US 201377

I'll verify this against live sources before summarizing.

US Patent 201,377 — Research Summary

Scope note up front: I searched for the exact number 201,377. Everything below is tied to that single patent. See the "Similar numbers — do not confuse" section at the end, because two unrelated 2026 matters involving a "377" surfaced and must not be merged with this record.

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1. Bibliographic data

Caveat on "assignee": I do not have authoritative chain-of-title data for this patent. The absence of a recorded assignee on the face of the document and in the Google Patents record is what I can verify; a separate USPTO Assignment-record search was not obtained, so I cannot rule out an unrecorded or later-recorded assignment. Treat "none" as "none of record," not as a proven negative.

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2. Abstract

There is no abstract. US 201,377 issued in 1878, well before abstracts were required on US patents (that practice began with the 1952 Act). Google Patents substitutes a "Definitions" field drawn from the specification. Its operative text:

"This invention relates to, and is intended to cover, said omission; and consists in one or more sprue or gate sticks being placed in such manner as to rest on the follower or templet-plate, and, during the compression of the sand, to form a mold. They are forced through suitable apertures made to receive them in the binder-plate."

The specification's own framing of the invention:

"In our several applications (filed March 9, 1877, May 7, 1877, June 20, 1877, and September 4, 1877) … we omitted a description of the manner in which the sprue or gate holes were formed to receive the molten metal in the molds. This invention relates to, and is intended to cover, said omission…"

So the patent is expressly a gap-filler for a family of earlier Aikin/Drummond sand-molding machine applications — it claims the sprue/gate-forming sub-combination that the earlier filings described the machines but not the sprue-forming method.

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3. Independent claims — plain language

There is exactly one claim, and it is independent. There are no dependent claims.

The claim as printed (verbatim, including the original's idiosyncratic lettering):

"The combination of the movable compressor G, the sprue or gate sticks D set thereon, and a binder-plate, E, having aperture D, through which the gate-stick or sprues pass while sand is being compressed, for the purpose of forming sprue or gate holes in molds to receive molten metal, substantially as set forth."

Plain-language breakdown

The claim is a three-element combination claim with a functional purpose statement. All three elements must be present together:

1. A movable compressor (G). In the specification, G is the follower- or templet-plate — the plate that presses upward into the flask to compact the sand. The claim calls it "the movable compressor," so the plate must move; the sprue sticks ride on it.
2. Sprue or gate sticks (D) resting on that compressor. These are the physical pins/rods that displace sand during compaction so that a vertical channel is left behind after the sand is set. They are "set thereon" — carried by the compressor, not by the flask or a separate fixture.
3. A binder-plate (E) with a matching aperture (D) for each stick. The binder-plate caps the flask and reacts the compaction thrust. Its apertures are aligned over the sticks so that, as the sand is compressed and the compressor advances, each stick passes up and out through its aperture.

Functional limitation / purpose clause: "for the purpose of forming sprue or gate holes in molds to receive molten metal." This ties the structure to the result — a finished pour channel in the mold — and is a purpose recitation, not a separate structural element.

Method of use described in the specification (context, not claimed): patterns and follower-plate positioned → flask placed on sand-box B → sprue/gate sticks D set on the follower/templet-plate G → sand filled into flask → binder-plate E brought over with apertures D' aligned over the sticks → power applied to compress the sand → while compressing, the sticks pass up through apertures D' in the binder-plate → the workman removes the sticks, leaving a perfectly molded sprue/gate → flask removed and the cycle repeated.

Claim scope in one sentence: A press-molding machine in which the sprue-forming pins are carried on the moving compaction plate and escape upward through holes in the stationary top binder-plate as the sand is squeezed — i.e., the sprue is formed by the compaction stroke itself, rather than being cut or cored in a separate step.

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4. Family / continuity context

The specification's four referenced earlier applications correspond to Aikin & Drummond filings that I could retrieve:

• US 195,070 — "Improvement in sand-molding machines for metal castings," filed March 9, 1877, granted September 11, 1877 (sectional follower-plate; patterns withdrawn while intermediate sections support the sand).
• US 195,786 — "Improvement in sand-molding machines," filed September 4, 1877, granted October 2, 1877 (stationary templet-plate with reciprocating pattern-head; sand-box and half-flask drawn down to compress).
• The May 7, 1877 and June 20, 1877 filings I did not retrieve under those exact numbers.
• US 291,124 (later Aikin & Drummond patent) expressly refers back to "our said previous patents" and describes a binder-plate and the practice of stopping the plunger "in order to remove the sprue-stick" — confirming the commercial embodiment of the 201,377 concept persisted in their later machines.

Forward citation of record: US 201,377 is cited as prior art by US 3,234,602 (Pettibone Mulliken Corp.), "Self-aligning pouring cup pattern and sprue punch assembly," priority November 23, 1962, granted February 15, 1966. The examiner's citation line there reads: "201,377 3/1878 Aiken et al 22-38." Note the surname spelling "Aiken" in that citation versus "Aikin" in the patent itself — I am reporting the citation literally and not correcting it. Also note this is the patent's only forward citation; it took 84 years for it to be cited.

Commercial/historical note (search-derived, lower confidence): A German-language report on the 1878 Paris Exposition (Eisen und Stahl auf der Welt-Ausstellung in Paris im Jahre 1878) records molding machines exhibited by "Ackin & Drummont in Louisville" — almost certainly Aikin & Drummond — and is dismissive of them, criticizing single-shot compression as unable to produce uniform sand density. Treat the name transliteration and the attribution as probable but not verified.

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5. Litigation status — USPTO and CAFC

No litigation, IPR, PGR, or CAFC appeal involving US 201,377 exists or can exist. I found nothing, and the reason is structural rather than a search gap:

• The patent's term ended March 19, 1895. There is no enforceable right to assert, and the America Invents Act post-grant proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) did not exist before September 2012.
• I reviewed the CAFC's published September 2026 oral argument calendar (revised August 19, 2026) and found no entry referencing 201,377: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/OralArguments/PublicCalendar-September2026.pdf
• Targeted queries for "US 201,377" / "U.S. Patent No. 201,377" returned no complaints, dockets, or appellate filings.

Confidence: high. The only residual uncertainty is completeness of docket coverage — no single search reaches every 2026 district court docket — but given the 1895 expiration, a live case is not a realistic possibility.

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6. Similar numbers — do not confuse with US 201,377

These surfaced in the same searches and are different patents/matters entirely:

If your docket search returned a "377" hit, verify whether it is one of the above before attributing it to US 201,377.

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7. Uncertainty notes

I want to be explicit about what is and is not solid:

1. Assignee — not authoritative. "None of record" is based on the patent face and Google Patents bibliographic data. I did not obtain a USPTO Assignment database extract.
2. Two unretrieved family members. The May 7, 1877 and June 20, 1877 applications named in the specification were not matched to numbers in my searches. I am not going to guess at their numbers.
3. Reference-letter inconsistencies in the original. The specification has OCR/printing artifacts that matter for claim reading: the flask is called "O" in one line and "G" in another; the aperture is labeled "D" using the same letter as the sprue stick D (almost certainly a misprint or a lost prime mark); and G is both the follower/templet-plate in the description and "the movable compressor" in the claim. I have flagged these rather than silently normalizing them. A claim-construction analysis of this patent should begin from the printed original and its drawing sheets, not from OCR.
4. Historical commentary (the 1878 Paris Exposition report) is search-derived and low-confidence as to name spelling.
5. No abstract exists — the text I quoted in §2 is Google Patents' "Definitions" field, not an official abstract. Anyone citing "the abstract of US 201,377" in a brief would be citing a modern database artifact, not the patent document.

I'll search for litigation records involving US Patent 201377.

Let me run additional targeted searches to be thorough.

Answer: No litigation involving US Patent 201,377 was found

Bottom line: Based on searches of patent-litigation aggregators, federal docket sources, and general web sources, I found no litigation — no district court case, no ITC Section 337 investigation, no PTAB/PTO post-issuance proceeding, and no Federal Circuit appeal — involving U.S. Patent No. 201,377. I will not manufacture a case list; there are no cases to list.

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1. The patent at issue (literally, ID 201,377)

Two threshold points that bear directly on the litigation question:

• The patent has been expired for over 130 years. Under the term structure applicable to an 1878 grant (17 years from grant, per the term recorded on the face of the record), the enforceable term ended March 19, 1895. An expired patent cannot support a live infringement action, and there is no possibility of a pending case today.
• There is no assignee of record in the fetched data, which is itself a signal that this patent was never part of a modern monetization program.

2. Sources searched and what they returned

3. Near-miss hits that must NOT be attributed to this patent

Every litigation-flavored result my searches returned concerned a different patent that happens to end in "377." Under the literal-interpretation rule, these are distinct identifiers and are excluded:

• U.S. 8,277,377 — Philips North America LLC v. Fitbit, Inc., No. 1:19-cv-11586-FDS (D. Mass.), and Philips North America LLC v. [Garmin International, Inc.](/litigations/by-defendant/Garmin%20International%2C%20Inc.), No. 2:19-cv-06301-AB-KS (C.D. Cal.). (Claim 1 held directed to an abstract idea; summary judgment of non-infringement as to Garmin.)
• U.S. 8,417,377 — Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC v. The Coca-Cola Company, No. 1:16-cv-01241-TWT (N.D. Ga.).
• U.S. 5,136,377 ("Johnston '377") — counterclaims in the MPT/LG Electronics matter, e.g. Multimedia Patent Trust litigation, No. 10-cv-02618 (S.D. Cal.).
• U.S. 9,041,377 — IPR2024-01158 (Reed accused product), a far more recent grant.
• U.S. 6,491,377 — Certain Inkjet Printers, Printheads, and Ink Cartridges, Inv. No. 337-TA-1011 (USITC, instituted June 27, 2016, complainant HP Inc.).
• The OrthoPediatrics "’377 Patent" ("Point and Click Alignment Method for Orthopedic Surgeons…," issued April 16, 2019) — OrthoPediatrics Corp. v. Wishbone Medical, Inc., No. 3:20-cv-00929-DRL-MGG (N.D. Ind., filed Oct. 30, 2020; settled and dismissed with prejudice, 2023). This is the single most commonly surfaced "‘377 patent" in current litigation reporting, and it is not US 201,377.

4. Important caveats on the completeness of this answer

I want to be explicit about the limits, because a bare "no litigation" can be misleading for a patent of this vintage:

1. Nineteenth-century enforcement is poorly captured in modern databases. Aikin and Drummond sued (if they sued at all) in the U.S. circuit courts under the pre-1891/1911 judicial structure. Such equity and law actions were frequently unreported, and many survive only in manuscript docket books or in West's Federal Cases (which collects selected circuit and district opinions through 1880). PACER, CourtListener/RECAP, and commercial litigation databases do not comprehensively cover 1878–1895 filings.
2. A reissue or a later Aikin/Drummond patent could have been the instrument of suit. The record shows a series of related Aikin & Drummond grants (e.g., US 195,070, Sept. 11, 1877; US 195,784, Oct. 2, 1877), and a later business entity ("Wm. Aikin, late of the firm of Aikin & Drummond," and "Aikin & Lighton, Iron City Foundry and Machine Works," advertising "Aikin's Improved Sand Molding Machine"). Any enforcement activity may be indexed under those numbers or that trade identity rather than under "201,377."
3. I could not access every source I would want. I could not run a live, patent-number-keyed query against the Unified Patents case list, a PACER docket search, or a Westlaw/Lexis Federal Cases search in this session. My conclusion is based on the sources enumerated in §2.

5. Recommended next steps if you need a defensible clearance statement

• Search the USPTO Patent Assignment / reassignment records for 201,377 to identify any chain of title and any assignee that might have had standing to sue.
• Search West's Federal Cases and the Commissioner of Patents' annual reports (1878–1895) for Aikin or Drummond as plaintiff.
• Search Bloomberg Law / Docket Navigator / Lex Machina on the literal string 201377 restricted to pre-1900 and to 377 patents generally, to confirm the negative.
• If this is for an invalidity/prior-art or freedom-to-operate purpose rather than a litigation-history purpose, note that the patent's expiry and its citation as prior art are the operative facts — not its litigation history.

Conclusion: No litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 201,377, and none is legally possible today given its 1895 expiration. Every "377" case surfaced by search belongs to a different patent number.

Proceedings overview

Zero PTAB proceedings. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings (IPR / PGR / CBM) for US 201,377, and web research surfaces none — no petitions, no institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, no appeals, and nothing at Unified Patents or on the PTAB's public docket. The breakdown is therefore trivially: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0. The bottom-line defensive posture cuts both ways: you do not face an IPR-hardened patent, because you do not face a live patent at all. US 201,377 issued 1878‑03‑19 with a 17-year term and its Legal Status on Google Patents is "Expired – Lifetime," with an "Anticipated expiration" event dated 1895‑03‑19. (Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US201377](/patent/US201377)/en.) Any demand letter citing "US Patent 201,377" is asserting a patent that has been in the public domain for over 130 years.

A structural note first, because it explains the empty docket and is the single most useful thing to give a client: AIA trials did not exist before 2012‑09‑16, and PGR is unavailable for a patent with a pre‑AIA effective filing date (pre‑2013‑03‑16); CBM review sunset on 2020‑09‑16. The PTAB itself did not exist as an adjudicatory body until the AIA, and the Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982. This patent's entire enforceable life ended 37 years before the Federal Circuit was created. The absence of PTAB activity here is not a signal about assertion history; it is a statistical certainty.

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No proceedings to report

There is no IPR, PGR, CBM, or derivation proceeding on file for US 201,377, and consequently no petitioner, no APJ panel, no grounds, no institution decision, no FWD, no settlement, no appeal, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to analyze. I will not manufacture proceeding numbers to fill the template.

For auditability, here is what I checked and what I found:

• ODP / structured data (canonical): no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest.
• Google Patents "Cited By" table: exactly one forward citation — US 3,234,602 A (Self‑aligning pouring cup pattern and sprue punch assembly, Pettibone Mulliken Corp., filed 1962‑11‑23, published 1966‑02‑15), flagged as cited by examiner. That is a 1960s examiner citation in a prosecution file, not a PTAB proceeding, and it is affirmative evidence that 201,377 has been treated as prior art — not as an enforceable right — for well over half a century.
• Google Patents "Similar Documents" table: twenty-two entries, all pre‑1910 US patents including contemporaneous Aikin & Drummond filings (e.g., US 195,785 A (1877‑10‑02); US 195,070 A (1877‑09‑11); US 191,377‑era siblings). These are family/same-field art, not challenges.
• Web search for PTAB/CAFC activity: nothing relevant. Hits for "201377" resolve to unrelated third-party documents — JP 2013‑201377 A (a Panasonic reactor device publication), WO 2016/201377 A1, and Hungarian patent 201377 — none of which relate to this patent.

Number-confusion warning. The identifier "US 201377" is easy to confuse with a modern pre‑grant publication series (e.g., a "US 2013/0xxxxxx A1"‑style number, or a foreign/regional number). If a demand letter quotes "201,377" alongside claim language about sand molding, flasks, sprue sticks, or a binder plate, treat it as this 1878 patent. If it quotes claim language about reactance devices, vaccines, or construction reinforcement, it is one of the unrelated documents above and you should verify the actual patent number before responding.

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Strategic summary

Claim status of US 201,377. The patent has one claim — a combination claim, not a system with independent/dependent tiers. Verbatim from the specification (letter references as printed, including the source's OCR rendering): "The combination of the movable compressor G, thev s'prue or gate sticks D set thereon, and a binder‑plate, E, having aperture D, through which the gate‑stick or sprues pass while sand is being compressed, for the purpose of forming sprue or gate holes in molds to receive molten metal, substantially as set forth." There are no canceled claims, no confirmed claims, and no untested claims — there is one claim, it was never challenged in an AIA trial, and it expired on 1895‑03‑19. Everything downstream of that date is public domain. Note a latent defect worth knowing about if you ever have to discuss the claim: the claim body calls element G the "movable compressor," while the descriptive portion of the same specification calls G the "follower or templet‑plate," and the reference letter D denotes both the sprue/gate stick and the aperture in the binder plate. Under modern § 112 that antecedent-basis and indefiniteness picture would be a serious problem; it is moot here, but it is a useful illustration of how far 19th‑century claiming practice sat from contemporary standards.

Estoppel landscape. There is none. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner, real party in interest, or privy that filed an IPR and reached a Final Written Decision. No petition was ever filed, so no party is estopped, and there are no unavailable prior‑art grounds. Equally, the § 315(b) one‑year bar from service of an infringement complaint is inert — it presupposes a served complaint on a live patent. Practically speaking, every § 102/§ 103 ground is "available" only in the academic sense: the strongest ground is the calendar. Validity defenses that would matter for a live patent — anticipatory art, obviousness, indefiniteness, the expiration date itself — are subordinate to the threshold point that an expired patent cannot be infringed.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed anything, let alone repeat filings, so there is no serial‑petitioner pattern to watch. The patent owners (William Aikin and William W. Drummond of Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky) are 19th‑century inventors; there is no present‑day assignee, no PAE, no defensive aggregator chain, and no patent owner actively litigating or appealing. The prosecution family context is worth noting for completeness: the specification states it covers an omission from the inventors' four earlier applications "filed March 9, 1877, May 7, 1877, June 20, 1877, and September 4, 1877," and the sibling US 195,786 A (patented 1877‑10‑02) states an application filing date of 1877‑09‑04, matching one of those four. That is a 19th‑century priority story, not a PTAB one. I did not locate any interference record from the examiner‑in‑chief era in the sources I consulted; if one existed, it is not indexed in any database I can reach, and I will not assert that it did or did not happen.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites US 201,377, your response is not a PTAB response — it is a one‑paragraph letter. Do not file an IPR (there is nothing to review), do not budget for a validity opinion on the merits beyond what you need to say "expired," and do not accept a standstill or tolling agreement premised on the patent's validity. The disposition you want to quote is the expiration record itself: the Google Patents legal‑status entry showing Anticipated expiration 1895‑03‑19 at https://patents.google.com/patent/US201377/en, alongside the 17‑year term running from the 1878‑03‑19 grant. The single claim, quoted above, is in the public domain, and 35 U.S.C. § 286's six‑year damages lookback cannot reach any conduct, since § 286 measures backward from a complaint that would have to have been filed before the patent lapsed.

Verification steps worth running before you send anything. (1) Pull the patent's full‑text PDF from the Google Patents link above and confirm the grant date, the single claim, and the named inventors — the OCR in the fetched text garbles letters (the flask element renders as "O" where the drawing letter appears to be "G," and the claim reads "thev s'prue"), so quote from the PDF, not the transcript. (2) Run the number through the USPTO Patent Public Search and the PTAB public docket at https://ptab.uspto.gov to confirm for yourself that the ODP "no proceedings" result holds at the moment you respond — that is a two‑minute check and it converts a report into a verified record. (3) Search litigation filings for the patent number; I found no record of any suit on this patent, but I cannot rule out a bad‑faith filing, and a defendant's own docket search is cheap. (4) If the letter's claim language does not match the sand‑molding claim, resolve the number confusion discussed above before responding, because you may be dealing with a different, possibly live, patent that happens to share a numeric string.

If you are looking for actionable PTAB intelligence and the patent really is this one, the answer is plainly that there is none. No active proceedings means no institution deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one‑year FWD clock to calendar under 37 C.F.R. § 42.100(c). No settled proceeding means no confidential termination agreement to characterize. No FWD means no claim canceled or sustained and nothing to appeal, so there is no CAFC docket number to give you. The absence of PTAB activity is not the usual "this patent has never been asserted hard enough to attract a challenger" signal — for a patent that expired in 1895, the absence is simply the correct and only possible answer.

Ownership & Assignment Record — US Patent 201,377

Patent: US 201,377, "Improvement in Machines for Molding in Sand"
Granted: 1878‑03‑19 · Application filed: 1877‑12‑14 · Term expired (anticipated): 1895‑03‑19
Sources consulted: Google Patents legal‑events record (authoritative fetch), USPTO Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center landing pages, Filson Historical Society (Louisville) holdings, 19th‑century Birmingham, Ala. business directory.

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Inventors

Determination of employer: the two men were not employees of a corporation. They were the named partners of their own Louisville foundry and machine shop, which the Filson Historical Society catalogs as "Aikin & Drummond Variety Foundry and Machine Shop … Main Street between Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets, Louisville, Kentucky" (https://filsonhistorical.omeka.net/items/show/7902). They filed the patent as co‑inventors in their own names, so "employer at time of filing" and "original assignee" are effectively the same party.

Unusual-pattern notes:

• No corporate employer, no pre‑issue assignment. The printed patent carries no "assignor to …" recital and the specification contains no assignment clause. In 1870s practice, a pre‑issue assignment was normally recited in the patent heading ("… assignors to X"), so its absence is affirmative evidence against a pre‑issue transfer.
• Self‑financed serial filing. The specification states the inventors had earlier filed "March 9, 1877, May 7, 1877, June 20, 1877, and September 4, 1877" applications. Same‑inventor siblings in the same family include US 195,070 (filed 1877‑03‑09), US 195,784 (filed 1877‑08‑21) and US 195,786 (filed 1877‑09‑04) — note 195,784's filing date does not match any of the four recited dates, so a clean 1:1 mapping of the four recited applications to issued numbers cannot be asserted here. A later same‑firm patent, US 291,124, describes the "binder‑plate" and the manual removal of the sprue‑stick during compression as being "described in our said previous patents," i.e. it is a documented continuation of this exact line of development. (I could not re‑verify 291,124's named inventors from a full text fetch; treat the family link as high confidence but the inventor list as unverified.)
• No "all inventors departed within 12 months" pattern applies — there was no assignee to depart from.
• The specification witnesses were WM. T. Drummond and SAML. T. Shelley — a second Drummond appears as witness, consistent with a family/partnership firm rather than an institutional R&D department.

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Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventors individually. There is no assignee named on the face of US 201,377; the heading reads "WILLIAM AIKIN AND WILLIAM W. DRUMMOND, OF LOUISVILLE, KY."

• Commercial vehicle: Aikin & Drummond, a "Variety Foundry and Machine Shop" in Louisville — primary line of business: general jobbing foundry work plus machinery (a cataloged piece of their ephemera advertises a "Great Western Sugar Cane Mill").
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — this is the notable commercial point of the chain. A Birmingham, Alabama business directory lists "Wm. AIKIN, Late of the firm of Aikin & Drummond, Louisville, Ky." and "Samuel H. Lighton, Formerly with Aikin & Drummond, Louisville, Ky." trading as AIKIN & LIGHTON, Iron City Foundry and Machine Works, 2nd Ave. and 16th St., Birmingham, advertising "Manufacturers of Aikin's Improved Sand Molding Machine, Power Sifter and BUGGY LADLE for Foundry use" (https://ia800303.us.archive.org/17/items/mineralwealthofa00dubo/mineralwealthofa00dubo.pdf). So the invention was actually manufactured and sold under Aikin's name — this is an operating‑company patent, not an abstract one. Caveat: the directory is undated in the copy I retrieved; I cannot fix the year of the Aikin & Lighton advertisement, only that it post‑dates the Louisville partnership.
• Current status: the Louisville partnership evidently dissolved (Aikin is described as "late of the firm"). No corporate successor, no bankruptcy, no liquidation and no modern owner is identifiable. The patent expired 1895‑03‑19, so ownership has had no legal consequence for over 130 years.

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Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for US 201,377 in any source I was able to reach — no reel/frame, no assignor, no assignee, no correspondent.

Specifically:

• The Google Patents legal‑events record for US 201377A lists only three events — application granted (1878‑03‑19), publication (1878‑03‑19) and anticipated expiration (1895‑03‑19). Google Patents mirrors the USPTO assignment dataset, and it surfaces no Assignment, Security Agreement, Merger, Change of Name, License, Release or Correction entry for this patent.
• The face of the patent names no assignee, i.e. the inventors retained title at issuance.
• The only third‑party reference in the record is an old‑art citation, not a transfer: US 3,234,602 (Pettibone Mulliken Corp., filed 1962‑11‑23) cites "201,377 3/1878 Aiken et al." in its "References Cited by the Examiner" (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3234602). A citation is not an assignment and creates no ownership link.

Method limitation, stated plainly: I could not execute an interactive query against https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ from this environment, so this finding rests on (a) the authoritative fetched Google Patents record, which reproduces USPTO assignment events, and (b) the absence of any assignee designation on the patent itself. Pre‑1955 USPTO assignment records are also indexed in the historical "Liber" volumes rather than the modern electronic reel/frame series, and a manual Liber search was not possible here. Any such 19th‑century record would in any event concern an assignment of a patent that expired in 1895.

Per your instruction, a no‑records finding is normally the stopping point. I continue below only because your verdict taxonomy explicitly provides for this case ("Insufficient data — no records, or only the original assignment"), and because the chain has a genuine commercial fact worth recording (the Aikin & Lighton manufacture). Nothing below is inferred from absence of records as if it were evidence of ownership by anyone.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 201377
    1877 : Application filed 14 December
         : Related Aikin and Drummond patents issued
    1878 : Patent 201377 granted to Aikin and Drummond
    1880s : Aikin and Lighton manufacture Aikin Improved Sand Molding Machine
    1895 : Patent term expired
    1966 : Cited as prior art by Pettibone Mulliken
    2026 : No USPTO assignment records found

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Because there is no assignment chain at all, most signals are not merely "not present" — they have no substrate to attach to. I mark them accordingly rather than manufacturing a finding.

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Verdict

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

US 201,377 issued on 1878‑03‑19 to William Aikin and William W. Drummond individually with no assignee on its face, the Google Patents legal‑events record shows no assignment events of any kind before the patent's anticipated expiration on 1895‑03‑19, and no reel/frame, correspondent, or successor owner can be cited — so not one of the eight NPE signals has a document to rest on. The one substantive ownership‑adjacent fact in the record is commercial rather than transactional: Aikin's later firm, Aikin & Lighton / Iron City Foundry and Machine Works of Birmingham, Alabama, advertised "Aikin's Improved Sand Molding Machine" for sale, confirming the patent was worked by its inventors rather than trafficked. Any modern NPE characterization of an 1878 patent that expired in 1895 is a category error.

For verification: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search by patent number 201377); patent text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US201377A/en.

Confidence notes: high confidence on inventors, absence of assignee on the face of the patent, filing/grant dates, and the absence of recorded modern assignments; moderate confidence on the identity of the Filson‑cataloged Louisville premises as the inventors' firm; date‑uncertain on the Aikin & Lighton Birmingham advertisement, whose publication year I could not fix; the US 291,124 family link is high confidence on subject matter but its named inventors were not verified.

I'll verify the citation record for US 201,377 and trace each patent citation it carries.

Key finding: US 201,377 appears as an examiner-cited reference inside US 3,234,602, not the reverse. Let me verify the citation direction and check for any backward citations.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 201,377

Analyst note: I verified the citation record for the literal identifier US 201,377 only. I did not substitute any other "377" patent (8,277,377 / 8,417,377 / 5,136,377 / 9,041,377 / 6,491,377 / the OrthoPediatrics '377) — consistent with the literal-interpretation rule and with the litigation section already generated.

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1. Bottom line

US 201,377 has no examiner-cited (backward) prior-art references in the record. The single citation entry associated with it runs in the opposite direction: US 201,377 is cited as prior art by the examiner in a 1966 patent. Consequently, there is no reference in the US 201,377 citation record that can anticipate its claim under 35 U.S.C. § 102 — a § 102 reference must predate the invention, and the only cited document postdates it by 84 years.

I have flagged the genuinely contemporaneous documents further below, but their status as "citations" must not be overstated: they appear in Google Patents' "Similar Documents" field, which is a machine-similarity list, not a citation list. Treating them as citations would be a fabrication.

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2. The record itself (literal identifiers as published)

Sole claim (the only claim): the combination of the movable compressor G, the sprue or gate sticks D set thereon, and a binder-plate E having aperture D′, "through which the gate-stick or sprues pass while sand is being compressed, for the purpose of forming sprue or gate holes in molds to receive molten metal."

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3. Every patent citation in the record — direction check

Direct evidence of direction. The examiner's citation list printed on US 3,234,602 reads, verbatim:

"References Cited by the Examiner — UNITED STATES PATENTS 201,377 3/1878 Aiken et al 22-38; 632,245 9/1899 Cooper 22-38; 1,095,356 5/1914 Riel et al. …"

…and Google Patents renders US 3,234,602's citation table with US201377A\* (the asterisk denoting an examiner citation) under "Citations (6)." Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3234602 (see also the PDF at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/bb/ed/11/47613e96901d1d/US3234602.pdf).

Flag for the record (do not auto-correct): the examiner's printed citation spells the inventor "Aiken et al.", whereas US 201,377 itself spells it "Aikin." These are the same record under the literal-identifier rule, but the spelling discrepancy is real and should not be silently harmonized.

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4. § 102 analysis, reference by reference

4.1 US 3,234,602 A — cannot anticipate (fails the temporal predicate)

• Full citation: US 3,234,602 A, Self-aligning pouring cup pattern and sprue punch assembly; assignee Pettibone Mulliken Corp.; filed Nov. 23, 1962; granted Feb. 15, 1966.
• Description: a molding-machine assembly combining a pouring cup pattern mounted on the blow plate with a sprue punch floatingly mounted on the machine table via a yielding lost-motion connection; the punch and cup interlock and self-align on flask closure, eliminating crevices at the juncture.
• § 102 result against US 201,377's claim: NO anticipation, under any subsection (§ 102(a), (b), (e), (f), or (g)). US 3,234,602 was not "patented … before the invention" (1877) nor "more than one year prior to the date of the application" (Dec. 14, 1877). A later patent is legally incapable of anticipating an earlier one. A 1962/1966 document is not prior art to an 1878 patent at all.
• What it actually is: evidence of the technology's lineage, and a § 102(b) reference running the other way (see § 5).

For completeness, the other documents in US 3,234,602's citation list (US 632,245 Cooper, 1899; US 1,095,356 Riel, 1914; US 1,905,490, 1933; GB 609,676, 1948; US 2,908,951, 1959) are likewise not citations to US 201,377 and all postdate it.

4.2 Backward citations — none to analyze

Because no "References Cited" appear for US 201,377, no reference exists that I can map to § 102 from the citation record alone. Two caveats:

1. For an 1878 grant, the governing statute was the Patent Act of 1870 (Rev. Stat. §§ 4886, 4920), not the 1952 Act's § 102. The 1870 Act's bars were framed on the date of invention ("not known or used by others in this country, and not patented or described in any printed publication … before his invention"), plus a two-year public-use/on-sale bar.
2. U.S. patents of this vintage generally did not print a front-page "References Cited" list; that practice developed later. So the absence of printed citations is the expected state of the document, and it is not proof that the 1878 examiner cited nothing in the file wrapper. I could not retrieve the original 1878 file wrapper / Examiner's Report in this session — that is a genuine gap.

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5. The direction that is supported: US 201,377 as a § 102(b) reference

Since the examiner expressly cited US 201,377 in 1966, the § 102 question with real content is the reverse:

Anticipation test against US 3,234,602's claims — with an explicit uncertainty flag. I retrieved US 3,234,602's abstract, objects, and the FIG. 1–3 structural description, but not its full claim text. US 201,377 discloses: (i) a movable compressor; (ii) sprue/gate sticks resting on, and set upon, that compressor; (iii) a binder-plate with apertures through which the sticks pass during compression. US 3,234,602's stated point of novelty is a floating, lost-motion, self-aligning punch mounting with an interlocking pouring-cup pattern that prevents sand-collecting crevices. Those limitations (floating/yielding lost-motion connection; interlock; crevice elimination) find no counterpart in US 201,377, whose sticks plainly rest in fixed bearing on the follower/templet-plate G with no lost-motion disclosure.

• Predicted § 102(b) anticipation: likely NO as to US 3,234,602's independent claims — US 201,377 would be missing at least the floating lost-motion connection, the interlocking cup/punch contour, and the self-alignment function.
• Predicted § 103 role: US 201,377 is far more plausibly a secondary/background § 103 reference establishing that forming sprue passages by passing sprue sticks through an apertured plate during sand compression was old in the foundry art as of 1878. Note, however, that § 103 (1952 Act) did not exist when US 201,377 issued; and the 1966 examiner cited it in Class 22, subclass 38, i.e., as general art, which is the classic profile of a § 103/background citation rather than a § 102 anticipatory one.

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6. Genuinely contemporaneous documents — closely related but not citations

The following appear in Google Patents' "Similar Documents" field for US201377A. This is a similarity ranking, not a citation list, and none of these is cited in US 201,377. I present them because they are the only temporally capable § 102 candidates, with dates as given (grant/publication dates).

6.1 Same-inventor Aikin & Drummond family — cannot anticipate

The US 201,377 specification expressly states the applicants' four earlier applications (filed March 9, 1877; May 7, 1877; June 20, 1877; and September 4, 1877) "omitted a description of the manner in which the sprue or gate holes were formed," and that the present invention "is intended to cover said omission."

Note on the same-inventor references generally: under the 1870 Act a patentee's own earlier patent is a double-patenting / same-invention question, not a § 102 "by others" anticipation. As prior art against claim 1 they fail on the merits, not merely on dates.

6.2 Third-party art predating the Dec. 14, 1877 filing (temporal capability only)

I did not verify the disclosures of US 8,570, US 6,013, US 122,255, or US 177,395. I therefore make no assertion that any of them anticipates claim 1, and I decline to name a specific anticipating reference where I have not read the text. My search budget was exhausted before I could retrieve the US 177,395 and US 6,013 specifications.

6.3 Post-filing documents — categorically unavailable under § 102

US 209,054 (1878-10-15), US 229,064 (1880-06-22), US 238,493 (1881-03-08), US 293,401 (1884-02-12), US 313,315 (1885-03-03), US 413,153 (1889-10-15), US 474,496 (1892-05-10), US 479,755 (1892-07-26), US 485,764 (1892-11-08), US 590,823 (1897-09-28), US 689,841 (1901-12-24), US 697,948 (1902-04-15), US 704,952 (1902-07-15), US 727,556 (1903-05-05), US 902,561 (1908-11-03), US 1,243,660 (1917-10-16). All postdate the Dec. 14, 1877 filing (as indexed) and therefore cannot be § 102 prior art to US 201,377. Several are nonetheless useful as evidence of how the sprue-forming concept evolved (e.g., US 485,764, "Mulder's flask"; US 704,952, "Method of forming sand molds").

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7. Caveats on completeness

1. No backward citation exists to analyze. The user's instruction to "look at each patent citation for 201377" resolves to exactly one entry, and it is a forward citation. I have not invented a § 102 mapping to fill the gap.
2. File-wrapper gap. I did not access the 1878 file wrapper, the original Examiner's Report, or the USPTO PatentCenter record for 201377 directly (the fetched record links to USPTO PatentCenter and Assignment but I could not query them). Any 1878-era rejection reference therefore remains unknown to me.
3. "Similar Documents" ≠ citations. Section 6 is offered as a search-lead list, not as the patent's citation record, and every § 102 conclusion drawn from it is flagged as unverified.
4. Class 22/38. The 1966 examiner placed US 201,377 in Class 22, subclass 38 (metal founding / molding-machine sprue mechanism). Under the modern CPC classes shown on the record (B22C15/02, B22C15/08), the assignment to 15/08 "involving pneumatic or hydraulic mechanisms" looks questionable for a machine driven by cams and yokes (see US 195,786's cam-driven sand-box and US 195,070's cam L), but I report the classification as published rather than "correcting" it.

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8. Direct answer to the questions asked

• USPTO search for 201377: the record retrieved is US 201,377, Improvement in machines for molding in sand, Aikin & Drummond, filed 1877-12-14, granted 1878-03-19. No other number substituted.
• Patent citations for 201,377: one entry of record — US 3,234,602 A — and it is a forward citation (US 201,377 cited by the examiner in US 3,234,602, Class 22/38). There are no backward/examiner-cited references on record.
• Full citation: US 3,234,602 A, Self-aligning pouring cup pattern and sprue punch assembly, Pettibone Mulliken Corp., filed 1962-11-23, published 1966-02-15.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates under § 102: None. US 3,234,602 postdates US 201,377 and cannot anticipate its single combination claim under § 102(a), (b), (e), (f), or (g). The legal relationship runs the other way: US 201,377 is a § 102(b) reference against US 3,234,602, and even there it most likely supports § 103 rather than anticipates, because US 3,234,602's claims add a floating lost-motion connection, a self-aligning interlocking cup/punch contour, and crevice elimination that US 201,377 does not disclose.

I'll ground this analysis in the prior-art set actually listed on the US201377 page, then supplement with targeted lookups on the individual references.

Useful — that confirmed the two Aikin/Drummond parents. Now let me pin down the remaining prior-art references cited on the page and check for sprue-forming art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 201,377 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Retrospective analysis. See the threshold caveat in §0 — § 103 did not exist when this patent issued, and several prerequisites I would normally rely on are unavailable.

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0. Threshold caveats and contradictions to flag

(a) § 103 is anachronistic here. US 201,377 issued March 19, 1878, 74 years before the Patent Act of 1952 created 35 U.S.C. § 103. The governing test in 1878 was the "invention"/patentable-novelty requirement of § 24 of the Act of 1870 (Rev. Stat. §§ 4886, 4920), applied through the "ordinary mechanic" standard of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850), and later Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883), and Thompson v. Boisselier, 114 U.S. 1 (1886). Everything below therefore applies Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), as a hypothetical retro-fit, which is the correct posture only if this is an invalidity-pleading or teaching exercise. It is not the law that would have decided the patent in 1878.

(b) Contradiction with the previously generated sections — reference number. The earlier Family/continuity summary identifies the September 4, 1877 Aikin & Drummond application as US 195,786. The US201377 Google Patents page's own "Similar Documents" list shows US195785A (1877-10-02), "Improvement in sand-molding machines." My live retrieval for the September 4, 1877 filing returned US 195,786 ("Specification forming part of Letters Patent No. 195,786, dated October 2, 1877; application filed September 4, 1877"). I am not auto-correcting either: the page says 195,785; the document itself says 195,786. Both are cited below where the distinction matters.

(c) Date discrepancy. The task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026"; the session date given to me is 2026-09-20, and the prior sections are dated September 2026. It does not change the analysis (the patent expired March 19, 1895 under either date), but flagging it per instruction.

(d) What "the Prior Art section of this page" actually contains. The page has no examiner-cited prior-art list. It contains only:

• a machine-extracted "Prior art keywords" field (sand, machines, gate, plate, molding) — a search artifact, not a § 102 reference;
• a "Similar Documents" list — Google's similarity output, not a citation;
• a "Cited By" list containing US 3,234,602 (Pettibone Mulliken, 1966), which is a forward citation and legally cannot be prior art against a March 1878 patent.

This matters: there is no on-the-record obviousness rejection to build on. The § 103 case below is constructed from (i) the Similar Documents list, (ii) the specification's own admissions about its four parent applications, and (iii) a small number of search-surfaced references, each flagged.

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1. Claim decomposition and the hypothetical PHOSITA

Sole claim (verbatim): "The combination of the movable compressor G, the sprue or gate sticks D set thereon, and a binder-plate, E, having aperture D, through which the gate-stick or sprues pass while sand is being compressed, for the purpose of forming sprue or gate holes in molds to receive molten metal, substantially as set forth."

PHOSITA (as of December 14, 1877): a foundry patternmaker/molder or mechanical engineer with several years' experience in compression molding machines — sand-molding machines, brick and tile presses, and analogous presses in which a plastic mass is compacted between opposed plates. No formal degree; "ordinary mechanic" skill in the 1870s sense.

Two constructions that drive everything:

1. Element 1.1 pins the disclosure to the US 195,070-type machine (follower/plunger rises), not the US 195,786 machine, whose "templet-plate F is stationary" and in which "the downward movement of the half-flask and sand-box" performs the compression. A stationary templet-plate with a stick resting on it does not read on "movable compressor G." This is a real limitation, not a formality.
2. The purpose clause (1.5) cannot save the claim from an otherwise-anticipating structure. An apparatus claim is not patentably distinguished by the intended use of what it inherently does. (Doctrine cited from training, not verified in this session.)

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2. Prior-art inventory and admissibility

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3. The core obviousness case

3a. What the '377 specification itself supplies (the "admission" route)

The specification states: "In our several applications (filed March 9, 1877, May 7, 1877, June 20, 1877, and September 4, 1877) … we omitted a description of the manner in which the sprue or gate holes were formed to receive the molten metal in the molds. This invention relates to, and is intended to cover, said omission…"

That is an express applicant admission that (i) a complete compression sand-molding machine existed in four earlier disclosures, and (ii) the only thing missing was how to make the pour channel. Admissions in a specification are usable as prior art (see M.P.E.P. § 2129, and In re Fout, 675 F.2d 297 (CCPA 1982) — cited from training). This is the strongest structural foothold for a § 103 attack, because it removes any dispute about whether the base machine was known and converts the question to: was it obvious to form the sprue with sticks riding on the compressor and escaping through apertures in the top plate?

3b. Combination A (two references) — brick-press core/piercing pins + the Aikin machine

Primary: US 195,070 (Aikin & Drummond). Retrieved text confirms: frame A; box B "serving as a guide for the follower, which is made to rise and fall, compressing the sand into the section O of the flask"; sections G and H "form a plunger for forcing the sand into the flask"; and a top closure — "A lid, E, attached to a lever, F, is intended to shut down onto the top of the flask." That supplies 1.1 (movable compressor G, literally the same reference letter) and a top plate performing the binder-plate's confining function, but with no aperture.

Secondary: US 54,967 and/or US 131,353 (brick-presses), reinforced by US 73,201. In the 1860s–70s brick-press art, it was routine to form holes in a compacted clay mass with pins carried on the plunger/die plate that enter the mass during the pressing stroke and pass into or through openings in the opposing plate, with provision for clearing material from those openings — exactly the US 73,201 snippet: pins "made to fit into the holes in the upper piston or pistons … to force out said surplus material." That supplies 1.2–1.4. An 1841 Wright brick press (No. 2,093) and the general proposition were recognized in contemporaneous Patent Office practice: In re Wagner, retrieved via search, states "nothing is more common than molds with a core for perforated prismatic forms, and … pistons have been adapted to such forms. Molds with cores have been used in forming perforated bricks."

Motivation to combine: the problem is identical in kind — forming a vertical bore in a plastic mass while that mass is being compressed between two plates. The result is mechanical, not chemical: a pin displaces volume that the compacting sand never fills; withdrawing the pin leaves the imprint. The through-aperture in the top plate is not an inventive flash but a mechanical consequence of the compaction stroke: the sand column shortens during compression while a stick resting on the rising follower is displaced upward by the full stroke. Unless the top plate has somewhere to let the stick go, the stick either crushes the sand or stalls the press. The aperture is what the problem itself dictates.

3c. Combination B (two references) — Aikin machine + cigar-mold perforator

US 156,341 (1874, cigar-molds) teaches forming a bore through a confined, compacted plastic mass by inserting a pin through the mold and withdrawing it. Motivated by the same "form the channel during molding, don't cut it afterward" objective. Weaker on the field-of-invention prong than Combination A, but the Supreme Court's modern rule (KSR) is that a reference need only be "reasonably pertinent to the particular problem," not from the same field.

3d. Combination C (three references) — flask + machine + core-molding

US 177,395 (1876, molder's flask: a flange "projecting from the flask at least the extent of compression required," which "when pressure is applied … will pass down into the other part of the flask") + US 195,070 + US 6,013 (1849, "molding and compressing cores"). This combination attacks elements 1.1, 1.2 and 1.4 separately: the flask teaches an element that traverses a mating part during compression (1.4); the Aikin machine teaches the movable compressor (1.1); and the core-compression art teaches a pin/core in a compressed foundry-sand mass (1.2).

3e. KSR rationales that apply

1. Combining known elements according to known methods, predictable result — plunger + pin + apertured plate is a straight mechanical assembly.
2. Simple substitution — replacing a pattern (which the 195,070 machine already withdraws from the sand) with a plain rod is a substitution of one known mold-forming element for another.
3. Known technique, same field — core pins/hole-forming pins in presses.
4. Design incentive / problem-driven — the aperture is forced by the geometry of the stroke.
5. "Obvious to try" — the artisan had exactly two conventional options (cut the sprue afterward, or mold it in during compaction), one of which is claimed. A finite, small, and predictable set.

3f. Element mapping — Combination A (strongest)

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4. Where the § 103 case is weak — and where it may be the wrong ground entirely

1. Wrong ground risk (§ 102). If any single 1849–1877 reference shows a sprue/vent pin resting on a movable compression plate and escaping through an apertured cover — and US 6,013 ("molding and compressing cores," 1849) is the obvious candidate to check first — the correct ground is anticipation, not obviousness, and the § 103 combination argument collapses into a § 102 argument. I did not retrieve the full text of US 6,013 and cannot rule this out.
2. Same-inventor problem. The two most on-point machine references (US 195,070, US 195,785/786) are the applicants' own patents. Under pre-AIA § 102(a), the "patented or described in a printed publication" branch is not textually limited to "others," but a patentee's own earlier disclosure is a poor § 103 reference against them, and the more natural fit is an obviousness-type double patenting inquiry (nascent in 1878; Miller v. Eagle Mfg., 151 U.S. 186 (1894), came later) rather than § 103. Practically: use 195,070/195,785/195,786 as admissions and background, not as statutory art.
3. The two unretrieved parents. The May 7 and June 20, 1877 applications named in the specification were never matched to numbers in either the prior sections or my searches. If either published as a patent before December 14, 1877, it is an additional printed publication and could change the § 102 analysis materially — including creating a § 102(b) bar if any issued more than a year before. Flagged as an open item.
4. Claim-construction dependence. The claim's "movable compressor G" excludes the stationary-templet US 195,786 machine as a base reference (see §1). A § 103 attack built on 195,786 as primary would be vulnerable on element 1.1.
5. OCR defects. The claim uses "aperture D" (the stick's own letter) where the description uses D′; the prior sections flagged the flask being called both "O" and "G." A § 103 analysis is unaffected, but any brief should be built from the printed original and drawings, not the OCR.
6. No secondary considerations. There is no record evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others, or copying, and none can now be developed — the patent expired March 19, 1895. Whatever goodwill Aikin & Drummond's Iron City Foundry had would fail the nexus requirement in any event.
7. Analogous-art caveat. US 156,341 (cigar-molds) is the weakest reference on pertinence; I would not lead with Combination B.

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5. Bottom line and confidence

Bottom line. On the strength of the art actually identified on the US201377 page, the sole claim is reasonably likely to be held obvious under a modern § 103/Graham/KSR analysis, principally via the applicant's own admission that only the sprue-forming step was missing from an otherwise complete, already-patented compression sand-molding machine, combined with the routine brick-press/tile-press practice of forming bores in a compacting plastic mass with pins that traverse openings in the opposing press plate. The strongest secondary reference set is the brick-press family (US 54,967, 131,353, and the search-surfaced US 73,201/60,050); the strongest doctrinal lever is the specification's admission, not the Google "Similar Documents" list, which is a similarity artifact and contains mostly post-1878 (therefore non-prior-art) documents.

Confidence: moderate on the conclusion, low on the evidentiary completeness of it. Specifically:

• Verified by retrieval this session: US 195,070, US 195,784, US 195,786, and the US201377 disclosure itself.
• Not retrieved — inferred from titles, dates, and search snippets only: US 6,013, US 8,570, US 54,967, US 122,255, US 131,353, US 156,341, US 177,395, US 3,234,602. Any of these could contain a full anticipation of the claim, or could contain nothing relevant. My element mappings above for those references are predicted from title, date, and field, not read from the text.
• Date unconfirmed: US 73,201 and US 60,050.
• The In re Wagner quotation and the US 73,201 pin-through-hole passage are taken from search-result snippets of OCR'd historical documents; the surname rendering "Mercy Wright" in that snippet is very likely an OCR error and I have not corrected it.

Required next step before this analysis could support a filing or an opinion: full-text retrieval of US 6,013, US 8,570, US 54,967, US 122,255, US 131,353, US 156,341, US 177,395, US 73,201, US 60,050, and the two unnumbered May 7 / June 20, 1877 Aikin & Drummond applications, with particular attention to (i) whether any single reference shows a sprue pin through an apertured cover during a compression stroke, and (ii) the issue dates of the two unretrieved parents.