US 208420

I'll verify this against live sources before summarizing.

US Patent 208,420 — Verified Summary

Sourcing note: I was able to verify this record against the full patent text (patents.google.com/patent/US208420/en, fetched 2026‑09‑24) and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History catalog record for the corresponding patent model. I found no CAFC docket activity of any kind for this patent.

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Bibliographic Data

On the "abstract": There is none. This patent issued in 1878, long before abstracts were required (35 U.S.C. § 112 dates from the 1952 Act). The passage Google Patents labels "Definitions" is not a patent abstract — it is a near‑verbatim restatement of the specification's summary paragraph. I am flagging this so it is not mistaken for an official abstract.

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Independent Claim 1 — Plain‑Language Overview

The patent has exactly one claim, so "each independent claim" resolves to a single claim covering an assembled article (not a method, and not a kit):

"Ornamental wood‑work made from the rectangular pieces herein described, of equal size in cross‑section and various lengths, provided with transverse slots, cut to the center of the pieces and equidistant from each other, in the longer pieces, the width of the slots equaling the width of the pieces on the sides in which they are cut, each of the shortest pieces equaling in length the distance from the center of one slot to the center of another slot in the longer pieces, and having a slot in the middle, the ends of all the pieces being equidistant from a slot, as shown and set forth."

Broken into its operative limitations, the claim requires an ornamental wood‑work assembly in which:

1. Stock pieces are rectangular and uniform in cross‑section, though they may be of various lengths. The specification is explicit that they "need not be square; it is only required that they be rectangular" and that no particular absolute size is required — only that all pieces be the same size.
2. Transverse slots are cut to the center of each piece (i.e., half‑depth, running to the mid‑line) so that two pieces can be interlocked at right angles.
3. Slot width equals the piece width on the face in which the slot is cut, so a mating piece fits snugly.
4. In the longer pieces, the slots are equidistant from one another. The spacing itself is arbitrary ("need be no particular distance apart"), but must be regular.
5. The shortest pieces each carry a single slot in the middle, and their overall length equals the center‑to‑center distance between two adjacent slots in the longer pieces. This is the dimensional key that lets a short piece span exactly one grid cell.
6. The ends of every piece are equidistant from a slot — i.e., the end margins are symmetric and consistent, which is what allows pieces to be joined flush at the ends of a run.
7. The result is an assembled ornamental wood‑work — illustrated in the drawing as a cross, but the specification notes it can form "a great variety of useful and ornamental articles," with variety depending on "the ingenuity of the manipulator and number of pieces used."

Scope comment: Claim 1 is a single, unitary product claim with no dependent claims and no method claim. Notably, the claim is argued entirely on dimensional and geometric relationships among identical‑cross‑section slotted sticks. Also worth noting: the specification recites that the pieces "can be put together and glued or otherwise fastened," but the claim does not require any fastening — the claim is directed to the wood‑work as a structure/assembly.

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Prior‑Art and Enforcement Status

• Cited references on the face: none listed as cited by examiner. The only citation relationship is a single third‑party forward citation (US 7,665,270 B1).
• Litigation / CAFC dockets: I found no Federal Circuit docket, no district court action, and no PTAB proceeding involving US 208,420. This is unsurprising: the patent expired September 24, 1895, and any cause of action on it would have been time‑barred more than 125 years ago. If you were asked to find 2026 CAFC activity on this number, the accurate answer is that none exists.

⚠️ Do Not Conflate — Unrelated Hits for "208420"

Searches on the bare string "208420" return several unrelated records. These are not US Patent 208,420 and should not be merged into this profile:

• FDA ANDA 208420 — Accord Healthcare Inc., Linagliptin Tablets 5 mg (a drug application number, not a patent).
• EP 208420 — Thiazolidine‑derivaten, hun bereiding en toepassing, Takeda Chemical Industries, Ltd. (Japan); filed 1986‑06‑10, granted 1991‑09‑18, lapsed 2003. Same numeric string, different jurisdiction and art.
• A PTAB petition (IPR‑style) briefly citing "the '420 Patent" concerning a knitting/loom device with pins and a base — that is a different, modern US patent, not this one.
• BE1022656B1 and other European search opinions surfacing "208420" as a dossier/page artifact.

Uncertainty Flags

• Assignee: I can state with reasonable confidence that no assignee is recorded, based on the patent document and the Google Patents record. However, 19th‑century assignments were recorded separately in Patent Office assignment ledgers that are not fully digitized; I cannot rule out an unrecorded or unindexed assignment, though none would appear on the patent face.
• Inventor name spelling: the patent text renders the surname "Ostrum" (OCR varies to "OsTRUM"); the Smithsonian's catalog record independently reads "Ostrum, Henry P." I am treating "Ostrum" as correct but note the historical spelling ambiguity.
• "Application number": Google Patents displays the family application as "US208420D" — an artifact of its internal numbering scheme, not a real pre‑1880 application serial number. Do not cite it as an application number.
• Issue date vs. "prior art date": Google lists both as 1878‑09‑24; the actual filing date from the specification is 1878‑03‑05.

I'll run targeted searches against litigation-focused sources before answering.

Let me run additional targeted checks.

Bottom Line

No litigation — federal, state, or administrative — involving U.S. Patent No. 208,420 is known to exist. I found zero cases in which US 208,420 (Ostrum, Improvement in ornamental wood-work) was asserted, challenged, or otherwise placed at issue, in any forum, at any time.

This is consistent with the prior section of this analysis, which states: "I found no Federal Circuit docket, no district court action, and no PTAB proceeding involving US 208,420." My independent searches found nothing that contradicts that conclusion.

Litigation table (as requested): empty. There are no rows to report — no plaintiff, no defendant, no jurisdiction, no case number, no filing date, no outcome.

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Search Methodology and Sources

I searched the following, prioritizing litigation-specific sources as instructed:

Caveats on methodology:

• Unified Patents, PACER, and Docket Navigator are paywalled or require interactive session-based queries; I could not execute a native, authenticated PACER docket-string search from this tooling. My searches reached their public-facing indexes and the open web only.
• One planned follow-up query ("Wicke v. Ostrum" 94 U.S. 671 ... which patent number) was cut off when I hit the tool-call limit, so I could not fully pin down the patent number at issue in that Supreme Court case. I flag that as an unresolved question below rather than guessing.
• Pre-1875 court records are sparsely digitized. A hypothetical 1878–1895 infringement suit on this patent could exist in a paper-only federal court file or a regional reporter and simply never have been indexed online. I cannot rule that out affirmatively — I can only report that nothing is discoverable.

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Critical Disambiguation — Do Not Conflate These with US 208,420

Searches on "420" family strings return several active, well-documented litigations that have nothing to do with Ostrum's patent. These appeared repeatedly in my results and are the likeliest source of a false positive if someone searches by truncated number:

The Wicke v. Ostrum question — flagged, not resolved

One search surfaced Wicke v. Ostrum, a U.S. Supreme Court patent case in which a Henry P. Ostrum (same name as our inventor, New Haven-area nailing machinery) was the defendant in a suit by George Wicke over a box-nailing machine. The Court held Ostrum's horizontal-nail-driving machine did not infringe Wicke's combination patent.

This is not litigation involving US 208,420, for two independent reasons:

1. The asserted patent in Wicke was Wicke's patent, not Ostrum's — Ostrum was the accused infringer, not the patentee asserting '420.
2. The chronology forecloses it: US 208,420 was filed March 5, 1878 and issued September 24, 1878, placing it after the Wicke v. Ostrum decision (reported at 94 U.S. 671, 1876 Term).

⚠️ Uncertainty flag: I did not confirm the patent number at issue in Wicke v. Ostrum, because my verification query was truncated. If the '420 number appears anywhere in the Wicke record, it would be coincidental — but I have not positively excluded that, and I am not asserting it. What I can say with confidence is that nothing in the Wicke material I retrieved indicates US 208,420 was asserted, and the issue-date chronology makes Ostrum's '420 patent incapable of being the patent-in-suit in a case decided before it issued. Treat the name match as a possible same-inventor coincidence, not a case involving this patent.

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Why Zero Litigation Is the Expected Answer

Beyond the empirical search result, three structural facts make litigation on US 208,420 essentially impossible:

1. Expiration. The patent expired September 24, 1895, on the 17-year term then in force (Google Patents records "Anticipated expiration 1895-09-24"). Any cause of action on the patent has been time-barred for roughly 131 years. There is no live infringement claim, no declaratory judgment of non-infringement ripe for adjudication, and no damages theory that survives.
2. No assignee of record. As covered in the prior section, the patent grants to Ostrum as inventor with no assignee on the face of the document. Absent assignment, there is no corporate patentee with an enforcement program — which is a common reason old patents nonetheless generate suits.
3. No post-issuance proceedings possible. IPR, PGR, and CBM at the PTAB were created by the AIA (2011–2012) and require an unexpired or recently expired patent within the statutory window. A patent that lapsed in 1895 cannot be the subject of an IPR, and Google Patents records no PTAB proceeding.

On the "2026 CAFC activity" framing: if the underlying question is whether there is current Federal Circuit activity on this number, the answer is no — and none is possible. As the prior section put it, "If you were asked to find 2026 CAFC activity on this number, the accurate answer is that none exists." My searches confirm no CAFC docket, no Rule 36 judgment, and no opinion mentioning US 208,420. The only CAFC-adjacent "420"/"Unified Patents" material I retrieved concerns entirely different patents (e.g., IDEAHUB v. Unified Patents, No. 2024-1684, PGR2022-00044 — a Rule 36 affirmance dated April 10, 2026) and has no connection to Ostrum.

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Contradiction / Discrepancy Flag

I am flagging two internal inconsistencies in the instruction set, per my operating rules:

1. Date conflict. The system context states today's date is 2026-09-30; the current task states April 26, 2026. The prior section's verified fetch of the Google Patents record is dated 2026-09-24T10:37:30Z. This does not affect the answer (no litigation exists under either date), but the record should not be treated as internally consistent on today's date.
2. No substantive contradiction on the merits. My live searches corroborate rather than contradict the prior section's finding of zero litigation. Nothing found in this round changes the "no litigation known" conclusion.

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Recommended Disposition

If this analysis is being prepared for a litigation-status deliverable, the correct entry is:

US Patent No. 208,420 (Ostrum, Improvement in ornamental wood-work, issued Sept. 24, 1878) — No known litigation. Zero identified cases; zero PTAB proceedings; zero Federal Circuit dockets or opinions. Patent expired September 24, 1895.

If a definitive negative is required (rather than a "none found" statement), the remaining uncovered ground is an authenticated PACER docket search across all districts using the exact patent number, plus a manual check of pre-1900 federal court records — neither of which I could execute fully here. Given the 1895 expiration, such a search would be of historical interest only and would not change the current-status answer.

I'll verify the PTAB landscape with a quick check before reporting.

Let me run two more targeted checks to make sure nothing is hiding behind the OCR/spelling variants of the inventor's name.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 208,420: ZERO. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block built from the USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent, and that null result is confirmed rather than merely defaulted-to: no IPRs, no PGRs, and no CBM petitions exist, are pending, were instituted, were denied institution, settled, or reached a Final Written Decision — there are therefore no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, and no panel or FWD to report. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "the patent has survived and is hardened," and not "claim 1 is dead at the Board" — it is that the patent's entire enforcement window closed on 1895-09-24, sixty-six years before administrative trials existed and one hundred thirty-one years before today, so there is no live PTAB question to litigate at all. A demand letter citing US 208,420 is not an IPR-defense problem; it is a different-number problem (see the conflation warning below).

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Per-proceeding sections

Not applicable — no proceeding numbers exist to report. I will not synthesize the template in the task prompt, because doing so would require inventing a proceeding number, petitioner, or patent owner, and the task instruction is explicit: "Do not invent proceeding numbers." For the record, the categories that would ordinarily be populated break down as follows:

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Why the count is structurally zero, not just empirically zero

This is worth stating plainly for a client who assumes "no hits" means "we didn't search hard enough."

1. Temporal impossibility for PGR. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. § 321 is available only for patents subject to the first-inventor-to-file provisions — i.e., effective filing dates on or after 2013-03-16. US 208,420 was filed 1878-03-05 and issued 1878-09-24. PGR is legally unavailable to challenge it.

2. Sunset of the CBM program. Covered business method review, created by AIA § 18, sunset on 2020-09-16 for newly filed petitions. US 208,420's one claim is directed to an ornamental wood-work article, not a "financial product or service," so it would not have qualified as a covered business method patent in any event. The "technological invention" exception would have been a threshold fight the petitioner would likely have lost.

3. IPR is technically unbarred but practically impossible. Section 311(a) does not limit IPR to post-AIA patents, so the absence of an IPR here is not a statutory prohibition. It is a standing and remedy problem: the patent's term expired 1895-09-24 (the 17-year term then in force, as the "unexpired" record confirms). Any infringement cause of action accrued before that date and was extinguished by the six-year damages lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286 more than a century ago. No petitioner can satisfy the § 311(a) injury-in-fact predicate, obtain a § 315(b)-compliant service date, or articulate a concrete benefit from a certificate canceling a claim that has been unenforceable since the Harrison administration.

4. The ODP null result is corroborated. I ran independent web checks and found no PTAB docket, institution decision, FWD, or Board document naming US 208,420 or naming Henry P. Ostrum as a patent owner. The only Ostrum surname hit in the modern patent corpus is an unrelated inventor (Keith Lane Ostrum), and the only collection record for Henry P. Ostrum is the Smithsonian's patent-model catalog entry (Id. No. AG.208420, accession 89797). Smithsonian NMAH record — note this is a museum artifact record, not a litigation or PTAB record.

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⚠️ Conflation warning — the "‑420" hits you will find are NOT this patent

Web and PTAB-source searches on the bare string surface several live AIA proceedings against different patents whose numbers happen to end in 420. Do not attach any of these to US 208,420:

• US 8,899,420 (waste-disposal cassettes) — IPR2017-00050, and PTAB document sets captioned with a "'420 patent" concerning an annular receptacle, a cassette clearance, and Firth as primary art. That is a 2014-era patent, not the 1878 wood-work patent.
• A "'420 patent" on computer-based multiple-patient monitoring — PTAB papers referencing U.S. Patent No. 5,357,427 (Langen) and U.S. Patent No. 5,331,549 (Crawford) as background art. Different patent, different century.
• A "'420 patent" asserted by Karl Storz Endoscopy-America — a co-pending district court litigation referenced in an IPR petition. Different patent.
• ANDA 208420 — Accord Healthcare's Linagliptin Tablets 5 mg drug application. A regulatory number, not a patent, already flagged in the summary section above.
• A knitting/loom-device PTAB petition citing "the '420 Patent" — flagged in the prior summary; still a different modern patent.

If a demand letter or a vendor's docket alert cites "the '420 patent" in a way that sounds like a medical device, a drug, or a monitoring system, the sender has crossed a number boundary. Ask for the full number and the issue date.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. US 208,420 has exactly one claim, and its status is UNTESTED — not CANCELED, not SUSTAINED. It has never been before the Board in any AIA trial. Its "sustained" appearance on the face of the Google Patents record ("Expired – Lifetime") is a legal-status field for term expiration, not a validity adjudication. No post-issuance validity tribunal has ever passed on it. The only adjudicative-like events in its history are the 1878 grant and the 1895 expiration.

Estoppel landscape. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is inapplicable — estoppel attaches only to a petitioner that obtained a final written decision, and no such decision exists. There is no petitioner, no privity chain, and no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or otherwise) in the record. Correspondingly, there is no estoppel that helps a would-be challenger either: a defendant cannot point to a prior petitioner's win or loss, because none exists. Every prior-art ground remains theoretically available in an abstract sense, which is cold comfort given that no court or the Board has jurisdictionally-useful reason to hear it.

Pattern signals. None. No repeat petitioner, no patent-owner appeal activity, no PTAB-originated Federal Circuit docket. The patent's entire post-issue footprint consists of (a) expiration in 1895 and (b) a forward citation from US 7,665,270 B1 (LatticeStix, Inc., 2010) that was made by a third party, not an examiner, and does not imply any adversarial proceeding.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and the patent has claims invalidated: it does not. There is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote. Any request for "the FWD" or "the cancelation certificate" should be answered with a flat statement that none exists.

If you are facing an assertion of US 208,420: say so plainly — there is no PTAB activity, and the reason is that the patent expired on 1895-09-24, which predates the existence of every AIA trial mechanism by more than a century. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, damages reach back only six years from filing; there is nothing recoverable, and the patent is not "well-asserted but unattacked" — it is simply a 148-year-old expired grant. Well-asserted patents do eventually attract IPRs; this one has never been asserted in a modern forum and never will be. Verify you are not actually looking at US 8,899,420, or another modern "‑420."

Where to confirm the null result yourself:

• USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End (PTAB E2E), party/patent search: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/
• USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) API — the canonical source for this prompt's structured block: https://developer.uspto.gov/api-catalog
• USPTO Patent Center for the patent's own file history and status: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/
• CourtListener (for any Federal Circuit docket — searches return none): https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%22208%2C420%22

If a live AIA proceeding is later discovered: it would be a newly filed petition that the ODP ingest has not yet indexed, and the trial-stage clocks to calendar are — institution decision due within 6 months of the petition's filing (§ 314(b)), and FWD due within 12 months of the institution date (§ 316(a)(11)). Worth noting that no such petition can be filed as of 2026-09-30 on this patent for the standing and § 286 reasons in point 3 above.

Uncertainty flag (carried forward and still open): 19th-century PTAB analogues do not exist, so there is no historical "proceeding" record to surface either. I am confident in the zero count. I cannot rule out a private, non-digitized interference or a reissue proceeding from the 1878–1895 window, but that is a Patent Office prosecution artifact and is not an AIA trial proceeding; if such a record is important, it would have to be pulled from the physical assignment and reissue ledgers at the National Archives, not from any PTAB register.

One incidental verification note: the Smithsonian catalog also lists a second Ostrum patent model, Id. No. AG.237283, patent number 237,283, dated 1881-02-01. If a client's portfolio review is conflating Ostrum's patents, that is a third number to keep separate from US 208,420. I have not verified its subject matter in this pass.

I'll verify what's recorded for this patent before writing anything.

Two leads worth chasing: a Supreme Court case naming "Ostrum," and the critical database-coverage question.

Inventors

Single inventor — no joint-inventor pattern. The patent names exactly one inventor, so the classic "all inventors departed the assignee within 12 months" fire-sale precursor cannot arise here. The two other names on the document — George Terry and William E. Baldwin — appear only as witnesses on the specification. They are not inventors and should not be listed as such.

Independent identification of the inventor (this is a substantive finding, not speculation). Henry P. Ostrum of "the city and county of New Haven, State of Connecticut" is the same person who:

• was granted US Patent No. 172,579 on 1876-01-25 for "an improvement in machines for nailing boxes"; and
• was the defendant in Wicke v. Ostrum, 103 U.S. 461 (1880), a suit by William Wicke (owner of US Patent No. 38,924, issued 1863-06-16 to George Wicke) in which the Court described the accused machines as those "made, used, and sold by him."

So at the time US 208,420 was filed (1878-03-05) and issued (1878-09-24), Ostrum was a working manufacturer and patent-holder in box-nailing machinery in New Haven — not a paper inventor. Note also the direction of that litigation: Ostrum was the defendant/alleged infringer, and the Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of the bill (no infringement). The patent-owner plaintiff in that case was an owner of the 1863 Wicke patent, not its inventor — an 1880s assertion posture worth keeping in mind when reading the NPE sections below.

Sources: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/103/461/ ; https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USREPORTS-103/pdf/USREPORTS-103-461.pdf ; https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/wicke-v-ostrum-892813833

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Original assignee

None recorded. The patent grants to Henry P. Ostrum as inventor, with no "assignors to" line on the face of the document and no assignee in the Google Patents bibliographic record. Consistent with the previously generated summary, ownership at issue rested with Ostrum personally.

• Entity named on the issued patent: none — individual inventor-owned.
• Product embodying these claims: No evidence found. The specification contemplates slotted sticks "put together and glued or otherwise fastened, … forming a cross, … and also forming a great variety of useful and ornamental articles." The only physical artifact I can confirm is the patent model at the Smithsonian (NMAH, Id. No. AG.208420, accession 89797) — https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_897255. I found no evidence of a commercial ornamental-woodwork product line tied to Ostrum.
• Primary line of business: machinery manufacture (box-nailing machines), New Haven, Connecticut, per Wicke v. Ostrum.
• Current status: Not applicable / long defunct. The patent expired 1895-09-24 (17-year term). Ostrum is a 19th-century natural person; there is no corporate successor to trace, and no 10-K, 8-K, bankruptcy docket, or SEC filer is implicated. No bankruptcy fire-sale or securitization is possible or present.

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Center has no records for US 208,420. Stating this plainly, as required.

Two independent reasons, one of which is definitional:

1. Database coverage. The online Patent Assignment Search "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980." Pre-1980 assignments are maintained separately — "Patent Assignments recorded prior to 1980 are maintained at the National Archives and Records Administration" (USPTO guidance), and MPEP 301.01 is explicit that "[t]he historical database of assignments is maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980." US 208,420 is an 1878 patent whose entire enforceable life ended before reel/frame indexing existed. Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20210623092848/https://www.uspto.gov/patents/maintain/patents-assignments-change-search-ownership ; https://blueironip.com/ufaqs/how-are-historical-patent-assignment-records-maintained/ ; https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf

2. No positive hit found. I searched for any indexed record tying the number 208,420 to a recorded conveyance and found none. I could not execute a rendered query against assignment.uspto.gov itself — it is a JavaScript application that web search cannot drive — so I am reporting a negative finding grounded in the coverage rule plus the absence of any indexed record, not a first-party database readout. Flagging that limitation rather than overstating it.

Consequences for the fields you specified: there is no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no execution date, no recording date, no assignor/assignee pair, and — critically for the correspondent-tracking technique — no correspondent of record to harvest. The "correspondent" metadata field is a post-1980 recordation artifact; it does not exist for 1878-era conveyances. Any assignment Ostrum executed (a very common practice for 19th-century inventors selling territorial rights, though I found no evidence of one here) would live in the NARA Patent Assignment Digests (1837–1957) or Liber Volumes (1837–1954) in Record Group 241 — offline, unindexed by patent number in any public digital interface I can reach, and requiring a manual pull. I did not obtain those.

Adjacent records I checked and ruled out as ownership evidence:

• Google Patents legal events list only the issue/publication event and the 1895-09-24 anticipated expiry. No reassignment events.
• Forward citation (not ownership): US 7,665,270 B1 (LatticeStix, Inc.; 2010-02-23) cites US 208,420 as prior art. A citation is not an assertion and not a transfer. No chain link.
• RPX / Unified Patents asserter directories: nothing returned for this patent or this patent number.
• Litigation: the only case involving either the inventor or this patent's subject matter is Wicke v. Ostrum, and US 208,420 is not a patent-in-suit there. No assertion of US 208,420 was ever possible after 1895-09-24.

⚠️ Flagging a contradiction with the requested output format. You asked me to compute NPE / troll-pattern signals and pick a verdict, but your own stopping rule says: "If the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, say so plainly and stop after this section." Those conflict. I am honoring the stopping rule, because every one of the eight signals below requires a specific reel/frame and date as its evidentiary basis, and fabricating that scaffolding over a record that does not exist is precisely the failure mode your constraints prohibit. Per the stopping rule I therefore omit the timeline diagram, the eight-signal table, and the verdict.

For completeness on the schema, though, note that your verdict menu already supplies the answer for this fact pattern: "Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment)." I would not upgrade it to "Defensive / non-asserting" (no defensive aggregator is in, or could be in, this chain) and I would not reach "Operating-company assertion" (Wicke v. Ostrum shows Ostrum as an operating manufacturer, but he was the defendant, and US 208,420 was never asserted by anyone). If you want the full signal table built out with "not present — no records exist" entries for all eight items, say so and I will render it; the substantive answer will be identical.

Verification link: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search (search Patent Number 208420; expect an empty result set, per the August 1980 coverage cutoff above). For the pre-1980 record, the request path is the Assignment Recordation Branch at 571-272-3350 or NARA RG 241.

I'll verify the citation record and then examine each reference that could bear on claim 1.

Now let me examine each reference in the citation/similar-documents record, focusing on those predating the 1878 filing date.

Let me pull the specific pre-1878 references from the record so I can assess them against claim 1.

Scope note before the analysis

Two framing points, because they change what "each patent citation" means here:

1. US 208,420 has exactly one claim. So every § 102 question in this task resolves to a single target — claim 1. I will not invent a claim 2, a dependent set, or a method claim.
2. An 1878 patent has no "References Cited" section. The practice of printing examiner-cited prior art on the face of a US patent did not exist in 1878. I checked the authoritative record and can state this positively: the face of US 208,420 cites zero patent references. What the record contains instead are three different things — a forward citation, a machine-generated Similar Documents list, and prior-art keywords — none of which are citations by the applicant or examiner. I distinguish them below rather than silently treating the Similar Documents list as a citation set.

⚠️ Date discrepancy carried forward: this task says April 26, 2026; the system context says 2026-09-30. Prior sections already flagged this. It does not affect the analysis. Tool limitation: I hit the tool-call limit mid-verification and could not retrieve full text for several references. Each row is marked V (verified in this pass) or U (unverified — date/title only, from the record).

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Section A — References cited on the face of US 208,420

This is the literal, correct answer to "look at each patent citation for 208420": there is nothing to enumerate. Any external list — including the "Similar Documents" block — is Google Patents' algorithmic neighbor list, not a citation.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US208420](/patent/US208420)/en (record as provided), cross-checked against the Smithsonian NMAH catalog entry, which independently confirms patent number 208,420 / Ostrum, Henry P. / patent date 1878-09-24 (https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_897255). I could not drive a native first-party USPTO query (Patent Center and the Assignment Center are JavaScript applications that web search cannot execute); I am therefore reporting the record as rendered, not a Patent Center readout, and flag that limitation.

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Section B — The only citation relationship in the record: a forward citation

Which claim of US 208,420 does it potentially anticipate under § 102? None. It cannot, as a matter of law or logic: a reference date of 2007/2010 post-dates US 208,420's filing (1878-03-05) and issue (1878-09-24) by roughly 130 years. A later document is categorically incapable of anticipating an earlier one. Its only analytical significance is reverse: it shows that a 21st-century lattice-structure patentee found the 1878 Ostrum patent worth citing as background — which is a signal about the persistence of the slotted-stick concept, not a validity threat to claim 1.

Verification status: U on substance (I did not retrieve the LatticeStix specification's discussion of US 208,420), V on the citation direction and dates (they appear in the record itself).

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Section C — Google "Similar Documents": NOT citations, but the only usable prior-art set

These 25 documents are algorithmically selected by classification/text similarity. They are not cited against US 208,420 by anyone. I nevertheless assess each against claim 1, because that is the substance of the request.

The controlling date. Claim 1 is anticipated only by art predating the invention; as a printed-publication bar under the pre-AIA framework, art published before 1878-03-05 (filing) is § 102(a) material, and art published before 1877-03-05 (one year earlier) is § 102(b) material. (Statutory note: in 1878 the governing law was the Patent Act of 1870, §§ 24–25, which had no fixed one-year printed-publication grace period — I use § 102 as the instructed modern proxy, and the pre-1877 dates below satisfy either regime.)

C.1 — Pre-filing references (potentially available under § 102)

C.2 — Post-filing references (categorically unavailable under § 102)

Every item below post-dates the 1878-03-05 filing and cannot be § 102 art against US 208,420, however similar it looks. Listing them is necessary precisely because they are the ones a keyword search will tempt an analyst to cite.

Pattern worth noting: the post-filing cluster is dominated by puzzles and toy building blocks — the art that grew up around exactly this invention's geometry after 1878. That is a citation-lag artefact, not evidence of anticipation. It also illustrates the anachronism of the modern CPC class assigned to US 208,420 (E04C2/42 and subclasses /421, /422, /423 — "gratings; grid-like panels … with notches"): that classification reflects 21st-century building-panel art, not 1878 ornamental woodwork.

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Section D — Anticipation verdict on claim 1

Claim 1 is not anticipated by any reference I verified, and no anticipatory reference is identified in this record. The claim is a narrow, single-claim product claim built almost entirely on dimensional relationships among uniform-cross-section sticks against other sticks:

The decisive gap is the shortest-piece-length equals center-to-center slot spacing limitation plus the slot-width-equals-piece-width limitation. Those two, together, are what convert a generic notched stick into a modular grid system. I found no reference, verified or listed, that discloses them. That is why this reference set supports an obviousness argument at most (Reed alone, or Reed + a toy-block reference), and not anticipation.

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Section E — Unverified leads worth chasing (flagged as leads, not findings)

The record's Similar Documents list is not the only candidate art. Two leads surfaced in search that are highly relevant on subject matter and pre-date the filing, but which I could not verify and which carry no patent number I am willing to assert:

1. "Kinsey's ornamental lock block and toy," ca. 1875 — a commercial 100-piece wooden set, described as a "tongue-and-groove assembly system," sold "for forming your own designs of picture frames, crosses, anchors, houses, brackets, match safes, wall pockets, letters, inlaying, &c." The CCA library record notes patent dates "Nov. 9, 1875 [—] May 4, 1875." The "crosses" and interlocking ornamental-block framing overlap is striking. I do not have the patent number, do not know the inventor's name, and am not asserting this as anticipation. If it exists as a US patent dated 1875, it could be the single most relevant reference in the field. (Source: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/library/publication/79648797)
2. USD 4,058 S — Joel A. H. Ellis, "Design for a Toy Block," 1870-05-24 — interlocking toy blocks in single/double square and H-shapes with cubical corner pieces. Pre-filing by 8 years, but disclosed as a design and directed at blocks, not slotted sticks. (Source of text: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/79/aa/9a/3234263f91828f/USD4058.pdf)

A name-based search would close both gaps: a USPTO full-text/classification search on "Kinsey" + ornamental block + 1875, and a retrieval of the full specifications of US 168,229, US 174,261, and US 147,805 — the three pre-filing references I was unable to read. Those four retrievals are the entire remaining evidentiary gap in this analysis.

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Section F — Explicit uncertainty flags

• Zero references cited on the face of US 208,420 — high confidence, grounded in the record itself and corroborated by the Smithsonian's independent catalog entry for the same patent number and patentee.
• US 7,665,270 B1 cannot anticipate — high confidence. The date arithmetic is not close.
• "No anticipation found" ≠ "no anticipation exists." My conclusion is bounded by what I could retrieve. Two of the eight pre-filing documents I could place on the timeline (US 168,229, US 174,261) are unread, and one of them is titled "Toy Building-Blocks," which is the most dangerous title in this set. An analyst asserting non-anticipation affirmatively should read it first.
• Do not cite the Similar Documents list as "prior art cited against US 208,420." Nothing cites US 208,420 except LatticeStix, and that citation runs the wrong way in time.
• § 102 is applied here as an instructed modern proxy. In 1878 the operative statute was the Patent Act of 1870; the "anticipation" concept is the same, the statutory citation is anachronistic.
• Number-boundary warning (carried forward): searches on "208420" also return FDA ANDA 208420 (Accord Healthcare, linagliptin), EP 208420 (Takeda, thiazolidine derivatives), and various modern "‑420 patents (e.g., US 8,899,420). None of these are US 208,420 and none are prior art to it. Prior sections flagged these individually; I confirm no change.

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Section G — Verification paths

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Bottom line

"Each patent citation for 208420" is an empty set. US 208,420 cites no references, and no examiner cited any against it — the practice did not exist in 1878. The one citation in the record (US 7,665,270 B1, LatticeStix, 2010) is a forward citation and is legally incapable of anticipation.

Of the 25 similar documents, 8 pre-date the 1878-03-05 filing. Of those I could verify, US 168,672 (Reed, 1875-10-11) is the closest — half-depth kerfs, equally spaced, equidistant from edges — but consecutive reading against claim 1 shows it fails on transverse orientation, slot-width-equals-piece-width, uniform-cross-section stock of varying lengths, and the shortest-piece-length rule. It is § 103 material, not § 102. The remaining pre-filing references are titles and dates only; US 168,229, "Improvement in Toy Building-Blocks" (1875-09-28), is the highest-priority unread document and should be pulled before any affirmative non-anticipation opinion is issued.

I'll analyze this under § 103, but first I need to verify what the "Prior Art" section of the Google Patents page actually contains and check the references it lists.

§ 103 Obviousness Analysis — US 208,420 (Ostrum, Improvement in ornamental wood‑work)

Sourcing note: Per instruction, I built this from the "Prior Art" content of the Google Patents page (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US208420](/patent/US208420)/en, fetched 2026‑09‑24). I verified a subset of the listed references by live search. Where I could not verify, I say so rather than describing content I did not retrieve. I hit my tool‑call limit mid‑verification, so several entries below are flagged unverified. One number already failed to resolve and is flagged in §7.

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1. Bottom line

Claim 1 of US 208,420 is, on the strongest available reading of the record, a modular half‑lap wood grille with a defined pitch. Every limitation is either (a) functionally dictated by the mechanics of a snug crossing joint, or (b) an arbitrary design choice the specification itself expressly disclaims as critical. That makes it a strong § 103 candidate on a KSR "predictable use of known elements" theory.

But the obviousness case cannot be built from the page's own prior‑art section alone, and I will not pretend otherwise. The page's list contains zero examiner‑cited references, and of its 25 "Similar Documents," only 8 predate the critical date. The single thematically on‑point entry (US 473,185, "Ornamental wood and metal work") is dated 1892 — fourteen years too late to be prior art. The sole "Cited By" entry is dated 2010. So the honest posture is: a legally sufficient § 103 combination is constructible, but it must be assembled with motivation reasoning and common‑knowledge evidence, not by pointing at the page's list.

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2. What the page's "Prior Art" section actually contains — and what it does not

Four things, and only four:

There is no "References Cited" / "Citations" block on the page at all. US 208,420 carries no examiner‑cited art. This is the single most important framing fact: nothing on this page has been adjudicated or even asserted as anticipating or rendering obvious the claim. The "Similar Documents" list is a 21st‑century text‑similarity artifact, and its inclusion of 1943 and 1921 references demonstrates it was never date‑screened.

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3. The critical date — and why Google's field is wrong

Pre‑AIA § 103(a) asks whether the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious "at the time the invention was made" to a PHOSITA. The operative dates:

Using 1878‑09‑24 as the cutoff, as the page's field invites, would wrongly exclude nothing on this list but would wrongly include nothing either — it simply misstates the law. Art between 1877‑03‑05 and 1878‑03‑05 can still be § 102(a) art but is not a § 102(b) bar. No listed reference falls in that window, so the distinction is not outcome‑determinative here, but it must be stated correctly.

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4. Screening the page's 25 "Similar Documents" under pre‑AIA § 102

Result: 8 of 25 qualify. 17 are legally unusable. A § 103 combination built on any reference dated 1884 or later — including the 1892 "Ornamental wood and metal work" patent that a similarity algorithm ranked near the top — would be fatally anachronistic.

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5. Verified reference content (the only two I confirmed by full text)

US 168,672 — Samuel A. Reed, "Improvement in Flooring‑Boards," filed 1875‑03‑29, issued 1875‑10‑11.

• Reed cuts "one or more longitudinal kerfs or slits" in wood boards, "through about one‑half or two‑thirds of the thickness of the board."
• Where more than one kerf is used (boards over four inches wide), he cuts "two or more kerfs equally distant from each other and the edges of the board."
• Kerf depth is calibrated to stock thickness ("to within about half an inch of the top" for thicker stock).
• Stated purpose: prevent warping; "I have found by experiment that… it is only necessary to cut… one or more kerfs."

Direct read on Claim 1: Reed discloses limitations (2) and (4) of the claim — a transverse slot in wood stock cut to the center (half‑depth) and, in multiple‑slot pieces, equidistant spacing — on stock of a single cross‑section. Reed is a single‑element reference, not an anticipation; it teaches nothing about assembly, mating, right‑angle crossing, or the short‑piece/pitch relationship.

US 174,261 — Edward M. Kuhn, "Improvement in Flooring," filed 1876‑02‑10, issued 1876‑02‑29.

• Tongue‑and‑groove edge jointing; the tongue is "horizontal on one face and inclined on the other," with a corresponding groove; purpose is to permit blind‑nailing without breaking the tongue.
• Relevance: establishes that interfitting wood joints with mating profile geometry were squarely within the ordinary skill of the 1870s floor/carpentry art. LOW‑MEDIUM standalone relevance — Kuhn's joint is edge‑to‑edge, not a crossing half‑lap, and the claim's "slot width = piece width" limitation is not disclosed.

US 168,229 — "Improvement in toy building‑blocks," 1875‑09‑28. Title and date confirmed via the Google Patents 1875 sitemap index. Full text not retrieved. Given the title and contemporaneous art (see §6), a reasonable inference is that it discloses slotted/grooved rectangular wooden pieces fitted together into structures — but I am flagging this as an inference, not a verified disclosure, and it must be pulled and read before being relied on.

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6. Supplementary art found during verification (not on the page's list)

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7. ⚠️ Data‑quality flags — do not auto‑correct, but do not rely on these either

1. Number discrepancy on the page. The list shows "US294607A — 1884‑03‑04 — Toy building‑block." My search for that exact string resolved to US 2,759,166 ("Wrapped electrical connection"), whose application serial number was 294,607 — a serial‑number/patent‑number collision, not the cited document. Separately, the patent actually issued 1884‑03‑04 under the title "Toy Building‑Block" is US 294,589 (Crandall, Montrose, Pa.). I am reporting the page literally (US294607A) while flagging that the identifier does not resolve to the document the page's title and date describe. I have not "corrected" it.
2. US 168,229 / serial‑number collision. The same numeric string appears as the application serial for US 3,190,821 (nickel plating brightener). The 1875 toy‑building‑block patent is confirmed separately via the 1875 sitemap, but the string is not unique.
3. OCR‑garbled entries. "US336517A — Haemon h" and the inventor/document fields throughout the '420 text are unreliable (e.g., "H P OSTRUM," "OEEIoE," "Spt. 24,1878"). Do not rely on OCR strings for citation.
4. Internal contradiction in the earlier generated sections. The Litigation section cites Wicke v. Ostrum at 94 U.S. 671 (1876 Term); the Assignment History section cites the same case at 103 U.S. 461 (1880) with govinfo/Justia links. Both cannot be right, and the litigation section self‑flagged its citation as unverified. This does not affect the § 103 analysis — the case is not about the '420 patent under either citation — but the record should be reconciled.
5. Date conflict (carried forward). Task states 2026‑04‑26; system context states 2026‑09‑30. Flagged, immaterial to this analysis.

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8. Claim 1, limitation by limitation

As parsed in the prior summary, Claim 1 requires:

Note the pattern. Limitations 2, 3, 4 and 5 — the only ones with any dimensional specificity — are each a result‑effective relationship dictated by the function of the joint and the lattice. Under In re Kao and the KSR "predictable variations" rubric, a parameter that is the result of a recognized design requirement cannot carry patentable weight. Limitations 1, 6, and the absolute dimensions are expressly conceded as arbitrary by the specification itself.

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9. The combinations, and why a PHOSITA would make them

Combination A — Primary: US 168,672 (Reed) + US 168,229 (toy building‑blocks), optionally corroborated by Schmetzer US 171,533 / Brock US 161,746 as common‑knowledge evidence

What each supplies. Reed supplies wood stock with transverse half‑depth kerfs at equal intervals — limitations 2 and 4 in a woodworking reference. US 168,229 (and, if verified, Schmetzer's cross‑grooved block) supplies rectangular wooden pieces interfitted at right angles to build up a structure, i.e., the assembly step and the crossing half‑lap. Brock supplies proof that forming regular parallel grooves in wood strip by circular saw/rotary cutter was conventional production practice by 1875.

Motivation to combine — articulated, not assumed:

1. Same field of endeavor. Reed is flooring/carpentry; the toy‑block art is woodworking; both operate on the same stock, with the same tools (saw kerf, groove), addressing the same physical problem — joining or stabilizing wood elements of uniform section.
2. Same problem, same solution family. Reed's stated purpose is dimensional stability of kerfed wood; the toy‑block art's purpose is rigid assembly of kerfed wood. Combining a kerfed‑stock idea with an interfit‑assembly idea yields a predictable grille, not an unpredictable result. KSR, 550 U.S. at 416–17 (combination of known elements according to known methods, yielding predictable results).
3. Design incentive / market demand. Both references are aimed at cheap, standard‑stock, repeatable production. Reed expressly calibrates kerf depth to standard board thickness; the toy‑block art relies on standard blocks. A worker seeking modular ornamental woodwork from standard stock would predictably pursue the same route. KSR at 421 (design incentives and market demands).
4. Simple substitution. Substituting a cross‑slot for Reed's longitudinal kerf uses the same technique, on the same stock, for the same purpose (creating a half‑depth seat for a mating element) — the classic KSR substitution rationale.
5. "Obvious to try" with a finite solution set. Given the objective of a crossing joint in uniform rectangular stock, the number of workable geometries is small and the outcomes predictable — slot to the center, width matched to stock, regular spacing. KSR at 421.

Combination B — US 12,276 (Marquetry, 1855) + US 168,672 (Reed) + USD 7,894 S (Design for embroidery‑patterns, 1874)

Purpose: supply the ornamental motivation that Claim 1's preamble requires. Marquetry is ornamental woodwork by definition; the design patent evidences that surface‑pattern layout for ornamentation was a recognized design activity.

Motivation: the '420 preamble is "ornamental wood‑work." A PHOSITA addressing the ornamental‑woodware market in 1878 had both (i) the ornamental‑pattern art and (ii) the kerfed‑stock construction technique, and applying a known construction technique to a known ornamental form is the ordinary workshop step. Caveat: I did not verify the content of US 12,276 or USD 7,894 S — search for US 12,276 returned nothing, and I will not characterize either beyond its listed title and date. This combination is structurally sound but evidentially thin and should not be relied on until both are read.

Combination C — US 147,805 (printers' chases, 1874) + US 168,672 (Reed) + US 168,229

Purpose: the chase is a rectangular frame holding elements set in a regular matrix — evidence that regular gridded matrices of standardized interlocking elements were conventional. Motivation: analogy of a regular gridded matrix to a modular lattice. Strength: WEAK. Chases are a different field of endeavor (typography), the analogous‑art objection is real, and the cross‑field inference is precisely the kind of "forced similarity" that In re Luks and In re Ellis caution against. Include only as a supporting, not primary, rationale. Unverified.

Common‑knowledge route (independent of the reference list)

Half‑lap joints, trellis/lattice construction, egg‑crate grilles, mortise‑and‑tenon, and notched‑log corner joinery are all pre‑1878. The claim, stripped of surplus verbiage, describes a half‑lap grille with a modular pitch. Under KSR, common sense can supply a missing limitation — but Arendi S.A.R.L. v. Apple Inc., 832 F.3d 1355 (Fed. Cir. 2016), forbids using "common sense" as a wholesale substitute for reasoned analysis and evidentiary support. This route is a supplement to Combination A, not a substitute for it.

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10. The motivation analysis, stated compactly

A single reason suffices: each claimed element performs the same function in the combination that it performed separately in the art, and the combination produces no result beyond the predictable sum of those functions. Reed's half‑depth kerf still seats a mating piece; the interfit art's crossing joint still locks two wood members at right angles; the regular pitch still produces a regular lattice. There is no teaching away in any qualifying reference (Reed specifically endorses multiple equidistant kerfs), no unexpected result recited in the specification, and no criticality asserted for any dimension — the specification affirmatively disclaims criticality: "The pieces need not be square… the slots in the longer pieces need be no particular distance apart; it is only required that they be equal distances from each other."

That sentence is, in substance, an admission that the claim's numeric content is a design choice among equivalents, which is close to a concession of obviousness under Graham factor 2.

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11. Counterarguments — why this is a good but not overwhelming § 103 case

Presenting both sides, as required:

1. Hindsight is the central risk. No single qualifying reference discloses all of limitations 2–6 as an arranged set. Building Combination A requires knowing the answer — specifically, the short‑piece‑equals‑pitch relationship — and then locating pieces in the art that map to it. KSR itself warns: "a patent composed of several elements is not proved obvious merely by demonstrating that each of its elements was, independently, known in the prior art." The reason‑for‑combining articulation in §9 must be made expressly and is the whole ballgame.
2. The best reference is time‑barred. US 473,185 ("Ornamental wood and metal work," 1892) — the closest title match in the entire list — is legally unusable. Any analysis that leans on it is defective on its face. (This is likely the single most common error a careless analyst would make on this page.)
3. The key reference is unverified. US 168,229 is the pivot of Combination A and I confirmed only its title and date. If its disclosure turns out to be non‑interfitting (e.g., picture‑blocks with irregular scroll edges, as in the 1884 Crandall patent), Combination A loses its crossing‑joint element and the case weakens materially.
4. Non‑analogous‑art exposure. The qualifying subset is dominated by flooring and lumber references. A PHOSITA in "ornamental wood‑work" may not be the same artisan as a flooring‑board manufacturer. Anticipate a non‑analogous art response to any combination drawn from the flooring references, though Reed and Brock both self‑identify as serving carpenters, builders, and cabinet‑makers, which blunts it.
5. Alternative attack avenues may be stronger than § 103. Two deserve mention and are not § 103 arguments: (i) the claim is directed to subject matter whose asserted novelty lies substantially in appearance, which is the province of design protection (in 1878, the Act of 1842; today 35 U.S.C. § 171) rather than a utility claim; and (ii) the relative terms — "equidistant from each other," "equidistant from a slot," "the same size" — are arguably indefinite under Nautilus, Inc. v. Biosig Instruments, Inc., 572 U.S. 898 (2014), which affects claim scope and therefore any § 103 mapping. I raise these as flagged alternatives, not conclusions.

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12. Governing law — the anachronism that frames everything

35 U.S.C. § 103 did not exist in 1878. It was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952 (effective 1953). At issuance, patentability turned on the "invention" requirement of the Act of 1870 (reenacting the 1836 standard), construed under Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) — whether the improvement required more ingenuity than that of an "ordinary mechanic" — and later hardened by the "flash of genius" test of Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941). Since US 208,420 has a pre‑2013‑03‑16 effective filing date, pre‑AIA §§ 102/103 govern if any modern analysis is attempted at all. The controlling modern framework would be Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content of art; differences; level of ordinary skill; secondary considerations) as refined by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).

Practical direction of the anachronism: the pre‑1952 standards Hotchkiss and Cuno were, in operation, less generous to patentees than § 103. So a claim that fails § 103 would a fortiori have failed the 1878‑era standard. If the claim is obvious under modern law, the historical analysis does not rescue it. I state this as a structural observation, not as a holding — no tribunal has ever passed on it.

And the proceeding cannot exist. The patent expired 1895‑09‑24. There is no infringement action, no § 282 invalidity defense, no declaratory judgment, and (as the PTAB section of this analysis establishes) no live AIA trial. This § 103 analysis is therefore academic/hypothetical — it reconstructs what a challenge would have looked like, not a challenge that can be brought.

Level of ordinary skill (Graham factor 3): a woodworker, cabinetmaker, or sawyer of ordinary skill in the mechanical arts, circa 1878; no formal technical education; fluent in saw kerfing, grooving, tonguing, and half‑lap joinery, and equipped with circular saws and rotary cutters (per Brock). Not a designer or engineer.

Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4): none available. No commercial success evidence; no nexus; no copying evidence; no licensing program; no long‑felt need. The only physical artifact is the Smithsonian patent model (NMAH Id. No. AG.208420, accession 89797) — a museum object, not marketplace evidence. The specification's own closing sentence — that the variety of articles "var[ies] with the ingenuity of the manipulator" — is not evidence of nonobviousness; it is evidence that the article is within the skill of the worker.

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13. Disposition

Uncertainty flags carried in this section: US 168,229 content, Schmetzer US 171,533 date, US 12,276 / USD 7,894 S / US 147,805 / US 195,352 / US 70,127 content — all unverified, all flagged in place rather than characterized. The US294607A number does not resolve to the document the page's title and date describe. The Wicke v. Ostrum citation conflict (94 U.S. 671 vs. 103 U.S. 461) is unresolved.