US 219455

I'll run several targeted searches for this patent number.

Let me run a couple of confirmatory searches on the litigation history and any modern docket activity.

US Patent 219,455 — Search Results

Scope note on the search. I searched for the literal number "219455" / "219,455" against patent records, litigation databases, and Federal Circuit docket material. I found no 2026 CAFC docket activity involving this patent, and I want to be explicit that this is a substantive finding rather than a gap in my search: the patent's recorded term ran out in 1896, 130 years before the requested docket window. Nothing in the available records suggests any live litigation. The only judicial activity I can confirm is 19th-century.

Bibliographic data (from the patent record)

Claim analysis

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

"The compound for axle-grease herein described, composed of sal-soda, water, lime, and the four qualities of rosin-oil known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, substantially as set forth."

Plain-language reading of the sole independent claim. This is a composition-of-matter claim drawn to a grease, not to a method. To fall within the claim, a product must contain all of the following as a combination: (a) sal-soda (sodium carbonate), (b) water, (c) lime, and (d) all four designated grades of rosin-oil — Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 — as those grades were defined in Frazer's earlier patent. Two features are worth flagging for anyone reading this claim today:

1. The "Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4" limitation is incorporative-by-reference and is not self-contained. The claim does not define what distinguishes grade No. 1 from No. 2, etc. The specification points back to Letters Patent No. 28,663, dated (per the specification text) January 12, 1860, for the definition of those oil grades. As a practical matter, the claim's scope depends entirely on an external document.
2. "Substantially as set forth" is a boilerplate catch-all, but the only operative disclosure it can pull in is the two-stage mixing sequence, which the claim does not itself recite.

Overview of the disclosed process (context for the claim)

The specification describes a two-vessel procedure:

• Vessel A: Dissolve one-half pound of sal-soda in three pints of water; mix in one-half gallon No. 1 rosin-oil and two and a half gallons No. 4 rosin-oil; stir. Then add ten pounds of fine sifted material and let foreign matter settle to the bottom.
• Vessel B: Combine one gallon No. 1 rosin-oil, three and a half gallons No. 2 rosin-oil, and four and two-thirds gallons No. 3 rosin-oil.
• Combine: Pour the Vessel A mixture into Vessel B and stir thoroughly to complete the axle-grease.

OCR uncertainty — flagging rather than guessing. In the source text I retrieved, the ingredient list in the description is corrupted at a critical point: the passage reads "…after which ten pounds of fine sifted ment or foreign matter will settle to the bottom." The word or words between "fine sifted" and "will settle" are missing/truncated by OCR. Given that lime is the only claim-element ingredient otherwise unaccounted for in the recited steps, it is plausible that the missing text specifies sifted lime — but that is an inference, not something I can verify from the record I retrieved. I am not asserting it as fact.

Prior-art and family context

• Incorporated-by-reference prior patent: Letters Patent No. 28,663, described in the specification as granted January 12, 1860, for "the distillation of oil from resin," defining the oils called Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4.
• Reported-date discrepancy (noted literally, not corrected): The specification says the 1860 patent was dated January 12, 1860. The 1884 federal opinion states a patent "issued to the defendant himself in October, 1860." The 1887 Illinois opinion states a patent issued June 12, 1860. I am reporting all three as found and not reconciling them — they may refer to different grants, or reflect error in one or more sources. I did not independently retrieve the 28,663 document.
• Companion patent: A second Frazer patent for a further improvement in axle-grease, dated October 19, 1880 (number not stated in the sources I retrieved). The litigation record indicates Frazer himself regarded the 1879 patent as having been "issued by mistake" relative to the 1880 one.

Adjudication history (the only litigation I can confirm)

• United States v. Frazer, 22 F. 106 (N.D. Ill., Oct. 20, 1884) (Blodgett, J.) — A bill in the name of the United States seeking cancellation of both the 1879 and 1880 patents on the ground that Frazer fraudulently swore the improvements were not previously known or used (alleged public use more than two years before filing) and that the process was fully described in his own expired 1860 patent. The court sustained a demurrer and dismissed the bill for want of equity, holding that the government should not lend its name to what was in substance a private dispute, especially where the real parties had a complete defense available to them in any infringement suit. Critically, the court expressed no view on validity or novelty. This is the only adjudication tied to the number 219,455 — confirmed by the List of Adjudicated Patents, which catalogues entry 219,455 — "Lubricant, S. Frazer, 22 F. 106."
• Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147 (1887) — An Illinois trademark/unfair-competition case (not a patent case) arising from Frazer's post-1870 Galena venture and his use of his own name. The court found the two greases substantially the same (both "made from a combination of rosin oil, lime, sal-soda and water") and enjoined use of the "Frazer" name. It mentions the 1879 patent as background but does not adjudicate it.
• CAFC 2026 dockets: Nothing found. No appeal, IPR, or other proceeding involving patent 219,455 appears in the material I retrieved.

Explicit uncertainties

• I did not retrieve the original USPTO PatentCenter/Global Dossier record directly, so the bibliographic fields above derive from the Google Patents transcription of the grant and may carry transcription artifacts.
• No abstract exists in the original document.
• The description contains at least one OCR-broken ingredient recitation; do not rely on the "sifted lime" reading without checking the original scanned specification.
• I cannot state the number of the October 19, 1880 companion patent with confidence.
• Frazer's corporate relationship to the patent is legally textured: while no assignment is recorded against 219,455 itself, the 1870 contract disposed of his rights in the earlier patent and his name, which is why the Frazer Lubricator Company litigated against him. Whether any interest in 219,455 was ever formally assigned is not something the records I retrieved establish.

I'll search for litigation records involving this specific patent number.

Let me run additional targeted searches to confirm.

This is a significant lead. Let me verify the litigation details and check for other cases.

Litigation review — US Patent No. 219,455

Patent reviewed: US 219,455, "Improvement in Lubricants" (Samuel Frazer, Galena, Jo Daviess County, Illinois). Application filed June 7, 1879; granted September 9, 1879. Single claim: "The compound for axle-grease herein described, composed of sal-soda, water, lime, and the four qualities of rosin-oil known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, substantially as set forth." Google Patents records the anticipated expiration as 1896‑09‑09 ("Expired – Lifetime").

Bottom line: No litigation asserting US 219,455 (i.e., no patent‑infringement suit on this patent) was found. However, the patent owner, Samuel Frazer, was a party to two well‑documented 1880s suits involving the same axle‑grease business, and the 1879 patent is recited in the facts of those opinions. I set both out below, with the caveat that neither was decided as a patent case.

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1. Cases involving the patentee (but not patent‑infringement claims)

Case A — Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co. (Illinois trade‑mark/contract case)

Nature of the action: The bill sought to enjoin Frazer and S. Frazer & Co. from using the name "Frazer," "Samuel Frazer," "S. Frazer," or "S. Frazer & Co." in the manufacture/sale of axle grease. The cause of action was trade‑mark/unfair competition plus breach of the February 7, 1870 contract (under which Frazer sold his patent No. 28,663 — the 1860 distillation‑of‑rosin‑oil patent — and the exclusive right to use his name).

Relationship to US 219,455: The Illinois Supreme Court's statement of facts recites: "In 1879 Frazer obtained a patent from the government for what he claimed to be an improvement in the manufacture of the axle grease, in which patent reference is made to the patent of 1860. In the following year he applied for and obtained a second patent..." — that 1879 patent is US 219,455 (it expressly references the 1860 patent, No. 28,663). Critically, the court notes Frazer relied on "the last one" (the 1880 patent), "as he claims the first was issued by mistake." No claim of infringement of US 219,455 was pleaded or adjudicated; the decree rested on the contract and trade‑mark law. The court also refused to enforce the unlimited covenant not to manufacture, holding it a general restraint of trade — Frazer remained free to make grease, just not under the "Frazer" name.

Case B — Frazer Lubricator Co. v. Frazer and Others, Partners, etc. (federal, Minnesota)

Nature of the action: Again a trade‑mark suit (imitation of the "Frazer's Axle Grease" label), not a patent suit. Complaint noted the plaintiff's title derived "from certain assignments of letters patent, and contracts" — but the patent referenced in the 1870 assignment was No. 28,663, not 219,455.

Both Case A and Case B arise from the same dispute and the same product; the patentee's Galena firm ultimately complied by incorporating as the Galena Axle Grease Co.

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2. Search results for the specific number 219455 — what was checked

Searches for the literal string "219455" / "US219455" / "US 219,455" in litigation-oriented contexts returned only unrelated hits, which I list so you can see the negative result is real and not a null search:

• WO 2018/219455 A1 (PCT/EP2017/063223) — telecom content‑filtering application.
• JP 2013‑219455 A — Hitachi wireless communication application.
• NASA/TM—2017‑219455 — boron nitride nanotube technical memorandum.
• Kosovo Commercial Court docket 2023:219455 (KF.nr.538/23), a customs‑valuation case decided 04.03.2026.
• An antibody catalog number (S219455, EXOG rabbit pAb).
• No entry for US 219,455 appears in the Unified Patents litigation case list, RPX/Insight litigation documents, CourtListener/RECAP federal dockets, or CAFC opinions in anything I retrieved.

Confidence and limitations (stated explicitly):

• I could not find any assertion of US 219,455 in a patent‑infringement action, in any forum, at any time.
• The Unified Patents litigation portal is a JavaScript application; I reached it only via keyword search, not a direct docket query, so I cannot claim to have exhaustively enumerated every case page on that site.
• PACER and the CAFC docket were not directly queried; however, the patent expired in 1896 (Google Patents: anticipated expiration 1896‑09‑09), so post‑1896 infringement litigation is legally impossible, and pre‑1896 federal equity cases are not in PACER.
• The Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co. trial‑court (Cook County Superior Court) docket number is genuinely unavailable in the reported record; I am not supplying a placeholder.

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3. Practical implications for counsel

1. No freedom‑to‑operate or clearance concern arises from US 219,455: it has been expired for roughly 130 years, and its entire disclosure (rosin‑oil fractions Nos. 1–4, sal‑soda, water, lime) is public‑domain subject matter.
2. Prior‑art value: US 219,455 remains citable as a printed publication/patent under pre‑AIA § 102(a)/(b) (and as "known or used" evidence) for grease, soap‑base or rosin‑oil lubricant formulations, and its September 9, 1879 date makes it an extremely early reference. Anyone relying on it should note the OCR corruption in the Google Patents text — the sentence "after which ten pounds of fine sifted ment or foreign matter will settle to the bottom" is clearly a garbled passage concerning the addition of lime and settling of foreign matter; the certified copy (USPTO PatentCenter/Espacenet PDF) should be used, not the HTML.
3. Related family/art: The specification expressly cross‑references Frazer's earlier Letters Patent No. 28,663 (distillation of oil from resin), assigned away in the 1870 Frazer–Packard agreement. If your question concerns the Frazer portfolio, that patent (and the unidentified 1880 patent mentioned by the Illinois Supreme Court) is the more relevant chain of title, and the title‑transfer history is documented in Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147.
4. Litigation‑history searches by number should be run with the leading "US"/"No." qualifier — bare "219455" is heavily contaminated by PCT publication numbers, JP publication numbers, court docket numbers, and commercial catalog numbers, as the results above demonstrate.

I'll verify the absence of PTAB activity before writing the analysis.

Proceedings overview

Zero. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — the USPTO Open Data Portal's canonical AIA-trial list for this patent — returns no proceedings at all for US 219,455. There is nothing to break down by active / claims-invalidated / claims-sustained / settled / institution-denied status, because there are 0 IPRs, 0 PGRs, and 0 CBMs on this patent. My independent web check (queries on "US219455 PTAB inter partes review" and "219,455 Samuel Frazer axle grease IPR") surfaced no PTAB or Federal Circuit proceeding naming this patent.

The bottom-line defensive posture is not "the patent has survived two IPRs and is hardened," and it is also not "the claims have been canceled." It is this: US 219,455 is a 19th-century patent whose term ended on 1896-09-09, and it has never been the subject of an AIA trial because it cannot realistically be asserted against anyone. A defendant who receives a demand letter citing US 219,455 is looking at a defective or fraudulent assertion, not at a hardened patent — the absence of PTAB activity here is a symptom of an unenforceable patent, not of one that fended off challengers.

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No proceedings to detail

Because there are no proceeding numbers in the structured data, I am listing none. Per the operating rules, I will not invent IPR/PGR/CBM numbers, panels, or dispositions to fill this section. If a demand letter or cease-and-desist asserts that "the PTAB upheld this patent," that statement is fabricated — there is no FWD, no institution decision, and no appeal to link.

Two structural reasons confirm the null result is expected, not an indexing gap:

1. Terminal expiry long before the PTAB existed. Google Patents / ODP list the grant as 1879-09-09 (filed 1879-06-07) with an "Anticipated expiration" of 1896-09-09 — the standard 17-years-from-grant term under the 1861 Act. The PTAB (and its predecessor BPAI trial regime) did not exist until the AIA's trial provisions took effect on 2012-09-16. The legal status field reads "Expired – Lifetime."
2. No live controversy to fund a petition. IPR fees and expert costs are only justified against a patent capable of being asserted for past infringement within the § 286 six-year lookback. A patent that expired in 1896 supports no recoverable past-infringement theory; the Board's jurisdiction over expired patents (see Sony Corp. v. Iancu, 924 F.3d 1235 (Fed. Cir. 2019), and 37 C.F.R. § 42.100(b) applying Phillips to expired claims) is a jurisdictional holding, not an invitation for anyone to spend money on an 1879 axle-grease claim.

Also note: PGR is categorically unavailable — 35 U.S.C. § 321 applies only to first-inventor-to-file patents, and CBM review sunset on 2020-09-16 and in any event requires a "covered business method" claim in the financial-services field, which an axle-grease composition is not.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: a single, unnumbered, UNTESTED claim. US 219,455 does not have claims 1–5. It has one claim, printed unnumbered, and recited in Google Patents' "Definitions" section as: "the compound for axle-grease herein described, composed of sal-soda, water, lime, and the four qualities of rosin-oil known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, substantially as set forth." No claim of 219,455 has ever been canceled, narrowed, or sustained in an AIA trial — not because it survived challenge, but because it was never challenged. Do not let anyone characterize "no IPR" as "the Board validated the claim."

Two practical points about the claim's content matter more than any PTAB record: (a) the claim is a "substantially as set forth" claim that incorporates the specification's process — the OCR of the printed specification is garbled around the step where sal-soda, water, lime and the rosin-oils are combined, so the metes and bounds of even the single claim are not cleanly recoverable from the public text; and (b) the patent is a dependency of the patentee's own earlier patent, No. 28,663 (granted 1860-01-12), which the specification expressly incorporates as the source of the "Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4" rosin-oil fractions.

Estoppel landscape: clean, and irrelevant in the way that helps you. Because no IPR was ever filed, no one is subject to 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel on this patent, and no petitioner or privy is barred from raising any ground. Conversely, no one has a favorable PTAB record to lean on either. If you are nonetheless forced to defend a validity challenge to 219,455, every § 102/§ 103/§ 112 ground remains available — but the far better defenses are unenforceability and plain non-assertability: a patent that expired 130 years ago cannot underpin an infringement cause of action, so a demand letter citing it is better met with a Rule 11 / § 285 letter than with an invalidity contention.

Pattern signals: none, and a false-positive warning. There is no repeat petitioner, no Unified Patents-style defensive aggregator, and no patent-owner appellate activity associated with US 219,455 — the family ID 2288856 shows a single family application in the US, no foreign counterparts.

⚠️ Search false positive you must not rely on. Web searches for "the '455 patent" today are saturated by an entirely different patent — U.S. Patent 11,160,455 (a 2021-issued Netlist patent) litigated in Samsung Elecs. Co. v. Netlist, Inc., where the Board has addressed related patents in the "'533- and '484- IPRs" and where institution decisions discuss IPR2024-01286 (U.S. 8,942,378, institution declined) and IPR2024-01287 (U.S. 9,287,982, instituted). Those proceedings have nothing to do with US 219,455 and cite a different patent's specification, different prior art (Lisogurski, Tran, Carlson, McKinnon, Go), and different claim numbers. Do not attribute them to this patent, and be alert to any adversary doing so.

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Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: there is no FWD to link and no disposition to quote. Say so plainly and in writing. The correct citations are to the patent itself — US 219,455 (granted 1879-09-09; term ended 1896-09-09; status "Expired – Lifetime," per the ODP record at https://patents.google.com/patent/US219455/en) — and to the statutory unavailability of any infringement recovery on an expired patent.
• If you are a defendant being sued on this patent: treat the assertion as a sanctionable one. Preserve the demand letter and any statement that "the PTAB previously upheld the '455 patent," because such a statement is false as to this patent and potentially a Rule 11 / § 285 issue. A short letter citing the 1896 expiry plus the ODP "Expired – Lifetime" status should end the matter.
• If you are evaluating the patent as prior art: note the practical value — the 1879-09-09 publication date makes US 219,455 (and its parent, US 28,663, granted 1860-01-12) citable as a § 102(a)(1)/(b) prior-art printed publication against modern rosin-oil, tall-oil, and rosin-acid-comprising lubricant claims, and its disclosure of sequentially combining rosin-oil fractions with sal-soda/lime saponification is a useful obviousness anchor. That is the only real utility this patent has in 2026.
• If active proceedings are asserted to be pending: they are not. There is no institution deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD date to calendar, because no petition has ever been filed against US 219,455.
• If you want independent confirmation: the absence here traces to the ODP ingest itself; a manual check of the PTAB E2E docket (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) by patent number, and of CourtListener's docket for "219,455," should return the same empty result. I could not locate a specific FWD, institution decision, or CAFC opinion for this patent, and I state explicitly that I have no such citation rather than inventing one.

I'll verify the assignment record and historical context before writing, since this is an 1879 patent with an unusual provenance.

Let me verify the coverage window of the USPTO assignment database and whether any pre-1980 record exists for this patent.

US 219455 — "Improvement in Lubricants" — Ownership Reconstruction

Analyst note up front: US 219455 is an 1879 patent, and the USPTO's electronic assignment record system does not reach it. Everything below distinguishes (a) what the USPTO Assignment Center can and cannot show, from (b) ownership facts documented in contemporaneous court records and published history.

Identifier caution: do not conflate three distinct "219455" strings. US Patent 219,455 = Frazer, granted 1879-09-09. Google Patents' rendered application number "US219455D" is a Google differentiation code, not a serial number. Separately, US application serial 219,455 (filed 1927-09-14) issued as US 1,805,321 (Ullman, pipe coupling) — a false positive that will pollute any Assignment Center "219455" lookup, and it appears in this patent's "Similar Documents" list for that reason alone.

Inventors

Frazer (b. 27 Feb 1824, Fatfield, County Durham, England; d. 1 May 1899, Galena) is the only named inventor, and the patent is signed by him alone with witnesses Thos. J. Sheean and William Wippon. His 1879 employment status is well documented by negative evidence rather than by an organization:

• He had retired from the Chicago partnership in February 1870, assigning his 1860 patent and his trade name to Edward Hunter, John A. Packard, Otis S. Favor and George B. Swift for a stated $10 plus valuable consideration (agreement quoted in full in Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147).
• Between 1870 and the mid-1880s he worked briefly in the leather business with Charles R. Perkins and prospected for lead near Elizabeth, Illinois.
• S. Frazer & Co. / the Galena axle-grease works did not exist at filing. The firm was organized in Galena around November 1883 (officers: President Jacob Fawcett; Secretary/Superintendent G. S. Avery; Foreman of Works Samuel Frazer), with the factory built in 1883–84. Court opinions date the Galena manufacturing start inconsistently — some report "February 1881," others "February 1884"; treat the exact start date as unresolved.

Unusual-pattern check: the "all inventors departed the original assignee within 12 months of filing" red flag is not applicable — there was no original assignee and only one inventor. The inverse pattern is present and is the historically interesting fact: Frazer filed this application as a private individual nine years after he had sold his prior patent and his own name-as-trademark to a Chicago company, and he then built a manufacturing business around the technology in 1883–84. The 1879 filing is best understood as a re-entry into a market he had previously exited by contract, not as an employee invention.

Text-caveat: the Google Patents OCR of the specification is truncated mid-sentence ("after which ten pounds of fine sifted ment or foreign matter will settle to the bottom"). The missing words are plainly the lime addition, which is why the single claim — "sal-soda, water, lime, and the four qualities of rosin-oil known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4" — recites a component the fetched body text drops.

Original assignee

None. The patent issued to Samuel Frazer as sole patentee; no assignee is named on the face of US 219455.

The specification confirms this: it recites Frazer as the inventor and states only that he "do[es] hereby declare that the following is a full, clear, and exact description thereof." There is no "assignor to" clause, no company name, no mesne-assignment reference.

• Product embodying the claims: Yes, commercially — but after issuance and by Frazer himself. The claimed composition (sal-soda, water, lime, four grades of rosin oil, per claim 1) is the "Superior Axle Grease" manufactured at Galena from 1883/84 under the firm name S. Frazer & Co., and later by the Galena Axle Grease Company / Galena Manufacturing Company, which continued grease, then motor oil, then can-filling machinery production into the twentieth century. Retail signage and packaging sold it as superior to competitors' grease.
• Line of business: Rosin-oil distillation and compounded axle greases (derived from Frazer's earlier 1860 patent on distilling oil from resin, his self-identified source of "Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4" grades).
• Current status: Dissolved for practical purposes nearly a century ago; the Galena plant site was later occupied by Galena Manufacturing Co., which never fully recovered from a flood and is now historical/archival (Galena History Museum and Galena Public Library hold the company ledgers and advertising). No successor entity owns this patent — the term expired 1896-09-09.

Comparable operating entity at the time: the Frazer Lubricator Company (Chicago, organized April 1870) held the earlier 1860 patent, the "Frazer's Axle Grease" trademark, and the covenant by which Frazer agreed not to compete. It is the adverse party in the 1880s litigation, not the owner of US 219455.

Assignment timeline

Plainly: there are no USPTO Assignment Center records for US 219455, and there cannot be any in that system.

• USPTO's electronic assignment database covers recorded assignments back to August 1980 (USPTO, Assignment Database webinar materials: "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980"; the XML bulk product likewise states "August 1980 – December 31, 2021").
• Records recorded before May 1, 1957 are not held by the USPTO for public distribution at all — they are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (37 CFR 1.12(a)(2) and MPEP 301.01: "All records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957, are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)").
• Google Patents' legal-events feed for US219455 shows only the grant, the "Expired – Lifetime" status and the 1896-09-09 anticipated expiration. No assignment event is indexed.

Accordingly, no reel/frame, no execution date, no assignee and no correspondent of record can be cited for this patent, and I will not invent one. Any 1879–1896 transfer of this patent (if one occurred) exists only as a paper entry in the pre-1957 Patent Office assignment books now at NARA, retrievable only by manual/NARA inquiry, not via assignmentcenter.uspto.gov.

For completeness, the following pre-issuance related transfers are documented in court records and are NOT Assignment Center entries — they are included because they are the only ownership events touching this patent family, and they are not assignments of US 219455 itself:

• 1870-02-07 (executed) — no reel/frame; no USPTO record; documented as the agreement quoted verbatim in Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147
  • Conveyance: Assignment plus trademark grant plus covenant not to compete
  • Assignor: Samuel Frazer, Galena, Illinois (then temporarily residing in Chicago)
  • Assignee: Edward Hunter, John A. Packard, Otis S. Favor and George B. Swift, all of Chicago (parties of the second part; the Frazer Lubricator Company was organized the following April and took the rights by "proper instruments of conveyance and assignment")
  • Correspondent: Not stated in the reported opinion — this is a pre-1957 transaction, so no attorney of record is recoverable from the Assignment Center
  • Context: Sale of a business — but it covers the 1860 patent, the "Frazer's Axle Grease" name/trademark, and a non-compete. It does not and cannot cover US 219455, which did not exist until 1879. The agreement describes the 1860 patent as issued "on the 12th day of June, 1860," whereas the US 219455 specification itself cites the earlier Frazer patent as No. 28,663, dated January 12, 1860 — a date discrepancy across sources that I flag rather than resolve.
• 1879-06-07 / 1879-09-09 — application filed / patent granted to Samuel Frazer; no assignee, hence no assignment to record.
• 1880-10-19 — a second Frazer axle-grease patent issues. Frazer later characterized the 1879 patent as having been "issued by mistake" and leaned on the 1880 patent commercially. This is a validity self-doubt, not an ownership transfer, but it is the single most important fact for anyone modeling assertion value of the '455 claims.
• 1884 — United States v. Frazer, 22 F. 106 (N.D. Ill., 20 Oct 1884): bill in equity to cancel the 1879 and 1880 patents for fraudulent affidavit (public use more than two years before filing; disclosure in the expired 1860 patent). Dismissed on demurrer because the suit was brought using the government's name on behalf of private parties — the predecessor/grievant corporation — with the court noting "it is an imposition on the patent office" but that the United States was not the real party in interest. Counsel: E. A. West and R. S. Tuthill for complainant; Coburn & Thacher for Frazer.
• 1884-08-30 (bill exhibited) — Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co. filed in the Superior Court of Cook County (trademark infringement over the name "Frazer"); decree for plaintiff, affirmed on appeal and ultimately affirmed by the Illinois Supreme Court (121 Ill. 147). Frazer's Galena company retained the grease but lost the use of the name.
• 1896-09-09 — term expires.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 219455
    1860 : Frazer gets patent on distilling rosin oil
    1870 : Frazer sells 1860 patent and his name to Chicago partners
    1879 : Application filed June 7 by Samuel Frazer
         : Patent 219455 granted September 9 with no assignee
    1880 : Frazer obtains second axle grease patent October 19
    1884 : US bill filed to cancel the 1879 and 1880 patents
         : Frazer Lubricator sues Frazer over the name
    1886 : Illinois Supreme Court affirms the injunction
    1896 : Patent term expires September 9
    1899 : Inventor Samuel Frazer dies at Galena

NPE / troll-pattern signals

The framework is largely inapplicable here: the modern NPE playbook requires (i) a live, unexpired patent, (ii) an assignable asset, and (iii) an identifiable assertion campaign. US 219455 has been expired since 1896-09-09. I nonetheless score each signal against the evidence rather than dismissing them wholesale.

Verdict

Insufficient data — and, more strongly, not a viable NPE analysis target at all.

Justification: the USPTO Assignment Center's electronic coverage begins August 1980, and pre-May 1, 1957 assignments are held by NARA under 37 CFR 1.12(a)(2) / MPEP 301.01, so no reel/frame entry, execution date, assignee or correspondent exists to cite for a patent granted 1879-09-09; Google Patents' legal-events feed for US219455 likewise carries only issuance, "Expired – Lifetime," and the 1896-09-09 anticipated expiration. The patent issued to Samuel Frazer as sole patentee with no named assignee, and the only documented ownership instruments in the family are the 1870-02-07 assignment of the prior 1860 patent and trademark to Hunter, Packard, Favor and Swift, plus 1880s operating-company litigation (U.S. v. Frazer, 22 F. 106 (N.D. Ill. 1884); Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147). Because the term lapsed 1896-09-09, every one of the eight NPE signals is either affirmatively absent or moot; the correct treatment is a closed historical file rather than a "could be a shell" speculation.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (patent-number lookup) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — expect a null result for 219455; for pre-1957 paper records, the retrieval path is NARA, not the Assignment Center.

I'll run targeted searches to identify what citation records exist for US 219,455 and to verify the prior-art chain.

Key discrepancy surfaced in that search. Let me verify the prior-patent number and look for the 1880 companion patent and any citation record.

Two strong leads: a census reference giving the 1860 patent a different number, and a "Similar Documents" entry dated exactly Oct. 19, 1880. Let me verify both.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 219,455

Task scope: locate the USPTO record for the literal number 219455, enumerate every reference cited against it, and map those references to the patent's claim(s) under 35 U.S.C. § 102.

Governing text used: the full authoritative record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US219455](/patent/US219455)/en (mirroring the USPTO grant and the ODP legal-status feed), per the operating rule that the supplied full text controls over search results.

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1. Literal-number confinement — false positives excluded

The number "219455" is heavily contaminated. The following were returned by search and are expressly excluded from this analysis; none is US 219,455:

The serial-number collision in the last row is the one that will pollute any Assignment Center or PatentCenter "219455" query; see the previously generated assignment section, which flags it for the same reason.

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2. What the USPTO record for 219,455 actually contains

2.1 The citation finding, stated precisely

There is no patent-citation list for US 219,455 — not in the USPTO record, not in the PatentCenter/Global Dossier rendering, and not in the Google Patents transcription. The document's rendered record contains a "Similar Documents" list but no "Citations" or "Cited By" section at all. This is the expected state for a patent granted in 1879: applicant/examiner citation practice and the printing of a "References Cited" block on the face of the grant did not produce a citable list here, and the ODP record carries no such field. I am reporting a genuine null, not a search failure — the identical record structure is visible across the 1870s lubricant patents in the same "Similar Documents" set (e.g., US176011, US198664, US179801), none of which displays a citations block either.

Consequently, the instruction to "look at each patent citation for 219455" has this literal answer: the document cites exactly one patent, and it cites it in the specification body, not in a formal citation list.

"January 12, 1860, Letters Patent No. 28,663 were granted to me for the distillation of oil from resin, in which patent I described different qualities of oil, called, respectively, Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4."

That is the only citation anywhere in US 219,455. Everything below is therefore organized as (A) the one true citation, (B)+(C) statutory prior art that the record itself raises, and (D) algorithmic "Similar Documents" that are not citations and must not be represented as such.

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3. Reference-by-reference prior-art analysis

Reference A — Frazer's own 1860 distillation patent (the sole express citation)

⚠️ Contradiction to flag against the earlier-generated sections. The previously generated summary and assignment sections state the prior patent as "No. 28,663, dated January 12, 1860" and treat that as settled. The census publication independently returned for this task lists 28,605 — June 12, 1860 for "S. FRAZER. Improvement in distillation of oils from resin." Under the operating rule I do not auto-correct either number. Two readings are possible and I cannot resolve them from the material retrieved: (i) the specification's "28,663 / January 12, 1860" is an OCR or typographic corruption of 28,605 / June 12, 1860; or (ii) there are two distinct 1860 Frazer grants. Verify against the original scanned grant before citing either number in a filing.

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Reference B — Frazer's own prior public use and sale of the same compound (statutory bar)

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Reference C — Third-party 1870s lubricating-compound patents (prior-art candidates only)

These appear solely in Google Patents' algorithmic "Similar Documents" list. They are not citations of record and no examiner considered them. They are listed here because, unlike the rest of that list, their dates fall before the June 7, 1879 filing and therefore make them § 102(a)/(b) candidates if their disclosures are on point. I have not retrieved or verified the substance of any of them.

Anticipation assessment: each would have to disclose all of sal-soda + water + lime + rosin-oil fractions Nos. 1–4 as an axle grease. Given the claim's "Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4" limitation is defined only by reference to Frazer's own 1860 patent, a third party's 1870s grease patent is unlikely to reproduce that four-grade limitation literally. Realistic contribution: § 103 obviousness as to the sal-soda/lime/water saponified-rosin-oil base. Verification required before any reliance.

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Reference D — Post-dating documents (NOT prior art)

Included to close the record and to correct a likely misreading of the "Similar Documents" list:

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Reference E — Unverified lead (flagged, not asserted)

A search returned an 1860-dated passage from a scanned patent compilation (cu31924092586688) reading "The product obtained by distilling a mixture of oil, which has been distilled from resin at about 550° F… lime… L. S. ROBBINS… 1860." The OCR is heavily corrupted. If this is a pre-1879 patent or publication by L. S. Robbins disclosing a lime-treated rosin-oil distillate, it is a genuine § 102(a)/(b) documentary candidate on the saponification element. I have not verified the document, its number, or its date, and I do not assert it as prior art. Recorded solely as a retrieval lead.

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4. § 102 mapping to the claim

The patent has one claim, printed unnumbered:

"The compound for axle-grease herein described, composed of sal-soda, water, lime, and the four qualities of rosin-oil known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, substantially as set forth."

No reference of record anticipates the sole claim. And that is the core structural finding: because the patent's own record contains no examiner citations at all, there is no official anticipation record to analyze.

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5. Bottom line

1. The USPTO record for US 219,455 carries no references-cited list. The claim-above-nothing is the honest answer. Do not accept any representation that specific patents were "cited against" 219,455 during prosecution.
2. The only citation in the document is internal — the specification's reference to Frazer's 1860 distillation patent, itself identified inconsistently across four sources (28,663 / Jan. 12, 1860 in the spec; 28,605 / June 12, 1860 in the 1900 Census; June 12, 1860 in the 1887 Illinois opinion; October 1860 in the 1884 federal opinion). This contradicts the previously generated sections' settled treatment of "28,663, January 12, 1860" and should be reconciled against the original document before any filing.
3. The most relevant prior art to the single claim is not a patent — it is Frazer's own pre-1877 commercial practice, which is the § 102(b) statutory-bar theory actually pleaded in United States v. Frazer, 22 F. 106 (N.D. Ill. 1884) and never adjudicated.
4. The 1880 Frazer patent — likely US 233,497 ("Lubricant," 1880‑10‑19), identification unverified — is not prior art; it post-dates the filing. The previously generated sections correctly flagged its number as unknown; US 233,497 is a candidate match on date alone.
5. Everything dated 1880 or later in the "Similar Documents" list is excluded as post-dating art, and the 1867–1879 entries are unrelated subject matter illustrating that the list is algorithmic output, not prosecution history.
6. Citation hygiene: all numbers here were reproduced literally. Where sources conflict (the 1860 patent number, its date, the identity of the 1880 patent), I have reported the conflict rather than silently selecting one, and I state explicitly that I could not verify the 1860 grant, the 1880 grant, or the content of any "Similar Documents" entry from the record retrieved.

I'll ground this analysis in the actual prior-art material on the patent's page, then verify what I can about the pre-1879 references.

Good — I now have verified content for US 198,664 and the historical grease formula. Let me check the other pre-1879 references in the page's Similar Documents list.

Obviousness analysis — US 219,455 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

1. Threshold: what "the Prior Art section of this page" actually contains

This matters before any legal analysis, because the source document does not contain an examiner-cited prior-art list. US 219,455 issued in 1879; there was no IDS practice, no "References Cited" block, and no front-page citation data. What the Google Patents page actually offers as prior-art material is three things:

Date-gating the "Similar Documents" list (filing date: 1879-06-07)

Only documents with a date before 1879-06-07 (or qualifying under pre-AIA § 102(e)) can be prior art. The list is roughly half-disqualified on its face:

Eligible by date (pre-1879-06-07): US 110,690 (1871-01-31), US 111,444 (1871-01-31), US 158,163 (1874-12-29), US 176,011 (1876-04-11), US 179,256 (1876-06-27), US 179,801 (1876-07-11), US 188,479 (1877-03-20), US 198,664 (1877-12-25), US 68,942 (1867-09-17), US 202,583 (1878-04-16), US 202,834 (1878-04-23).

Disqualified — post-dates the filing: US 233,497 (1880-10-19), US 230,898 (1880-08-10), US 243,876 (1881-07-05), US 243,154 (1881-06-21), US 246,532 (1881-08-30), US 381,483 (1888-04-17), US 406,883 (1889-07-16), US 466,393 (1892-01-05), US 831,868 (1906-09-25), US 886,340 (1908-05-05), US 1,081,059 (1913-12-09), US 1,107,020 (1914-08-11), US 1,256,537 (1918-02-19).

Special note on US 233,497 (1880-10-19), "Lubricant." This grant date is the same day as the "second patent for another discovery and improvement upon the process of making said axle grease" that Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147 (1887) attributes to Frazer. On that basis US 233,497 is very probably the patentee's own later companion patent — not prior art at all, and a candidate for a double-patenting/§ 112 critique rather than a § 103 reference. I flag this as a date-and-context inference, not a verified identity; I did not retrieve US 233,497's face.

Also disqualified as ambiguous: US 219,150 (1879-09-02, "Improvement in paints") issued after the June 7, 1879 filing but would carry an earlier filing date. I could not establish its filing date, so I do not rely on it. Its art (paints) is non-analogous in any event.

OCR caveat carried forward from the earlier sections: the specification body is truncated at "after which ten pounds of fine sifted [———] ment or foreign matter will settle to the bottom." The claim nonetheless recites lime. Because "lime" is thus inside the claim but outside the reliably-readable body text, I treat lime as claimed but note the disclosure defect.

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2. The governing standard — a necessary flag

35 U.S.C. § 103 did not exist in 1879. It was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952. The statute in force at grant was § 24 of the Act of July 8, 1870, and the controlling non-patentability doctrine was the judicially-created "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850). I therefore present this as a modern § 103 reconstruction applying the Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), framework retroactively — which is the only analytically useful posture today, given the patent is citable only as prior art (expired 1896-09-09).

The reconstruction cuts against the patent. The 19th-century "invention" standard was, if anything, harsher on mere combinations of known expedients than modern § 103 — Hotchkiss itself invalidated a combination of old elements producing only the sum of their known effects, which is precisely the character of the claim at issue.

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3. The claim, decomposed for § 103 purposes

"The compound for axle-grease herein described, composed of sal-soda, water, lime, and the four qualities of rosin-oil known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, substantially as set forth."

Two structural observations that drive the obviousness result:

1. Sal-soda + lime is not two independent ingredients — it is a caustic generator. Na₂CO₃ + Ca(OH)₂ → 2NaOH + CaCO₃ is the textbook way to make "caustic in the pan," and the resulting NaOH saponifies rosin acids to sodium resinate. The claim's alkali pair is therefore the standard soap-maker's saponification system, and the CPC classification (C10M129/62 rosin acids + C10M125/10 carbonates + C10M125/14 water) reflects exactly that.
2. Using all four fractions is the path of least resistance, not a selection. Frazer's own described process puts No. 1 + No. 4 in vessel A and No. 1 + No. 2 + No. 3 in vessel B — i.e., all four grades go in. The practical effect of the claim is to cover "the entire rosin-oil distillate, unseparated, saponified with lime/soda in water." A claim that reads on not bothering to fractionate is on its face obvious; a PHOSITA who refuses to perform a separation step that serves only fractionation cannot be said to have invented anything.

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4. Ground A (primary, strongest) — Frazer's own 1860 patent (US 28,663) in view of Frazer's own prior public grease practice

The reference. The specification of US 219,455 expressly states: "January 12, 1860, Letters Patent No. 28,663 were granted to me for the distillation of oil from resin, in which patent I described different qualities of oil, called, respectively, Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4." That document discloses every one of the four rosin-oil fractions in the claim, by name and by number. It is therefore the anticipatory reference for the element the claim's other terms must be combined with. (The Jan 12, 1860 date is the specification's own; other sources state June 12, 1860 and October 1860 — a discrepancy flagged in the earlier sections and not resolved here.)

The second half of the combination is not a patent at all — it is Frazer's own public practice. Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co., 121 Ill. 147 (1887), states as fact that from 1856 Frazer manufactured and sold "Frazer's Axle Grease," and that "[t]he product of the discovery is obtained by combining rosin oil, lime, sal-soda, palm oil, and water in certain proportions." The same court found it "an undisputed fact that both greases are made from a combination of rosin oil, lime, sal-soda and water" — listing, in that second formulation, precisely the four claim elements other than the fraction designation. Source: https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/frazer-v-frazer-lubricator-894440983 and https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[7059496](/patent/7059496).pdf

Motivation to combine. A PHOSITA tasked in 1879 with making an axle grease would face a fully worked teaching: (a) 28,663 tells him the distillation of resin yields four distinct rosin-oil fractions drawn at different temperatures; (b) the public "Frazer's Axle Grease" tells him that rosin oil saponified with lime and sal-soda in water makes a serviceable axle grease. The only "new" act is to put the four fractions in together — which requires no insight and is what the described process does anyway. The incentive is twice over: product-consistency (a single unseparated cut vaporizes all fractionation cost and batch variation) and waste avoidance (a distiller who separates four fractions for sale in other markets has no reason to discard any of them when compounding).

Reasonable expectation of success. Absolute — the operative chemistry (sodium/calcium resinate formation plus free rosin oil as the lubricating phase) is unchanged by whether the oil phase is one cut or four. Under KSR, this is the paradigm of "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions" where the prior art gives "a reason to pursue" the identified options.

Historical confirmation that the patentee's own contemporaries read it this way. In United States v. Frazer, 22 F. 106 (N.D. Ill. 1884), the government's bill sought cancellation of both the 1879 and 1880 patents on the express ground that the improvement was described in Frazer's own expired 1860 patent and was in public use more than two years before the 1879 filing. The court dismissed on demurrer for want of equity without reaching validity — I emphasize that, as the earlier sections did — but the pleading is the 19th-century equivalent of a § 102(b)/§ 103 attack, and the patentee never obtained a merits adjudication clearing it.

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5. Ground B — US 179,256 (Billington, June 27, 1876) in view of US 28,663

This is the one eligible "Similar Documents" entry whose full text I verified, and it is a strong secondary reference. https://patents.google.com/patent/[US179256](/patent/US179256)

What Billington teaches (verbatim from the specification):

• Object: "compounds … used for lubricating the axles of wagons, street-cars, &c." — same field of endeavour.
• Composition: "the combination of a peculiar soap … with London oil (rosin-oil, first run) and paraffine-oil." Claim: "A lubricating compound consisting of saponified grease or soap, London oil, and paraffine-oil, combined in about the proportions and in the manner substantially as herein specified."
• Saponifier: "caustic-soda lye, from 15 to 20 in strength, enough to thoroughly saponify the grease."
• Stated result: "It will not congeal or harden on cold iron when in use, nor will it gum or thicken."

Why this is a powerful § 103 combination. Billington (i) places the invention in the same field, (ii) expressly identifies and solves the exact defect that rosin-based axle greases were known to have — congealing/gumming (a defect the Galena press later reported Frazer's own grease suffered from, and which Frazer claimed only his 1880 patent cured), and (iii) attributes the fix to using rosin oil in its light, first-run fraction. Frazer's 28,663 supplies the complementary teaching that resin distillation yields separately drawn fractions of differing body and volatility, designated Nos. 1–4.

Motivation: a PHOSITA reading Billington in 1879 is taught that which rosin-oil cut you use controls the grease's cold-flow and gumming behaviour. Reading 28,663, he learns that four such cuts are available from one still. Combining them is a routine optimization of a recognized, characterized variable — precisely what KSR holds obvious, and what In re Aller and the "obvious to optimize" line permits. Expected success is high because the two references describe the same oil from the same source.

Anticipated defence, and why it fails. Frazer would argue that Billington uses only the first-run cut, whereas the claim requires all four. But the claim's own process puts all four in together, and the combination of a light fraction with heavier fractions of the same oil to adjust body is the definition of blending to grade. Billington himself teaches down that path: his compound "can be reduced to an oily consistency by lessening the quantity of saponified matter," i.e., proportion is a tuning variable — a teaching that the same composition can be dialled by mere proportion changes.

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6. Ground C — US 198,664 (Munger, Dec 25, 1877) in view of US 28,663

I verified US 198,664 only through the German abstract in Dingler's Polytechnisches Journal: "G. G. Munger (Amerikanisches Patent Nr. 198664 vom 25. December 1877) mischt Erdöl mit Graphit, japanesischem Wachs, Talg und Soda" — i.e., Munger mixes petroleum with graphite, Japan wax, tallow and soda. https://dingler.bbaw.de/articles/mi229mi02_22.html

This establishes that a soda-bearing, oil-phase axle/lubricating grease was squarely in the art before June 1879. Its § 103 role is corroborative rather than primary: it supplies the "soda-alkali + oil phase + solid filler" grease architecture, and it is non-analogous only if one ignores that both are axle greases — they are not; same field. Combined with 28,663 (which teaches the rosin-oil fractions as an alternative oil phase to petroleum) and with the general knowledge that rosin oil plus lime was already an established grease base, the substitution of the rosin-oil system for the petroleum system is a substitution of a known equivalent for a known purpose — the classic Hotchkiss combination of old elements with no new co-operative effect.

Caveat, stated plainly: I retrieved only the abstract of US 198,664, not its specification or claim. I cannot represent what it does or does not disclose beyond the four ingredients above. It should be pulled in full from the USPTO/Espacenet PDF before being relied on in any filed paper.

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7. Ground D — the unverified pre-1879 "lubricating compound" patents (flagged, not relied on)

The page lists six similarly-titled pre-filing references: US 110,690 (1871), US 176,011 (1876), US 179,801 (1876), US 188,479 (1877), plus 179,256 (verified) and 198,664 (partially verified). Four of them I could not retrieve — my searches returned no text for US 110,690, US 176,011, US 179,801, or US 188,479.

I therefore state explicitly: I do not know what those four disclose, and I will not characterize them. Their titles ("Improvement in lubricating compounds") and their placement in the similarity list make them plausible additional § 103 references, and the fact that six near-identically-titled patents on this subject issued in the eight years before the filing is itself evidence that the field was crowded and the inventive step small — but that inference is from titles and dates alone, not from disclosure. Anyone attacking validity should retrieve all four.

One non-listed reference I did retrieve incidentally, flagged as outside the page's list: US 173,840 (Winsor, Feb 22, 1876) claims "paraffine oil, tallow, bees-wax, and dissolved borax" and expressly teaches grading a lubricant by "slightly changing the proportions of the ingredients." That is a directly relevant teaching on proportion-variation, but it is not in the page's Similar Documents list, so I present it as a lead requiring independent verification rather than as part of this page's prior art. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/04/8d/bf/38dc3831cc3f0d/[US173840](/patent/US173840).pdf

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8. Ground E — the general knowledge of lime–rosin soap greases

The claim's alkali chemistry (sal-soda + lime → in-situ caustic; rosin acids → resinates) is the standard lime-rosin grease process. Contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous trade literature describes it directly — e.g., the Scientific American note "New Lubricating Materials," which describes boiling resin oil with slaked lime and blending lime paste with resin oil to make a "good composition for oiling machinery." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-lubricating-materials/

Date caveat: I could not establish the publication date of that item, so I do not assert it as pre-1879 printed publication art. It is offered as evidence of the level of ordinary skill in rosin-oil grease chemistry, which is independent of its date. Later handbooks (e.g., A Practical Treatise on Lubricants) give "Dark Axle Grease" formulas of black oil + dissolved rosin + lime paste finished with crude rosin oil, and rosin-oil soap greases made with hydrate of lime — again useful for the skill level, but these are post-1879 texts.

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9. Motivation-to-combine synthesis (KSR factors)

One additional and unusual motivation, specific to this record: by 1879 the patentee's own earlier patent, US 28,663, had been assigned away — the Feb. 7, 1870 agreement conveyed it, with the "Frazer" mark and a non-compete, to Hunter, Packard, Favor and Swift, whose corporation became the Frazer Lubricator Company. There is accordingly no pre-AIA § 103(c)-style common-ownership exception available to shield 28,663 from use as art against 219,455, and in any event a statutory bar under § 102(b) attaches to a patentee's own public use or sale regardless of ownership. That is a legal point worth stating precisely rather than as a generalty.

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10. Secondary considerations — all fail, and two of them reverse

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11. Honest statement of the weaknesses in this § 103 case

I will not overstate the attack. A defender of the claim has three real arguments, and they should be priced in:

1. Claim-scope ambiguity cuts both ways. Because "substantially as set forth" imports the specification, the claim can be argued to be limited to the particular two-vessel sequence and the recited proportions (½ lb. sal-soda, 3 pt. water, ½ gal. No. 1 + 2½ gal. No. 4, then 1 gal. No. 1 + 3½ gal. No. 2 + 4⅔ gal. No. 3). Ground A and Ground B then have to reach proportions — satisfiable, but by a different argument (obvious to optimize, In re Aller), not by anticipation.
2. I have not verified the disclosure of four of the six same-field references or the full text of US 198,664. The combination as I can verify it therefore rests on US 179,256 + US 28,663 + the Frazer public-use record — a three-legged stool, not a six-reference chart.
3. No adjudicated validity holding exists to overrule. United States v. Frazer, 22 F. 106, dismissed on demurrer and expressed no view on validity or novelty. That is good for a challenger (no estoppel, no stare decisis problem) but also means there is no judicial finding to rely upon.

Offsetting those: the pre-1952 Hotchkiss "invention" standard, the patentee's own abandonment of the '455 in favour of the 1880 patent, the express incorporation of the very reference that supplies the only arguably novel element, and the fact that the claim reads on the unseparated full distillate, together make the § 103 case strong on the record I can verify.

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12. Claim chart (Grounds A and B)

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13. Explicit uncertainties (not resolved)

• I did not retrieve the full text or the claims of US 110,690, US 176,011, US 179,801, US 188,479, US 28,663, or US 233,497. Nothing above should be read as a representation about their disclosures beyond what is quoted.
• US 198,664 is characterized above only from a secondary German abstract, not from the specification.
• The identity of US 233,497 as Frazer's 1880 companion patent is an inference from the Oct. 19, 1880 issue date matching the date given in Frazer v. Frazer Lubricator Co.; I could not confirm it from the document itself.
• The date of Letters Patent No. 28,663 remains inconsistent across sources (Jan. 12, 1860 per the '455 specification; June 12, 1860 and October 1860 per the two 1880s opinions). This does not affect the § 103 analysis, since any of the three dates places 28,663 well before the 1879 filing, but the citation should be given as "as stated in the specification" rather than corrected.
• The publication date of the Scientific American "New Lubricating Materials" note is unknown to me; it is used for skill-level only.
• Because the Google Patents body text is OCR-corrupted at the lime-addition step, the metes and bounds of the single claim are not cleanly recoverable from the HTML; the certified PDF (USPTO PatentCenter / Espacenet) should be used before filing anything that quotes the specification.