US 219651

I'll search for this specific patent number across the requested sources.

US Patent 219,651 — Search Summary

Scope note on sources: I searched Google Patents (authoritative full text supplied and independently confirmed at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US219651](/patent/US219651)/en), and general web/patent-repository sources (datamp.org, us.archive.org Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents). I found no CAFC 2026 docket, appeal, or any post-1896 litigation activity involving this number. I did not obtain a live USPTO PatentCenter record (the site is not directly searchable via this tool), so the bibliographic data below rests on the Google Patents record and the patent's own front matter.

---

Bibliographic data

Caveat on the assignee string: the OCR of the patent front page reads "ASSIGNORS TO J. A. FAY 85 00." I read this as "J. A. FAX & CO." — i.e., J. A. Fay & Co., which is corroborated by a contemporaneous J. A. Fay & Co. product catalog on vintagemachinery.org advertising "Doane's Patent Duplex Planing, Matching, and Beading Machine" (J.A. Fay & Co., Cincinnati). I am flagging this as an OCR-normalized reading, not a verbatim quote.

---

Abstract

Patents of 1879 were not issued with formal abstracts. The closest thing to one is the opening statement of the specification (and the "Definitions" block Google Patents extracts):

"This invention relates more especially to planing and matching machines in which provision is made for lowering the matcher-heads below the surface of the platen or bed, so that the machine can be used either in its duplex character or as a simple planing-machine."

Two stated features: (1) a crank-shaft-and-link mechanism for elevating/lowering the matcher-frame, in which the crank-arms swing to a vertical position and act as solid props under the frame, relieving the link pivot-pins of strain; and (2) a mechanism (expressly stated to be "adapted for application to most all machines operating with weighted feed-rolls") linking the weighted lever ends to crank-arms of a transverse rock-shaft so the levers operate in unison and keep the feed-roll horizontal.

---

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Important uncertainty: The claim text as captured from the source is truncated mid-sentence. The only legible claim reads in full:

"1. The combination, substantially as before set forth, of the matcher-frame, the shaft pro—"

The record cuts off there. The specification describes two independent features, which strongly implies two claims (one per feature), but I cannot verify the count, numbering, or full wording of the claims from the available text. Treat the below as a reconstruction from the specification, not as quoted claim language.

Claim 1 (matcher-frame elevating/lowering combination) — as far as legible:
A combination of (a) the matcher-frame (frame carrying the matcher-head spindles, mounted in ways between the sides of the main frame), (b) a crank-shaft journalled in main-frame bearings, with crank-arms (F F), (c) links (G G) pivoting the matcher-frame lugs (l l) to the crank-arms, and (d) an operating band-lever (H) with a spring latch-pin (h) to lock the frame in raised working position. The point of novelty is geometric: the crank-arm ends and the bottom edges of the lugs are so formed and proportioned that when the crank-arms are turned up to vertical they contact the lug bottoms and act as props between the frame and shaft, so the frame's weight is carried directly by the crank-arms and the link pins are fully relieved of strain.

Claim 2 (feed-roll unison combination) — per the specification, likely the second claim:
In combination with a spring-weighted upper feed-roll (I) carried in sliding boxes on screw-spindles (K) swiveled to elbow-links (L) pivoted to weighted levers (M, M′): links (O, O′) connecting the long weighted arms of those levers to crank-arms (P, P′) on a transverse rock-shaft (Q), plus a hand-lever (R) on shaft Q. Result: the levers must move in unison and raise/lower both ends of the feed-roll equally and simultaneously, maintaining horizontality. Stated commercial benefit: no need to accommodate gearing bind, so one set of feed-roll driving gearing suffices instead of a set at each end. The specification adds that crank-arms P and P′ may instead be connected directly to the weighted levers by fixed stud-pins playing in slots, in which case links O and O′ may be dispensed with.

---

Key findings and limitations

1. No CAFC 2026 docket exists for this number. This is expected and not a search failure: US 219,651 expired September 16, 1896, and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was not created until 1982. The 2026 CAFC results returned by search (e.g., FullView v. Polycom, 2026-121; Constellation Designs v. LG) concern entirely unrelated modern patents (U.S. 8,842,761; 10,693,700; etc.).
2. No live USPTO prosecution or assignment record is implicated — the Google Patents "Status: Expired – Lifetime" and "Anticipated expiration 1896-09-16" are consistent with a fully lapsed 19th-century grant.
3. One apparent database artifact to flag, not to reconcile: the search surfaced a Google Patents priority-application row reading "US219651A | US3188447A | 1957-09-16 | 1962-08-27 | Method of welding" (referenced from US3068340). Per your instruction not to auto-correct identifiers, I report this literally — but it is not the 1879 document; it is a coincidental token match in Google Patents' structured application-number data for a 1962 welding-method patent. Do not conflate the two.
4. OCR noise in the source (reported literally, not corrected): the text contains "watcher-frame" for matcher-frame, "ban dlever, H", "lugs 11", "sh aft E", "cranlearms", "1?" / "0 and 0". These are scanning artifacts. Inventor name spelling: the drawing header OCRs as "G. W. PASSEL 8 G. W. DUANE" while the specification body reads "GEORGE W. PASSEL AND WILLIAM H. DOANE" — datamp.org corroborates "W.H. Doane, G.W. Passel" for 219,651. The specification body is the more reliable reading.
5. Related litigation is not about this patent. Search surfaced 19th-century planer patent cases (Stover, Case No. 13,510; the Meriam machine; Woodworth v. Hill/Norcross) involving matcher-spindle lowering mechanisms — the same technology family, but different patent numbers. None references 219,651.
6. Assignee/product corroboration: J. A. Fay & Co. (Cincinnati) marketed "Doane's Patent Duplex Planing, Matching, and Beading Machine," matching the specification's duplex-convertible framing (vintagemachinery.org catalog scan). William H. Doane is separately the named inventor on related Cincinnati planing-machine patents, including US 335,994 and US 175,676 (with George W. Bugbee), the latter being listed as a "similar document" on Google Patents for 219,651.

Bottom line: US 219,651 is an 1879 improvement patent to Passel and Doane, assigned to J. A. Fay & Co., covering (i) a crank-arm prop mechanism for raising/lowering a planer-matcher frame and (ii) a rock-shaft linkage forcing the two weighted feed-roll levers to move in unison. It is long expired, has no CAFC 2026 docket, and its claim text is only partially recoverable from the available source — the claims section is truncated mid-claim in the text I can access, so claim count and full claim language cannot be stated with authority.

Bottom line

No litigation is known — and none plausibly exists — involving U.S. Patent No. 219,651.

I found no district court action, no CAFC appeal, no ITC investigation, no PTAB proceeding, and no PACER docket naming US 219,651 as an asserted or challenged patent. The searches returned nothing on point.

Why an affirmative "none" is the correct answer here

The reason is structural, not just an absence of search hits:

Under the law in force for an 1879 patent, the term ran seventeen years from grant, and the Google Patents record independently shows an anticipated expiration date of 1896‑09‑16. Any cause of action for infringement of the claims therefore had to accrue on or before that date. There is no continuation, reissue, reexamination, or post-issuance proceeding shown in the record — the "Family Applications (1)" entry lists only US219651D/US219651A itself, and "Publications (1)" lists only US219651A.

Consequently:

• Plaintiff(s): none identified
• Defendant(s): none identified
• Jurisdiction: none identified
• Case number: none identified
• Filing date: none identified
• Outcome/status: N/A — no case exists in the modern docket databases

The only litigation-era exposure this patent could conceivably have had would be 1879–1896 infringement suits by J. A. Fay & Co. or their successors in courts of that era. Those would not appear in PACER, Unified Patents' caselist, or Docket Alarm (which generally cover the electronic-docket era). I did not find any 19th-century reported decision citing this patent, but I want to be explicit: I cannot rule out the existence of an unreported or unrecovered 1880s–1890s infringement action, because historical federal equity dockets and the old Federal Cases reporters are not exhaustively indexed in the databases you directed me to, and I did not complete a dedicated historical-reporter search. Treat that as an acknowledged gap rather than a confirmed negative.

Critical disambiguation warning

Searching for "219651" surfaces an entirely different patent family that is easily mistaken for this one. The hit below is not US 219,651:

• An IPR petition (PTACTS document, Petitioners AT&T Mobility LLC and Verizon Wireless) references a "'651 patent" described as filed December 21, 2012, claiming priority back to 1999, with a specification "relat[ing] to downloadable ringtones" and claims directed to "a format conversion server that can receive pictures from a camera phone, perform size and resolution conversions, and provide the user a link to download converted video files." That is a modern patent in the ~US 9,xxx,651 numbering range, asserted in cellular multimedia-messaging litigation. Its shorthand "'651" refers to the last three digits, not to number 219,651.
• Similarly, a search hit for JP 2010‑219651 A (NEC Corp., optical receiver, published 2010‑09‑30) and a Brazilian HC 219651 (Supremo Tribunal Federal) are unrelated to US 219,651.

Any of these would be a false positive if reported as litigation against US 219,651. I have excluded them.

Sources consulted

• Google Patents record and full text for US 219,651: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US219651](/patent/US219651)/en — the authoritative source for status, dates, assignee, and claims; it shows no litigation or post-issuance proceedings.
• DATAMP patentee cross-reference pages (George W. Passel; Albert N. Spencer), listing "219,651 | Sep. 16, 1879 | W.H. Doane, G.W. Passel | Planer-matcher convertible to planer." These confirm the patent's identity and 1879 vintage but report no litigation.
• Attempted litigation-specific searches against Unified Patents, Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP, and PTAB documents returned only unrelated matters (e.g., IPR2022‑01026 Unified Patents v. Savannah Licensing, re Patent 9,454,777; EIS, Inc. v. IntiHealth Ger GmbH, D. Del. 1:19‑cv‑01227; Hologic v. Minerva, re the '348 patent). None involved US 219,651.

Recommended next steps if you need a definitive historical negative

1. Westlaw/Lexis "Federal Cases" (F. Cas.) and Hughes' Federal Patent Cases full-text search for "219,651" or "Passel" / "Doane" / "Fay" as planing-machine litigants, 1879–1896.
2. NARA / Circuit Court equity dockets for the Southern District of Ohio (Cincinnati), which would be the likely venue for a J. A. Fay & Co. enforcement action.
3. Assignment records for a chain of title to establish whether any successor ever asserted it — though the 1896 expiration makes any later assertion legally impossible.

If you'd like, I can draft the "no known litigation" section for the patent's prosecution-history/legal-status summary using the disambiguation note above.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 219,651: zero (0). The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no PTAB proceedings for this patent, and an independent web sweep of PTAB petition/decision repositories surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming US 219,651 as the challenged patent. The breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials — but the reason is not that the patent is "hardened." It is that US 219,651 issued on 1879-09-16 and expired 1896-09-16, roughly 127 years before the first AIA petition was ever filed (the AIA trial regime began 2012-09-16). There is no PTAB record to read and no claim-level outcome to quote — not a single claim of this patent has ever been construed by the Board because no petitioner has ever had a reason to file. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "the patent survived two IPRs"; it is "the patent has been dead since the 19th century, and any demand letter citing it is separately sanctionable for that reason."

For the template's per-proceeding sections, there is nothing to fill in. I will not invent proceeding numbers, panels, or dispositions to populate them.

---

Proceeding-by-proceeding detail

No proceedings on file

• Type: N/A — no IPR, PGR, or CBM ever instituted, filed, or denied against US 219,651.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: N/A. The structured source block states the ODP returns no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest; my searches were consistent with that.
• Judge panel: N/A. No panel has been assigned.
• Petition grounds: N/A.
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A. No claim of US 219,651 — no independent claim, no dependent claim — has ever been canceled or sustained in an AIA trial, because no trial has ever been requested. I am deliberately not quoting or characterizing "claims 1–2" from this record: the authoritative text supplied for this patent truncates mid-sentence at claim 1 ("The combination, substantially as before set forth, of the matcher-frame, the shaft pro-"), so the claim set cannot even be reproduced here in full, let alone adjudicated.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: None. No PTAB decision exists to appeal, and no Federal Circuit docket number exists to cite. CourtListener contains no appeal involving this patent number.
• Defensive value: Total. US 219,651 is a pre-1953 unexpired-term artifact, not a live right. An assertion of this patent today fails at the threshold for reasons entirely independent of prior art: (1) no enforceable term — the patent expired 1896-09-16, and § 271 infringement requires an unexpired patent; (2) no recoverable damages — § 286 limits recovery to six years pre-suit; (3) no PTAB risk calculus at all — you never need to file because there is nothing to invalidate.

Why no AIA pathway was ever open (or needed)

---

Strategic summary

Claim status: untested in every forum — and untestable in the § 271 sense. There is no "canceled" versus "sustained" versus "untested" split to report out of any PTAB Final Written Decision, because there is no FWD. The only accurate statement is: the entire claim set is untested in any AIA trial and unenforceable by expiration. If someone hands you a chart mapping your product to "the '651 patent," the first thing to confirm is the number: on the supplied record, US 219,651 is a 19th-century woodworking patent (Planing and Matching Machine; inventors George W. Passel and William H. Doane of Cincinnati, Ohio; assignors to J. A. Fay & Co.; filed 1879-02-21, granted 1879-09-16; class B27C5/02). Every live dispute I can find using the shorthand "'651 patent" involves an entirely different, modern patent — e.g., the wafer-stage '651 patent whose claims 19, 25, 31, 72, 77 were challenged in a modern PTAB petition, and the portable-ultrasound '651 patent litigated in the Western District of Wisconsin (07-C-273). Those are short-form citations to different patents and cannot be attributed to US 219,651.

Estoppel landscape: void. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel keys off a petitioner who filed and lost. No petitioner exists, so no party, privy, or real party in interest carries any estoppel. That cuts both ways: the entire prior-art universe remains formally available against US 219,651 — an absurdity, since the prior art would necessarily predate 1879 (e.g., the roughly contemporaneous planing-machine references clustered in Google Patents' "Similar Documents," which includes US 175,676 (1876-04-04, "Improvement in planing-machines"), US 99,008 (1870-01-18), US 53,466 (1866-03-27), and US 138,703 (1873-05-06)). If you genuinely needed an invalidity position (you do not), those 1860s–1870s planing-machine patents are the relevant universe under the pre-AIA § 102/§ 103 law that governs a 1879 filing.

Pattern signals: absent across the board. No serial petitioner, no repeat-filer pattern, no IPR–district-court parallel-track dynamic under Fintiv/NHK Spring, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar entity) touching this number, and no patent-owner appeal activity at the Federal Circuit. The strongest available inference from the silence is the one the instructions flag: well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. This one attracted none in 147 years of existence, which is consistent with a patent whose enforcement value ended in the 1890s.

---

Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant and the assertion cites "the '651 patent," demand the full number and the patent's front page before responding on the merits. If the citation resolves to US 219,651, the correct response is not an invalidity defense — it is a Rule 11 / § 285 posture: the patent expired 1896-09-16, has no enforceable term, and cannot support a § 271 claim or any damages. See the authoritative record at patents.google.com/patent/US219651/en.
2. If the citation resolves to a different patent ending in 651, stop here and re-run the analysis on the correct number. Verify against the USPTO Patent Center record for US 219,651 and cross-check the assertion's serial number; the short-form "'651" collision is the single largest source of error in this file.
3. No PTAB milestones to track. There are no institution deadlines, no oral hearings, and no statutory 1-year FWD dates, because there is no proceeding. Confirm the null result directly at PTAB E2E / PTACTS and, for any appeal, at CourtListener — a null search there is expected, not anomalous.
4. Do not draft an IPR on a number you were given verbally. If a client or an adversary is actually asserting a live patent, the claim set and the real proceeding history must come from the patent's own front page, and this memo's "zero proceedings" conclusion should not be carried over to a different patent number.

Bottom line: There is no PTAB story to tell about US 219,651. The absence of proceedings is not a sign of a hardened patent; it is the predictable result of a patent that expired 1896-09-16, before the AIA trial regime — indeed before the modern patent bar itself — existed.

I'll verify what the USPTO Assignment Center actually holds for this number before writing anything.

Confirming the coverage window and then checking the corporate chain for the original assignee.

Checking the pre-1980 recordation coverage question and the inventors' corporate roles.

Assignment Record — US Patent 219,651

Scope note: I could not execute a live, form-driven query against assignmentcenter.uspto.gov (it is not retrievable through the tools available to me). What follows therefore rests on (a) the USPTO's own published statements of the Assignment Search coverage window, (b) MPEP/37 CFR provisions on where pre-1980 records physically live, (c) the Google Patents legal-events record for US219651A, and (d) contemporaneous corporate-history sources for the original assignee. Where I am reasoning from coverage rules rather than from a record I actually saw, I say so.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — no adverse pattern found. The classic red flag you asked me to watch for (all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, presaging a portfolio fire-sale) is not present. The opposite is true: both inventors remained tied to the assignee across the 1893 merger, fourteen years after filing. The 1893 Cincinnati biography of Thomas P. Egan names both men in the post-merger organization — "George W. Passell, assistant superintendent" and, among the directors, "W. H. Doane" (Cincinnati Enquirer 1924 reprint, via wiki.vintagemachinery.org; Centennial History of Cincinnati, v.2, p.77, via HathiTrust).

Two identity caveats worth restating for the record:

• The drawing-header OCR reads "G. W. PASSEL & G. W. DUANE"; the specification body reads "GEORGE W. PASSEL AND WILLIAM H. DOANE." The body text governs, and datamp.org independently indexes the patent as "W.H. Doane, G.W. Passel | Planer-matcher convertible to planer" (https://www.datamp.org/patents/search/xrefPerson.php?...id=4009). No third inventor is evidenced.
• Doane is co-named on US 175,676 (Apr. 4, 1876, "Planer-matcher convertible to planer"), which Google Patents lists as a "similar document" to 219,651, and datamp's George W. Bugbee cross-reference lists 175,676 with Doane and Passel both appearing. I cannot determine from the retrieved text whether 175,676 is the same inventive trio or an overlapping pair — flagging it as a same-family sibling patent, not asserting the composition.

Original assignee

J. A. Fay & Co., Cincinnati, Ohio — named on the face of the patent as "assignors to J. A. Fay & Co., of same place."

• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes. J. A. Fay & Co. marketed a "Doane's Patent Duplex Planing, Matching, and Beading Machine" (company catalog, via vintagemachinery.org). That product name maps directly onto the 219,651 disclosure, whose stated purpose is a planer-matcher "in which provision is made for lowering the matcher-heads below the surface of the platen or bed, so that the machine can be used either in its duplex character or as a simple planing-machine." The claims were commercialized, not paper.
• Primary line of business: woodworking machinery — planers, matchers, moulders, bandsaws, mill machinery. Per the Centennial History of Cincinnati, J. A. Fay & Co. held roughly 200 patents, "practically all the patents on wood-working machinery."
• Current status: dissolved through successive restructurings. Chronology (all from vintagemachinery.org's J. A. Fay & Egan Co. and Egan Co. manufacturer histories):
  • 1893-02 — merger of J. A. Fay & Co. with crosstown rival The Egan Co.; articles of incorporation for J. A. Fay & Egan Co. with $2.5M capital stock. The two departments operated semi-independently into the 1900s.
  • 1937 — J. A. Fay & Egan Co. went bankrupt; acquired by Walter F. Schott from the Egan family.
  • 1977 — company liquidated; some assets used to form Dels Industries (parts/documentation supply), since disappeared.
  • Later, "Fay & Egan" subsisted only as a division of James A. Wulfeck, Inc. (per Chandler W. Jones, Planers, Matchers and Molders in America, 1985).

Assignment timeline

As of 2026-09-30, the USPTO Assignment Center holds no records for patent number 219,651. I am stating that plainly, and per your instruction I stop the record-reconstruction here rather than manufacturing entries.

This is a coverage-window fact, not an absence of ownership history:

• USPTO's own Assignment Database webinar material states the searchable database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). Corroborated by Finnegan's Prosecution Pointer 119 and by Lexology's 2016 practitioner note on AOTW.
• MPEP 301.01 maintains that "the historical database of assignments is maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980" — i.e., pre-August-1980 records are deliberately outside the online index.
• 37 CFR 1.12(a)(2) / MPEP 301.01: "All records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957, are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)." Patent assignments before 1955 were recorded in bound volumes (liber and page); microfilm reel/frame indexing begins only with the 1955 recordation regime.
• Consistently, the Google Patents legal-events record for US219651A shows only two entries — status "Expired – Lifetime" and "Anticipated expiration 1896-09-16." Zero assignment events. No reel/frame, no conveyance code, no correspondent of record exists to report.

Consequently: no reel/frame numbers, no conveyance types, no assignor/assignee legal names, and no correspondent-of-record attorneys are reported below, because none are in the online record. I will not fabricate them.

For completeness, here is the chain of title as reconstructed from the patent's own face and contemporaneous corporate history — explicitly not from Assignment Center records, and each link flagged as to whether it was a formal recorded assignment:

Any transfer after 1896-09-16 would have conveyed an expired right — of no assertion value.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 219651); legacy mirror at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

---

Why I am stopping here

Your instruction was to stop after the Assignment timeline if the Assignment Center has no records. It does not. So I am not producing the Timeline diagram, NPE/troll-pattern signal table, or Verdict — not because the analysis would be sensitive, but because every one of those outputs is downstream of reel/frame evidence that does not exist for this patent. Asserting "Shell-entity transfer — not present" or "Bankruptcy fire-sale — present" against a 19th-century chain would be dressing up corporate history as recorded assignment data, which is exactly the failure mode your constraints prohibit. Two structural notes, offered as context rather than signal findings, since the prior sections already cover them: the Google Patents record shows a single-family entry (ID 2289052, US219651A only, no foreign members), and any patent-number search for 219651 collides with unrelated modern 9,xxx,651 records and with the 1962 welding-method token match flagged in your summary.

If you want a defensible affirmative on the full chain, the next steps are the ones from the litigation section, plus two additions specific to assignments: (1) a NARA requisition for the pre-1957 patent assignment records for 219,651 under 37 CFR 1.12(a)(2), and (2) a USPTO Certification Division abstract of title request — which, per MPEP 301.01, covers assignments recorded after May 1, 1957, and would therefore also come back empty. If you'd like, I can write that requisition or abstract-of-title request up as a draft.

I'll verify the reference data before analyzing. Note an important framing issue up front: 1879-era US patents were not printed with examiner-cited references in the modern sense, so I need to check whether Google Patents records any formal "Patent Citations" for this document (as opposed to its algorithmic "Similar Documents" list).

I have strong material on the key reference (US 175,676). Let me verify the remaining pre-1879 candidates and check whether any Doane family patent (e.g., US 213,180) is implicated.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 219,651 ("Improvement in planing and matching machine")

1. Method and one critical framing finding

What I could and could not search. The task asks me to search the USPTO database for number 219651 specifically. My tool set does not reach USPTO PatentCenter or the Examiner's citation index directly (the same limitation flagged in the earlier "Patent summary" section). The authoritative text supplied — the Google Patents record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US219651](/patent/US219651)/en — mirrors USPTO bibliographic data for this number, and I supplemented it with DATAMP and Chicago Public Library patent index lookups and full-text retrieval of candidate references. I held strictly to number 219,651 and did not fold in near-number matches.

Finding: US 219,651 has no citation record. The Google Patents document for US219651A contains these blocks only: Images, Classifications, Definitions, Landscapes, Description, Similar Documents, Publications (1), Family Applications (1), Country Status. There is no "Patent Citations," no "Non-Patent Citations," and no "Cited By" block. This is not a search failure — it reflects reality: 1879 US grants were not printed with an "References Cited" section in the modern sense, and Google Patents has not reconstructed Patent Office references for this document.

Consequence for the task. There is literally no list of patent citations for 219651 to analyze. The closest available proxy is Google Patents' "Similar Documents" list — an algorithmic subject-matter similarity ranking, not an examiner citation and not an admission of prior art. I treat it below as a candidate pool and independently filter it for legal eligibility. I also add references of high relevance that surfaced outside that list, and I mark clearly which is which.

---

2. Legal framework — flagging the anachronism

The instruction asks which references "potentially anticipate under 35 U.S.C. § 102." US 219,651 was filed February 21, 1879 and granted September 16, 1879. The statute in force was § 24 of the Patent Act of 1870 (Rev. Stat. § 4886), not the 1952 Act. Applying § 102 subsections to it is technically anachronistic. The functional mapping I use is:

Operative cutoff for 219,651: the February 21, 1879 filing date (with the pre-invention date, necessarily earlier, governing the § 102(a)-analogue bar).

---

3. Candidate pool — Google Patents "Similar Documents" (closest thing to a citation list)

Dates are as reported in the 219651 record. Eligible = issued before the 2/21/1879 filing of 219651.

Two observations worth stating plainly. (a) Items 10–25 — sixteen of the twenty-five "similar documents" postdate 219,651's 1879 filing and cannot be prior art against it. Their presence in the list is pure text-similarity matching. US 936,659 (1909), "Feed-roll-controlling mechanism for wood-planers," is topically near-identical to 219,651's second feature and is nonetheless 30 years later — the inverse-citation arrow; do not mistake it for prior art. (b) Items 2, 3, 6, 9 are mechanically unrelated fields (staves, saws, bark rossers, wall-paper trimming) and anticipate nothing in the two matcher/feed-roll combinations.

---

4. Reference-by-reference analysis (eligible references only)

Claim numbering caveat, carried forward: as flagged in the earlier section, the claim text in the available source is truncated ("1. The combination, substantially as before set forth, of the matcher-frame, the shaft pro—"). "Claim 1" = matcher-frame elevating combination; "Claim 2" = feed-roll unison combination are reconstructions from the specification, not verified claim language. Anticipation verdicts below are therefore necessarily provisional.

---

4.1 US 175,676 — the most relevant reference found

Full citation: US Letters Patent No. 175,676, "Improvement in Planing-Machines," William H. Doane and George W. Bugbee, of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Dates: Specification dated April 4, 1876; application filed July 13, 1875. (Google record: 1876-04-04.) Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US175676](/patent/US175676) and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/cd/97/3c/abc811dd38ffa0/US175676.pdf
Eligible: Yes — three years and seven months before 219,651's filing. Same inventor (Doane), same city, same machine class.

Brief description. A planing-and-matching machine with (i) weighted feed/pressure rolls, and (ii) matching-arbors shiftable to convert the machine to wide surfacing. Three enumerated improvements:

• Weighted levers D, D′ arranged side by side, directly above and in planes parallel to the axes of the rolls, "centrally connected so as to equalize their actions on the opposite ends of the rolls"; the levers "are connected by a pin, d′, fixed to one and playing in a slot, d″ in the other one, whereby their movements up and down are steadied" and made capable of harder usage.
• "Means for simultaneously raising and lowering the matching-arbors, which is accomplished by a vertical movement of the bearings in which they are stepped at the lower ends, imparted by crank arms on a rock-shaft, which are engaged with said bearings, and are arranged to partake of their lateral adjustments." The mechanism: each step has a horizontally-slotted lug, z and 11, entering between the jaws of a crank-arm K whose wrist-pin k engages the slot; the crank-arms are keyed to a shaft G provided with a handlever G′ to raise/lower the arbors.
• Wedge locking of the lateral-adjustment screw-spindles (M, wedging-pins m).

Anticipation analysis:

Bottom line on 175,676: the single most dangerous reference for 219,651, but as an obviousness reference (§ 103 / the 1870 Act's "not invented by applicant" and want-of-invention practice), not a clean § 102 anticipation — unless 219651's claim 2 is construed to cover the pin-and-slot alternative, in which case a direct anticipation argument exists.

---

4.2 US 53,466

Full citation: US Letters Patent No. 53,466, "Improvement in Planing-Machines" (feeding devices for planing and working lumber), William B. McIver, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Date: March 27, 1866. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US53466
Eligible: Yes — 12 years pre-filing.

Brief description. Directed to a recognized problem: "In feed-rolls of planing-machines where both rolls are driven by gearing, it is very essential that the upper roll should be able to rise and descend bodily, or at either end independently of the other, and that the cogged wheels of the rolls in said movement should remain in true gear with each other, so that no jarring or grinding of the cogs can take place." Solution: journal boxes K, L for the upper roll and the upper journal of a driven shaft G supported on one rigid piece, with a splined sliding shaft through bevel-wheel F so gears H/U and F/V remain in mesh in every roll position; roll hung by stirrups to a transverse plate, spring-loaded.

Anticipation analysis. Discloses neither claim 1's matcher-frame prop mechanism nor claim 2's transverse rock-shaft unison linkage. It addresses the same problem 219,651 recites in its motivation ("no provision requires to be made with respect to the binding of the gearing for driving the feed-rolls"), but solves it differently (constant-mesh gearing rather than preventing differential roll motion). No § 102 anticipation of either claim. Relevant as § 103 / background art showing the gearing-bind problem was known and addressed long before 1879 — it undercuts any argument that the problem was novel, though not the solution.

---

4.3 US 99,008

Full citation: US Letters Patent No. 99,008, "Planing machine," Moses Andrew.
Dates: Google Patents record shows 1870-01-18; the Chicago Public Library patent index records the grant date as 2/15/1870 (https://apps.chpl.org/services/invent/patent.asp?patent=1378). I report both literally and do not reconcile them. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US99008
Eligible: Yes — ~9 years pre-filing.

Brief description. A planing machine with a surface-planing cylinder C, laterally adjustable upright edge-cutters D, D′ driven off longitudinal screw-shafts E, E′ through inclined-tooth gearing, and a feed-roll weighting arrangement: "H H are two weighted levers, one placed at each side of the machine, and inside of the frame A," fulcrumed in stirrups H′ and yokes H″, "each end thereof bears upon the freely perpendicular-sliding boxes in the sides of frame A. The boxes hold the journals of the upper feeding-rollers B B, and are made to slide to accommodate the different thickness of stuff... and so that said feed-rollers may rise or fall."

Anticipation analysis. Discloses weighted levers acting on sliding boxes of an upper feed-roll — the starting environment of 219,651's claim 2 — and laterally adjustable edge/matcher cutters. It does not disclose connecting the weighted lever ends to crank-arms of a transverse rock-shaft, does not disclose links O,O′, and does not disclose any requirement of lever unison or horizontality maintenance. Claim 1's matcher-frame prop mechanism is absent entirely. No § 102 anticipation. Useful only as background showing the weighted-lever-on-sliding-box feed-roll was old and conventional by 1870 — which is exactly how 219,651's own specification treats it ("as usual").

---

4.4 US 138,703

Full citation: US Letters Patent No. 138,703, "Improvement in planing-machines," A. H. Shipman (indexed under James S. Graham & Co.), May 6, 1873. Source: https://www.datamp.org/patents/search/xrefCompany.php?id=167
Eligible: Yes — ~5 years 9 months pre-filing.

Brief description: I could not retrieve the full text or drawings for this reference within this session. DATAMP indexes it as a wood-planer improvement, patentee A. H. Shipman, assigned in the James S. Graham & Co. portfolio. I therefore cannot describe its disclosure.

Anticipation analysis: Indeterminate — not assessed. Given the class match (planing-machines, 1873), it should be retrieved and read before any final anticipation opinion; I decline to speculate about its contents.

---

4.5 Other eligible "similar documents" — no demonstrated relevance

---

5. Additional relevant art found outside the "Similar Documents" list

These are not citations of 219,651. I flag them separately because they bear directly on the two claims and would be the natural starting points for any validity challenge.

5.1 US 138,244 — Lyman Gould (planing and matching machine; feed-roll gearing + matcher-head lower support)

Full citation: US Letters Patent No. 138,244, "Improvement in Planing-Machines," Lyman Gould, Norwich, Connecticut. Patented April 29, 1873; application filed February 8, 1873. Source: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/5a/db/52/952bb4c2f204bc/[US138244](/patent/US138244).pdf
Eligible: Yes — six years pre-filing.

Description. Explicitly framed for "a planing and matching machine." Two stated objects: (1) "improvements in the devices employed for permitting the upper rear feed-roll to rise and fall without being disconnected from the driving gear"; and (2) "improvements in the devices employed for supporting the lower end of the upright shaft to which the matcher-head is attached" (see Figs. 4–5, vertical central section and side view of the lower ends of the matcher-head shaft and its frame and bearing). The gearing solution uses swinging links/straps k k and m m so that "as the upper feed-roll rises and falls... the straps or links will also swing... thereby preventing all binding of the parts, and yet retaining the gears in proper mesh."

Anticipation analysis. Attacks the same two problem areas as 219,651: matcher-head support/adjustment, and feed-roll rise-and-fall gearing bind. But it discloses no rock-shaft crank-arm matcher-frame raiser with props (claim 1), and no transverse rock-shaft lever-unison linkage (claim 2). No § 102 anticipation. Relevant as § 103 art: it is another 1873 Cincinnati/Norwich-market solution to the very "gearing bind" problem 219,651 recites as motivation, and it shows matcher-head lower-end bearing support was an active design area.

5.2 US 70,592 — racks-and-pinion matcher-arbor raiser (cited inside US 175,676)

Citation: US Patent No. 70,592, referenced in the body of US 175,676 as "showing a machine in which the matching-arbors are supported at their lower ends in steps attached to or forming part of racks engaging pinion on a shaft, by turning which the matching-arbors may be raised or lowered." Date not verified in this session (pre-1876 by definition of the citation). Eligible as prior art if issued before 2/21/1879 — almost certainly yes, but I have not confirmed the date.

Anticipation analysis — this is the key § 103 reference for claim 1. The 219,651 specification's asserted novelty is that its crank-arms become solid props carrying the matcher-frame weight and relieving the link pins, versus prior mechanisms with play. US 175,676 states the objection to the racks-and-pinions approach in terms that map directly onto 219,651's stated advantage: "In all cog-gearing, the spaces between the cogs are wider than the thickness of the cogs; hence there is always a little play in such gearing, and such play would allow the matching-arbors to jump slightly while in operation." A skilled artisan starting from 70,592 plus Doane's own 175,676 crank-arm rock-shaft, with the known objection to cog play, would arrive at a positive, play-free prop arrangement with strong motivation. Not a § 102 anticipation on the record available; a serious § 103 combination.

5.3 US 213,180 — Doane's own earlier convertible planer-matcher

Citation: Described in US 335,994 (Doane, dated Feb 9, 1886) as "the class of planing and matching machines illustrated and described in Letters Patent No. 213,180, granted to me March 11, 1879" — its object being "to enlarge the capacity and enhance the efficiency of the class of 'duplex' machines." Filing date not verified in this session.

Timing problem to flag: 213,180 was granted March 11, 1879 — eighteen days after 219,651's February 21, 1879 filing. It therefore cannot be prior art as a patent publication under the § 102(a)(1)-analogue. It could still matter if (a) its application was filed before 219,651's filing and the 1870 Act's earlier-filing branch applies, or (b) it evidences Doane's own prior invention/possession. I have not obtained its filing date and will not assume one. Retrieve it before relying on this reference. Note the inventor-identity overlap (Doane on both) raises a possible double-patenting / same-inventor issue rather than a clean prior-art issue.

5.4 US 335,994 — Doane, dated February 9, 1886

Postdates 219,651 by more than seven years — not prior art. Useful only as (i) a statement of the family lineage (it names 219,651's machine class and 213,180 explicitly) and (ii) evidence of how the "duplex" convertible-machine art developed in Cincinnati. I mention it because a careless search will surface it alongside 219,651 and mislabel it as related prior art.

---

6. Ranked relevance and anticipation summary

Headline conclusion. On the record available, no reference anticipates either reconstructed claim of US 219,651 under the § 102 analogue. The asserted novelty of claim 1 — crank-arms that swing to vertical and bear the matcher-frame weight as props, unloading the link pins — appears in none of the art identified. Claim 2's transverse rock-shaft Q with crank-arms P,P′ and links O,O′ is likewise not disclosed. The genuine vulnerability is § 103 / want-of-invention: inventor Doane's own US 175,676 (with Bugbee) plus the admitted rack-and-pinion art (US 70,592) supplies every functional element except the prop geometry, in the same machine class, from the same workshop, three years earlier.

---

7. Limitations I am not papering over

1. No citation record exists for 219,651. Any "citation" list presented for this patent is either the algorithmic "Similar Documents" set or independently assembled by the analyst. I have labeled the provenance of every item above.
2. Claim text is truncated in the source. The claim-1 / claim-2 mapping is a reconstruction, so all anticipation verdicts are provisional and must be re-run against the printed claim set.
3. Three references were not retrieved in full: US 138,703 (description unknown), US 70,592 (date unknown), US 213,180 (filing date unknown). Each is material to the ranking; each is flagged rather than guessed.
4. Date discrepancy reported, not reconciled: US 99,008 appears as 1870-01-18 in the Google record and 2/15/1870 in the CPL index.
5. Anachronism: § 102 is applied as a functional analogue of R.S. § 4886; the governing exceptions and bars (two-year public-use/sale period; "prior invention by others") differ from the modern statute.
6. False-positive contamination remains a live risk for anyone searching "219651": the modern ~US 9,xxx,651 IPR matter, JP 2010-219651 A, and Brazilian HC 219651 previously identified are unrelated. The identifier-alias artifact ("US219651A" appearing in structured application-number data for a 1962 welding-method patent) noted in the earlier section is likewise not this document.
7. Note on dating: the task header states April 26, 2026; the working context for this analysis is dated 2026-09-30. Neither date affects the 1879 art cutoffs, but I flag the inconsistency rather than silently choosing one.

I'll ground this analysis by pulling the prior-art references listed on the patent page before combining them.

Obviousness Analysis — US 219,651 (Passel & Doane, "Improvement in Planing and Matching Machine")

0. Three threshold caveats before the § 103 analysis

(a) Statutory anachronism — flagged, not glossed over. US 219,651 was filed 1879‑02‑21 and granted 1879‑09‑16. 35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952; it did not exist at issuance. The controlling 1879 test was Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) — whether the improvement required "more ingenuity and skill … than were possessed by an ordinary mechanic acquainted with the business." I run the analysis below under the modern Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966)/KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007) framework as instructed, but every "obvious under § 103" conclusion should be read as "would equally have failed Hotchkiss's ordinary-mechanic test," and I flag where the two standards could diverge (particularly the props/geometry point in Claim 1).

(b) The claims are truncated in the source. As established in the previously generated summary, the only legible claim text is "1. The combination, substantially as before set forth, of the matcher-frame, the shaft pro—". An element-by-element § 103 analysis on claim language is therefore not possible with authority. What follows analyzes the two disclosed features as the operative subject matter (the standard approach for a "substantially as before set forth" 19th-century combination claim, whose scope is defined by the specification). If the granted claim 2 differs structurally from the feed-roll unison combination described, this analysis would need to be re-run.

(c) "Prior Art section" clarification. US 219,651's Google Patents page has no literal "Prior Art" tab. The two relevant blocks are the "Prior art keywords" list (planing, frame, matcher, improvement, arms) and the "Similar Documents" list. The former is an algorithmically extracted keyword set, not prior art. I therefore use the "Similar Documents" list as the prior-art universe, and apply the critical date myself.

Critical date: the application was filed February 21, 1879. Under the then-governing Rev. Stat. § 4886 / pre-AIA § 102(b) analogue, a printed patent granted more than one year before that date is a statutory bar regardless of inventorship — importantly, this makes Doane's own earlier patent US 175,676 applicable prior art against him, and the US 175,676 grant (1876‑04‑04) is ~2 years 10 months pre-filing, comfortably outside the one-year grace.

---

1. Prior-art universe, date-filtered

From the "Similar Documents" list on https://patents.google.com/patent/[US219651](/patent/US219651)/en, split by whether the reference pre-dates the 1879‑02‑21 filing:

QUALIFIES as prior art (granted on or before 1879‑02‑21):

DOES NOT QUALIFY (post-dates 1879‑02‑21; usable only as hindsight-free confirmation of the state of the art, not as § 103 art): US 398,048 (1889), US 246,340 (1881), US 301,128 (1884), US 344,836 (1886), US 393,948 (1888), US 404,088 (1889), US 508,516 (1893), US 542,598 (1895), US 649,085 (1900), US 730,313 (1903), US 869,850 (1907), US 936,659 (1909), US 1,689,108 (1928), US 313,885 (1885). Also post-dating: US 335,994 (Doane, 1886) — cited in the earlier section as a related Doane patent, but it cannot be prior art to a 1879 filing.

Search-surfaced but NOT on the page's Similar Documents list (I flag these as supplemental, and they should be verified before use): US 138,244 (Lyman Gould, 1873) — squarely on point for "permitting the upper rear feed-roll to rise and fall without being disconnected from the driving gear"; US 117,230 (S. A. Woods/Thomas, 1871) — yokes, weighted levers, stirrups, screw adjustment placed below the rolls to keep gearing out of the way; US 126,381 (Durkee, 1872); US 59,966 (Climer & Riley, 1866); US 149,493 (Margedant, 1874).

---

2. Feature 1 — matcher-frame elevating/lowering with crank-arm props

Subject matter (from the specification, OCR noise reported literally): matcher-frame B in ways between main frame A; shaft E in main-frame bearings with band-lever H and spring latch-pin h; crank-arms F F in the same vertical planes as lugs l l of the matcher-frame; links G G pivot the lugs to the crank-arms; "the end of the cranlearms and the bottom edge of said lugs are so formed … and so proportioned that when the crank-arms are turned up into a vertical position they will touch the bottom edge of the lugs and act as props between the matcher-frame and the shaft E," so the frame's weight is carried directly and "the links G and the pivot-pins thereof are then relieved entirely from strain."

Primary reference: US 175,676. Same field, same machine class (planing-and-matching convertible to surfacer), same Cincinnati assignee milieu, same named inventor (Doane). It discloses the identical kinematic family: a rock-shaft (G) carrying crank-arms, turned by a hand-lever (G), engaged with the vertically-movable matcher-arbor steps (H, H) to raise and lower them into and out of working position. The only structural difference in feature 1 is (a) the substitution of pivoted links G G for the jaw-and-wrist-pin engagement of 175,676, and (b) the deliberate propping geometry (crank-arm end bearing on the lug underside at top dead center).

Rationale for combining / why the difference is obvious:

1. Same field, same inventor, same problem. Both documents address lowering matcher arbors below the platen to convert a duplex matcher to a simple surfacer. KSR holds that where the references are in the same field and address the same problem, the field itself supplies the motivation.
2. The art already condemned backlash in matcher-arbor adjustment mechanisms. US 175,676 expressly distinguishes racks-and-pinions (US 70,592) because "there is always a little play in such gearing, and such play would allow the matching-arbors to jump slightly while in operation," contrasting mechanisms that "hold the cutter-spindle firmly." A PHOSITA seeking a play-free, vibration-resistant raised position is directly led to a mechanism that carries the load in compression through a dead-center prop rather than through pivots in tension/shear. That is a classic and well-known machine-design expedient — the toggle/prop link — and the specification itself states the result as a mere consequence: "the crank-arms in their turned-up position receive the weight of the matcher-frame directly, the links G and the pivot-pins thereof are then relieved entirely from strain."
3. Predictable result, no new function. The prop does not add a capability; it redistributes load. Element-by-element, the combination is: [matcher-frame] + [crank-shaft] + [links] + [lever & latch] — every element known in the art (US 175,676 for shaft/crank-arms/lever; US 99,008 for weighted-lever/fulcrum practice; US 31,459 and US 34,883 for slotted-link connections), with the sole asserted advantage being reduction of pin strain.
4. Only possibly non-obvious sliver. The specific co-planarity of crank-arms and lugs plus the matching contouring of arm-end and lug-bottom is arguably a design choice of dimensional proportioning. Under KSR, "[a] designer of ordinary skill … knows the effects of varying … proportions," which cuts toward obviousness; under Hotchkiss's "ordinary mechanic" test this is likewise close to the line. If the granted claim is limited to the exact geometric relationship, this is the one element where a non-obviousness argument has any purchase — and it is a narrow purchase.

§ 103 conclusion on Feature 1: obvious over US 175,676 alone (single-reference obviousness, since 175,676 discloses the whole arrangement except the prop geometry), or over US 175,676 in view of US 70,592 and the art's own anti-backlash teaching.

---

3. Feature 2 — unison weighted feed-roll levers via links to a transverse rock-shaft

Subject matter: upper feed-roll I in sliding boxes on screw-spindles K; K swiveled to elbow-links L; L pivoted to levers M, M′; short arms fulcrumed on stud-pins m; long arms carry adjustable weights N; the long arms are connected by links O, O′ to crank-arms P, P′ of transverse rock-shaft Q, with hand-lever R. Stated result: "the levers must always move in unison and raise or lower the feed-roll I equally and simultaneously at both ends, so as to maintain its horizontality," hence "no provision requires to be made with respect to the binding of the gearing for driving the feed-rolls, and one set of such gearing only will be required, instead of a set at each end."

Primary references: US 175,676 + US 53,466 (+ US 99,008 as the weighted-lever/roll-box starting structure).

Element mapping:

Rationale for combining:

1. The two references are in the same art and address the identical defect. US 175,676's pin-and-slot coupling and US 219,651's link-and-rock-shaft coupling both exist to stop the two weighted levers from operating out of phase. This is a substitution of one known coupling for another known coupling in the same machine, achieving the same result — a textbook KSR rationale (B): substitution of one known element for another to obtain a predictable result.
2. The 219,651 specification concedes equivalence in its own text. It states that "the crank-arms P and 1? [P′] may be directly connected to the weighted levers by fixed stud-pins playing in slots, in which case the links 0 and 0 [O, O′] could be dispensed with." That is a pin-and-slot connection between the weighted levers' arms and the crank-arms — i.e., an express admission that the coupling across the pivot/rock-shaft can be by slotted pin, which is exactly the pin-and-slot arrangement of US 175,676. A PHOSITA reading the inventor's own equivalence statement would not see a patentable difference.
3. Recognized problem + known solution = motivation. US 53,466 supplies the express why: roll end-play must not bind the feed gearing. Once a PHOSITA accepts that the roll must be held horizontal while the gearing is driven from one end, coupling the two weighted levers on a common rock-shaft is the natural, mechanistically trivial answer, and one set of gearing is the obvious resulting economy. The 219,651 specification recites that economy as its rationale, not as an unexpected result.
4. No unexpected results. The stated advantages (unison, horizontality, single set of gearing) are the direct, predictable consequence of rigidly coupling two levers to a common axis. Under KSR, "predictable results" means obvious.

§ 103 conclusion on Feature 2: obvious over US 175,676 in view of US 53,466 (and US 99,008 as the alternative starting structure for the weighted-lever/feed-roll subcombination). It is arguably also anticipated if the reference relied on is US 175,676 read alone with the disclosure's own equivalence footnote — but anticipation (§ 102) requires the exact claimed combination, and I cannot do that test because the claim text is truncated (see § 0(b)).

---

4. What would not be obvious / where to push back

• The propping geometry as a unit of claim scope. If claim 1 is limited to "crank-arm end and lug bottom so formed and proportioned that at vertical the arm touches the lug bottom and props the frame," the argument for patentability is that US 175,676's jaw-and-wrist-pin engagement, while play-free, is not a support/compression prop and does not relieve the links (175,676 has no links). Expect an examiner/defendant to rebut with "KSR — varying proportions is within the designer's skill," so this is a weak, not a strong, position.
• Secondary considerations. None appear in the record: no unexpected results beyond the spec's own predictions, no licensing demand tied to either feature, no long-felt-need evidence, no failure of others. The earlier section's note that J. A. Fay & Co. marketed "Doane's Patent Duplex Planing, Matching, and Beading Machine" is evidence of commercial embodiment, not of nexus-bearing secondary considerations. Under KSR/Graham there is nothing here to rebut a prima facie case.
• A drafting-level caveat that could flip the analysis: because the claim is a "combination, substantially as before set forth" claim, its scope is tied to the whole disclosed combination as an integrated mechanism. If the now-lost remainder of the claim (and any claim 2) recites a specific interaction between the matcher-frame elevating mechanism and the feed-roll mechanism — e.g., a single lever or shaft serving both — that creates a combined-combination problem not addressed by US 175,676 alone and would materially strengthen the non-obviousness position. I cannot see that text, so I cannot rule it in or out.

---

5. Summary table

---

6. Explicit gaps — do not treat as complete

1. US 138,703 (Shipman, 1873‑05‑06), US 142,460 (1873‑09‑02), and US 150,528 (1874‑05‑05) are listed as "similar documents" on the patent page but I could not retrieve their specifications before exhausting tool steps. My multi-step searches for US 138,703 and US 201,366 returned no substantive text (the US 138,703 hit returned an unrelated Shipman Engine Co. fuel-atomizer case and a datamp company listing). Do not treat these as analyzed. US 138,703 in particular (a planing-machine patent assigned to the same trade circle) may be a better primary reference than US 175,676 for one or both features, and could convert either conclusion from "obvious" to "anticipated."
2. US 201,366 (1878‑03‑19) appeared in a Chinese-language classification listing as the closest-in-time "Improvement in planing-machines," but it is not on the US 219,651 Similar Documents list and I did not retrieve it. It is within one year of the filing date, so it would be pre-AIA § 102(a)/§ 102(e)-type art, not a § 102(b) bar — worth checking, but not dispositive under § 103 either way.
3. The claims remain unrecovered. Every conclusion above is a conclusion about the disclosed embodiments, not about granted claim scope.
4. Disambiguation: the "219651" identifier also returns a modern US ~9,xxx,651 cellular-multimedia patent asserted by AT&T/Verizon, JP 2010‑219651 A (NEC), Brazilian HC 219651, and a Google Patents priority row reading "US219651A | US3188447A | 1957‑09‑16 | 1962‑08‑27 | Method of welding." None of these is US 219,651. Note in particular that my search for "US201366" returned a Google Patents citation artifact ("US201366D / US201366A") in a similar-documents listing — that is the 1878 planing-machine patent, not the modern US 2013/xxxxxx publication format, and it should not be auto-normalized.

7. Bottom line

On the prior art available and date-qualified from the US 219,651 record itself, both disclosed features are prima facie obvious: Feature 1 over US 175,676 (with US 70,592 and the anti-backlash teaching), and Feature 2 over US 175,676 in view of US 53,466 (with US 99,008 supplying the weighted-lever/roll-box subcombination). The decisive weakness is that Doane's own earlier US 175,676 already contains, in the same machine, the rock-shaft-with-crank-arms-and-hand-lever raising/lowering mechanism and a pin-and-slot coupling between the two weighted feed-roll levers for unison motion — and the 219,651 specification itself states that its link-and-crank-arm coupling is interchangeable with a slotted stud-pin coupling. That is a KSR "substitution of known elements, predictable result" case with a built-in inventor admission. The only genuinely arguable point of novelty is the geometric propping relationship in Feature 1, which is narrow and vulnerable to the "varying proportions is within the skill of the designer" rationale. This conclusion is contingent on US 138,703, US 142,460, US 150,528, and US 201,366, which I was unable to retrieve.