or "Trials" section appears for this patent.
• Searches for the exact number returned only noise. Queries for 171192 and "171,192" produced no docket, complaint, IPR, or CAFC record tied to the 1875 Teed patent.

Bottom line: Based on available sources, no litigation is known involving U.S. Patent 171,192. If you require a definitive negative, the appropriate next step would be a manual search of pre-1900 federal circuit court records and the Commissioner of Patents' annual reports for the 1875–1892 window — a records set not indexed by the modern tools available to me here.

PTAB Proceedings Report — US Patent 171192

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. There are no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, and no institution denials — because the structured USPTO Open Data Portal block returns no AIA trial proceedings for US171192A, and my web searches for any PTAB or Federal Circuit activity on this patent returned nothing responsive. The bottom-line defensive posture is not "hardened" or "canceled" — it is moot: US171192A issued 1875-12-14 and its legal status on file is verbatim "Expired - Lifetime," with an anticipated expiration of 1892-12-14. An expired patent cannot be infringed, so there is no defensive posture to compute. If a demand letter cites US171192A, the problem is not which claims survive — it is that the entire right has been dead for 134 years.

Proceedings detail

None to detail. Per the task constraints, I will not invent proceeding numbers, panels, or dispositions. For completeness, here is why the count is zero rather than merely "not yet indexed":

• The tribunal did not exist. The PTAB's AIA trial jurisdiction (IPR/CBM) commenced 2012-09-16. US171192A was granted 1875-12-14 — 137 years earlier — and lapsed 1892-12-14 under the then-applicable 17-year term.
• PGR is categorically unavailable. Post-Grant Review reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. US171192A was filed 1875-11-06 (application date per the specification).
• CBM is categorically unavailable and sunset. The transitional CBM program covered financial-services business-method patents and closed to new petitions on 2020-09-16.
• IPR is technically available for any unexpired or expired patent, but is pointless here. An IPR is limited to § 102/§ 103 grounds on patents and printed publications; there is no live claim scope to construe, no possibility of a meaningful claim amendment, and no infringement theory to defeat. No petitioner has filed one, and the ODP record confirms none exists.

Strategic summary

Claim status: not CANCELED, not SUSTAINED, not UNTESTED — EXPIRED. The patent contains a single claim (pre-1952 single-claim format). Quoting the printed claim verbatim from the record, OCR artifacts included: "The bow and arrow herein described, consisting of the tubular handle A, cross-piece 1), spring B, having guide-loop O, and the arrow 1) with shoulder 12, combined to operate substantially as set forth." The OCR has garbled the reference letters — contextually, "1)" is letter D, "O" is letter C, and "12" is lowercase d. Note also an internal inconsistency worth flagging if anyone ever litigates the disclosure (they cannot litigate the claim): the body text describes a single-spring alternative with "a guide-loop, U" while the claim recites guide-loop C.

Estoppel landscape: none, and none needed. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner who obtained a final written decision. No FWD exists, so no party — petitioner, privy, or real party in interest — is estopped from anything. Correspondingly, there are no prior-art grounds to preserve: everything in the 1875 specification has been public since December 1875 and is § 102(b) art against any modern patent, which is the only respect in which US171192A still has any legal utility (as a printed publication, not as a claim set).

Pattern signals: all negative. No petitioner has filed once, let alone multiple times. There is no patent-owner appeal strategy because there is no owner asserting anything. There is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) in the chain, and there never will be — defensive aggregators challenge live claims. The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list and the F41B7/00 ("spring guns") classification are modern retrospective annotations, not evidence of prosecution or litigation activity.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and someone is asserting US171192A against you: the correct response is not an IPR petition. It is a demand for the plaintiff's chain of title and standing, followed by a Rule 11 / § 285 letter. The patent's legal status is "Expired - Lifetime," anticipated expiration 1892-12-14 — see the Google Patents record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US171192](/patent/US171192)/en. All maintenance-fee and term questions were resolved in the 19th century.
• There is no FWD to link to, and I will not fabricate one. Because no Final Written Decision exists, I cannot point you to a PTAB decision or a CourtListener docket entry for this patent, and any such citation would be invented. The absence of PTAB activity is, as the assignment notes, itself a signal — but here it is a signal of expiration, not of a hardened patent that has simply evaded challenge.
• If a client asks whether to file an IPR defensively: no. There is no claim to cancel, § 315(b)'s one-year bar is irrelevant, and the fee alone exceeds the value of the exercise. Redirect the budget to determining whether the demand letter is itself actionable.
• Caveat on my confidence: I could not locate any USPTO PTAB Decisions entry, PTAB E2E proceeding, or CAFC opinion touching US171192A, and the ODP block supplied in this prompt reports no proceedings. I am confident on the expiration arithmetic and the statutory unavailability of PGR/CBM. If the asserting party claims an unexpired continuation or reissue descending from this 1875 disclosure, that would be a different patent number with a different record — ask for it, because US171192A itself is not it.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent.

Research note on source coverage (read first)

Before the sections, one coverage fact drives this entire analysis and comes from USPTO's own documentation: the Patent Assignment Search database contains recorded assignment information back to August 1980 (USPTO, Assignment Database Webinar, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). Older reel/frame coverage exists for roughly the 1950s–1980 window, but reassignment data in commercial feeds generally runs 1980+ (IFI Claims date-coverage table, https://clarivate.com/life-sciences-healthcare/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/dlm_uploads/dialog-pro-ifi_claims_us_patents_and_legal_status-041521.pdf). And per MPEP 301.01, assignment records recorded before May 1, 1957 are not held by USPTO at all — they are maintained by NARA (restated at https://blueironip.com/ufaqs/how-can-i-obtain-copies-of-patent-assignment-records/).

US 171,192 issued 1875-12-14 and expired 1892-12-14. It sits 85 years below the floor of the online assignment database. Any 1875–1892 conveyance of this patent would live in USPTO's 19th-century liber volumes, now at NARA — not in Assignment Center. I searched Assignment Center-equivalent records by patent number 171192, by 171,192, and by assignor name Teed; nothing for this patent was returned. I am stating that plainly, and I am also completing the remaining sections, because the required verdict taxonomy explicitly includes a "no records" outcome.

Inventors

• Sole inventor. The specification names one inventor only; filing date 1875-11-06, grant 1875-12-14.
• Unusual-pattern check — departures within 12 months: not applicable and not assessable. There is no assignee entity and therefore no "original assignee" from which an inventor could depart. There is also no employment relationship disclosed on the face of the patent.
• Attesting witnesses on the specification: G. M. Nye and A. F. Mosher. These are 19th-century signature witnesses, not attorneys or agents of record, and not assignment correspondents. I flag them only so they are not mis-read later as prosecution counsel. No attorney/agent is named anywhere on the printed patent.
• Caution on identity: I could not independently corroborate Teed's occupation, business, or any corporate affiliation from contemporaneous sources. Elmira, NY in 1875 was a rail and manufacturing town, but I will not assert an employer for him on that basis.

Original assignee

None. US 171,192 issued to Colby F. Teed personally, in his individual capacity.

• The grant is in the form "Be it known that I, COLBY F. TEED, of Elmira… have invented" — the standard unassigned individual-inventor grant of the era. There is no "assignor to" language, no corporate name, and the Google Patents record for US171192A carries no Assignee field.
• Product shipped embodying the claims: not determinable, and almost certainly no meaningful commercial product. The disclosure is a single-claim spring-projector — a tubular handle with an end-to-end perforation, a wooden cross-board, one or more flat annulus-form wire springs, a metal guide-loop C, and a spear-headed arrow D. It is a toy/novelty-grade bow-and-arrow launcher, not an industrial article.
• Primary line of business: the disclosed subject matter indicates nothing about a business. Not determinable.
• Current status: not applicable. There is no entity to be operating, acquired, dissolved, or in bankruptcy. The inventor-owner is the only party ever of record, and the patent's status is "Expired – Lifetime," anticipated expiration 1892-12-14.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for US patent 171,192.

Consequently there is no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no assignor/assignee pair, no execution date, no recording date, and no correspondent of record to report. I will not reconstruct or approximate any of these fields.

Two points that are findings rather than gaps:

1. The absence is structural, not incidental. The online database begins August 1980; this patent terminated 88 years earlier. A null result here is exactly what a correctly functioning query returns.
2. The pre-1957 window is unexamined, not disproven. I cannot affirm that Teed never assigned this patent during its 1875–1892 life. What I can say is that (a) no assignment is printed on the patent, (b) no online record exists, and (c) determining otherwise requires a manual NARA pull of pre-1957 assignment records and the Commissioner of Patents' annual Official Gazette assignment notices for 1875–1892 — a records set I cannot query here.

Correspondent analysis — short: there is no correspondent of record because there is no recorded conveyance. The recurrence signal the assignment asks me to hunt for (the one lawyer running many anonymous LLCs) cannot exist in a chain of zero recorded transfers, and I decline to manufacture a name to fill the field.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 171192
    1875 : Application filed Nov 6 by Colby F Teed
         : Patent issued Dec 14 to Teed alone
         : No assignee named on the grant
    1892 : Patent term expires Dec 14
    1957 : USPTO pre-1957 records moved to NARA
    1980 : Online assignment database begins
         : No record of this patent in it

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Cross-references checked and negative: RPX Insurance and Unified Patents asserter directories (no entity to look up), SEC 10-K/8-K filings (no corporate assignor or assignee), Docket Alarm/Justia/RPX Insight (no litigation → no transfer-to-asserter to find), and Google Patents legal events (the page shows only Application granted, Publication of US171192A, and Anticipated expiration — no assignment events).

Verdict

Insufficient data — but the insufficiency runs in a benign direction.

Justification: USPTO Assignment Center returns no reel/frame, no conveyance, and no correspondent for US 171,192, which is the expected result for a patent that expired 1892-12-14 and predates the online assignment database's August 1980 coverage by roughly a century (https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). The patent issued unassigned to Colby F. Teed personally on 1875-12-14, with no Assignee field on the grant — so the operative finding is not "the original assignee still owns it," but "there was never an assignee of record to begin with." None of the eight NPE/privateering/fire-sale/defensive-aggregator signals can be evaluated as anything but not present, because every one of them requires at least one recorded transfer, and there is not one.

Two limits I will not paper over. First, a null online result for an 1875 patent does not prove no assignment ever occurred; pre-1957 records sit at NARA under MPEP 301.01, and a 19th-century transfer would be documented only there or in Official Gazette assignment notices. That is the correct next step if anyone genuinely needs a title opinion — and, given the 134-year-old expiration, that step has no commercial value.

Verification: run the patent-number search yourself at the USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ or the equivalent interface at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) entering 171192, then 171,192, then assignor Teed. The expected and correct return is an empty result set.

Contradiction flag: none. This analysis is consistent with the previously generated litigation and PTAB sections — no litigation, no PTAB proceedings, expired 1892 — and adds the ownership finding that the patent was never assigned of record. If a demand letter ever cites "US171192A" together with a chain-of-title or assignment exhibit, that exhibit cannot be a USPTO-recorded document for this patent number, and it should be challenged on that ground.

I'll search for citation data specific to US171192 and for contemporaneous prior art.

Prior-Art Report — US Patent 171,192 (literal ID "171192")

Scope run: USPTO/Google Patents record for US171192A at https://patents.google.com/patent/US171192/en, plus targeted searches for citation data on the number "171192" / "171,192" and for contemporaneous (pre-1875) spring-bow/spring-gun art. No results for any other number are reported here, per the strict-ID rule.

1. Bottom line up front

US 171,192 has no patent citations of record — zero. The Google Patents record for US171192A contains no "Citations" (patent-literature) block, no "References Cited," and no examin-er-cited art. This is not a search failure; it is a property of the document. The "References Cited" section on US printed patents is a 20th-century convention. An 1875 Letters Patent was printed as drawings + specification + claim only, and the examiner's references (if any were used) were not published on the patent. I therefore cannot give you "each patent citation for 171192," because the record does not contain any, and I will not manufacture a list.

What the record does contain is (a) an algorithmic "Similar Documents" list that is not a citation list and that is mostly irrelevant to prior art because most entries post-date the patent, and (b) a classification (F41B 7/00, spring guns) plus keyword tags. Both are retrospective, machine-generated annotations.

I separately located a small set of genuinely pre-1875 analogous art by searching the era's spring-gun/toy-bow patents. Those are third-party candidates, not citations of record, and none of them anticipates the sole claim.

2. Citations of record: verified count = 0

Practical consequence: any "prior art cited against 171192" claim by a third party cannot be sourced to the patent's face. If someone asserts that a specific reference was "cited in 171192," ask for the document — there is no such citation in the public record.

3. The "Similar Documents" list is NOT prior art — and mostly cannot be

Google Patents displays a 25-entry "Similar Documents" list beneath US171192A. These are algorithmic neighbors, not citations, and titles are frequently OCR-corrupted (e.g., "US273388A … Abijah peatt" is a personal name, not a title). Filing date of 171192 is 1875-11-06.

Only six of the twenty-five antedate the 1875-11-06 filing, and all six are mechanically unrelated (rakes, umbrellas, hoops, pounders, augers, a mechanical movement). Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, a reference must disclose the claimed elements to anticipate; none of these touches projectile launching, springs, or bores. Anticipation by any "Similar Documents" entry: none.

4. Independent prior-art search — genuinely ante-dated candidates

These are art references I located by searching, not citations appearing on US171192A. I flag each with its date as printed, including OCR contradictions.

Nothing in this section is a citation on US171192A, and nothing in it is an anticipation. They are the best analogous art I could verify exists in the relevant window, and each one proves the opposite point: the 171192 combination was narrow.

5. § 102 analysis against the sole claim (claim 1)

The patent has exactly one claim, and it is a single-element combination claim. Quoting the record verbatim, OCR artifacts intact:

"The bow and arrow herein described, consisting of the tubular handle A, cross-piece 1), spring B, having guide-loop O, and the arrow 1) with shoulder 12, combined to operate substantially as set forth."

Element breakdown for § 102 purposes (using the parties' reference characters as best recoverable — see § 6 caveat):

1. tubular handle A with an end-to-end perforation a receiving the arrow;
2. cross-piece/board rigidly secured near the upper end of the handle;
3. flat or wire spring B, bent in the form of an annulus, mounted on the cross-piece;
4. guide-loop C at the top of the spring, in line with perforation a;
5. arrow D with an enlarged spear-head and a shoulder bearing against the spring, the whole "combined to operate substantially as set forth."

Conclusion: no located reference discloses all five elements arranged as claimed. Anticipation risk is nil on the available record. The realistic 19th-century attack on this claim would not have been § 102 anticipation but a § 103-style "want of invention" / aggregation argument, or an on-sale/public-use defense — neither of which produces an anticipating reference.

6. Contradictions flagged (as required)

1. Shoulder reference character — internal conflict between the prior sections. The Patent summary reads "shoulder 12" as lowercase b; the PTAB section reads the same "12" as lowercase d. Both cannot be right. The claim text is corrupt at that character, and I have not resolved it. Treat the shoulder's letter as unverified.
2. Cross-piece vs. arrow letter collision. The prior summary assigns D to the cross-piece and also D to the arrow, while the description's OCR renders the board as "I)" and the arrow as "D." A well-formed 1875 patent would not use one letter for two elements. My element table above therefore names elements positionally ("cross-piece," "arrow") rather than committing to a letter.
3. Date contradictions in two candidate references (US 269,249, US 358,526) — heading dates, filing dates, and serial numbers disagree with each other and, in the case of 358,526, with the patent number range. I have recorded both values literally rather than auto-correcting, per the strict-ID rule.
4. Era mismatch on the legal standard. US171192A was examined under the Patent Act of 1870 (§ 24 novelty standard). 35 U.S.C. § 102 did not exist until 1952. The § 102 table above is a modern retro-fit, useful for evaluating the claim as a printed publication against later patents, but it does not describe how this patent was actually examined.

7. Confidence and limits

• High confidence: there is no citation list on US171192A; the Similar Documents list is not citations; the majority of that list post-dates 1875 and is ineligible; the patent has one claim only.
• Medium confidence: the exact printing dates of US 269,249 and US 358,526, because of the OCR contradictions noted. Both require a paper/USPTO image check.
• I could not perform an exhaustive pre-1875 search. Pre-1900 US patents are only partially OCR-indexed, and there is no reliable full-text search over 1836–1870 subject matter. There may be additional 1850s–1870s spring-bow, toy-gun, or arrow-projector patents that I did not surface. I state this as a limitation rather than claim completeness.
• No litigation or PTAB citation context exists to corroborate any prior-art theory (consistent with the earlier sections: no suits, no AIA proceedings, anticipated expiration 1892-12-14).

Bottom line: For US 171,192, the prior-art citation count is zero — the patent has no citations of record at all. The nearest reference-like material on its public record is an algorithmic "Similar Documents" list in which 19 of 25 entries post-date the patent and the six ante-dated entries are unrelated arts (rakes, umbrellas, hoops). Independent searching located three pre-1875 or near-contemporaneous analogous references — US 42,317 (Stevens, 1864), US 87,344 (Judd, 1869), and the subject-matter neighbor US 269,249 (Wilcox, date disputed) — but none discloses all five elements of the single claim, so none anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102, and no anticipating reference exists on the record.

I'll ground this in the actual prior-art material on the record before analyzing.

Useful — the searches surfaced genuine pre-1875 references. Let me verify the key ones before relying on them.

Obviousness Analysis — US 171,192 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the prior sections: this analysis takes as given the single combination claim already quoted, the "Expired – Lifetime" status with anticipated expiration 1892-12-14, and the zero-litigation / zero-PTAB findings. It does not repeat them. One methodological flag is raised up front, then the substance.

1. Two thresholds that precede any § 103 analysis

1.1 § 103 did not exist in 1875. Section 103 was enacted July 19, 1952 (effective January 1, 1953). US 171,192 was examined under the Act of July 8, 1870, where the operative test was the "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850). A modern § 103 analysis is therefore a retrospective reconstruction — useful for understanding why the claim issued, and analytically identical in substance, but not the law that governed. This is an academic exercise: the right lapsed 1892-12-14, so no rejection, IPR, or invalidity judgment can attach today.

1.2 Which prior-art regime applies. Because the effective filing date (November 6, 1875) precedes March 16, 2013, AIA § 102 does not apply. Under pre-AIA § 102 the windows are:

• § 102(a): known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication anywhere, before the applicant's invention date (bounded by Nov. 6, 1875, or potentially earlier if Teed proves earlier conception).
• § 102(b): patented or described in a printed publication, or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year before the U.S. filing date — i.e., before November 6, 1874.

Anything dated after November 6, 1875 is categorically unavailable. That rule disposes of most of the page's "prior art" section, as shown next.

2. What the page's "Prior Art" section actually supplies

Bottom line on the page's own prior art: it cannot support a § 103 rejection. A proper analysis therefore requires pre-1875 references. The searches conducted for this task located several; they are set out below with their date-verification caveats.

3. Verified candidate references (pre-November 6, 1875)

4. Element-by-element mapping and KSR rationales

PHOSITA here is a competent 19th-century mechanic/toysmith/gunsmith: familiar with leaf, spiral, and coiled-wire springs, with firearm breeching and bores, and with the 1871–75 commercial spring-air gun trade — not an engineer with formal training.

The clearest motivation story: a worker in this field in 1875, facing a demand (documented by 1871 mass manufacture of Quackenbush spring-air pistols) for a cheaper, simpler, self-contained launcher that needs no bowstring, no air chamber, and no separate bow limb, had every reason to (i) take the bored-grip-housing-spring idea from '638, (ii) take the coiled-wire spring as the energy store from '698, and (iii) drop the air chamber and piston, driving the arrow directly. The combination yields nothing more than the predictable sum of its parts. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398, 416–17 (2007) ("the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results"); id. at 417 (predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions). Stevens' own stated rationale — coils give "sufficient elasticity from common wire, and a cheaper article is thus obtained" — is the kind of articulated design incentive KSR treats as supplying the "why" for a combination.

5. Arguments the patent owner would make (and their weight)

1. No reference teaches the annulus-form flat spring with a guide-loop clinched under its ends. This is the strongest technically-grounded defense. The page's prior-art section supplies nothing on this; the references I located supply ring/coil springs generally but not this specific clinched-loop/spring-end structure. Whether this survives depends on whether a pre-1875 ring-spring or wire-loop reference can be produced — which I could not verify, and I decline to fabricate one.
2. Quackenbush teaches air propulsion, not direct spring propulsion. A teaching-away argument is available in principle but weak: '638 also discloses spring guns used to discharge projectiles, and removing a pump/air chamber as a simplification is exactly the sort of predictable expedient KSR discounts.
3. Claim specificity / narrow scope. The claim is limited to the elements "combined to operate substantially as set forth." That narrowness cuts both ways: it creates non-infringement room, but each element's specificity also gives the patentee a hook for nonobviousness of the arrangement (stapled board, spaced annular springs, clinched guideway).
4. Missing elements cut against the patentee. The claim recites no trigger, sear, or catch, and the specification's single-spring alternative uses "guide-loop U" while the claim recites guide-loop C — an internal inconsistency already flagged in the PTAB section. A broader claim (absent any release mechanism) is more exposed to § 103, not less.

Secondary considerations (Graham factors): the record offers none. There is no named assignee, no commercial-success evidence, no copying evidence, no documented skepticism. Most tellingly, Quackenbush's spring-air pistols were in mass manufacture from 1871 — four years before Teed's filing — which is evidence of contemporaneous, independent work in the same field, the same reasoning a modern petitioner used when arguing that "independently made, simultaneous inventions… are persuasive evidence that the claimed invention was the product only of ordinary mechanical or engineering skill" (PTAB IPR2023-00773, Ex. 1003 ¶ 189, cited only as a methodological analogue).

6. Conclusion

Probable § 103 outcome: the sole claim would most likely be held obvious, and specifically obvious over US 115,638 (Quackenbush, June 6, 1871) in view of US 28,698 (Stevens, June 12, 1860), with US 122,193 (Quackenbush, Dec. 26, 1871) supplying the spring-projectile-retainer teaching. Every claimed element is a familiar element performing its established function, the field of endeavor is identical (both are spring projectile launchers, as the F41B 7/00 classification of US171192 itself reflects), and articulated motivations — cost reduction from common wire, compactness by housing the spring in the handle, and elimination of the bowstring/air chamber — are present in the art.

But the confidence level is qualified, and I will state exactly why:

• The page's own prior-art section is legally inert. Its keywords are search terms, its Similar Documents are almost all post-1875, and its classification is a modern annotation. Anyone relying on that section alone to invalidate US171192 has cited nothing.
• The references that do carry the analysis were located by me, not supplied by the page, and two carry OCR number defects I have flagged rather than corrected (122,193 vs. 129,193; 28,698 vs. 28,608). Their bibliographic data should be confirmed against a paper Official Gazette or the Commissioner's Annual Reports before any of this is treated as a formal rejection.
• The clinched guide-loop on the annular spring is the one element I could not map to a verified pre-1875 reference. If a genuine pre-filing reference for that structure cannot be found, an examiner (or a court) could sustain the claim on that narrow point even while rejecting the rest of the combination as a predictable substitution.

Practical significance: none. As established in the earlier sections, US171192A is "Expired – Lifetime" with anticipated expiration 1892-12-14 — it cannot be infringed, asserted, or subjected to an IPR, and the analysis above is therefore of historical and archival value only. Its continuing legal utility is as a printed publication under pre-AIA § 102(b) — art available against later-filed claims, which is precisely the role the claims of Quackenbush '638, '122,193, and Stevens '698 play against it here.

Sources: Google Patents record, https://patents.google.com/patent/US171192/en (authoritative for the specification and claim text); US115638.pdf and US122193.pdf, patentimages.storage.googleapis.com; US28698.pdf, patentimages.storage.googleapis.com; Commissioner of Patents' Annual Report for 1871 (patentee list); Smith's Standard Encyclopedia of Gas, Air and Spring Guns; Pollard's History of Firearms.