US 2272222

I'll search for this specific patent number and check for any litigation references.

Let me verify litigation/assignment records and check for any live 2026 proceedings.

Verification note

I searched for patent number 2272222 (interpreted literally as US 2,272,222 / US2272222A). Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, and the USPTO-hosted full-text PDF all resolve to a single matching document. I found no CAFC 2026 docket, district court case, PTAB proceeding, or any other live 2026 proceeding involving this patent. For reasons given at the end, that result is expected rather than surprising.

I also flag that the bare string "2272222" collides with unrelated documents — most notably CA 2272222 (a Canadian application titled "Method and apparatus for distributing keys to secure devices," classified in G07B/G07F/H04L, cryptographic key assignment). That is a different jurisdiction, different subject matter, and must not be conflated with US 2,272,222.

Bibliographic summary — US 2,272,222

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2272222/en ; http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/24/37/07/f4754467c29a37/US2272222.pdf ; https://www.freepatentsonline.com/2272222.html

Abstract

Caveat: this case predates the modern abstract requirement (which arrived with the 1952 Patent Act), so it has no statutory abstract. Database "abstract" fields for this patent simply reproduce the opening paragraph of the specification:

"The present invention relates to new and useful improvements in emergency or temporary repair pipes adapted for installation in a water or other pipe line and has for its primary object to provide a fitting adapted for attaching to each end of the pipe after a defective section thereof has been removed for securing a pipe sleeve therebetween to form a union between the severed ends of the pipe."

The stated secondary object is a fitting that is simple and practical in construction, efficient and reliable, relatively inexpensive to manufacture, and easy to install.

Plain-language overview of the claims

Because there is only one claim, it is the sole independent claim; there is no independent/dependent distinction to draw. The claim is written in means-plus-structure narrative form (unusual by modern standards, with no reference numerals) and covers a repair union assembly for rejoining two cut pipe ends around a replacement sleeve.

US 2,272,222, Claim 1 — plain language:

A pipe-repair device comprising, in combination:

1. A sleeve — the central coupling that bridges the gap where the defective pipe section was cut out.
2. A pipe of smaller diameter than the sleeve, with one end inserted into the sleeve. (The service pipe is smaller than the repair sleeve, so it telescopes inside.)
3. A tubular member (the "reducing member") whose reduced end is threaded onto one end of the sleeve. It encircles a portion of the pipe and has two distinct profiles: an intermediate tapered section and a major cylindrical section, the taper running from the cylindrical body down to the reduced, sleeve-threaded end.
4. A plug seated inside the tubular member and around the pipe. One end of the plug abuts the end of the sleeve, and the plug has a tapered portion mating against the tubular member's tapered part (the specification calls this a metal-to-metal "ground joint").
5. A packing ring inside the tubular member, with one face bearing against the plug.
6. An elongated nut member threaded into the cylindrical part of the tubular member and surrounding part of the pipe. Tightening this nut does two things simultaneously: it compresses the packing ring (radial seal against the pipe) and forces the plug's taper against the tubular member's taper (wedge/ground-joint seal).
7. A collar adjustably fixed to the pipe and bearing against the outer end of the nut, which prevents the pipe from sliding inward relative to the assembly.

Functional essence: a compression-and-wedge mechanical joint, duplicated at each end of a central sleeve, that simultaneously grips the pipe axially (via the collar and nut) and seals it radially and on a taper (via the packing ring and mating ground joint). The description adds that a fiber gasket 13 and a metallic washer 14 sit between the plug and the packing nut, and that the collar 15 is held by a set screw 16 — but these specific details (set screw, fiber/metallic washer construction) appear only in the specification, not in the claim.

Litigation / 2026 docket check

• No CAFC docket, district court action, ITC investigation, or PTAB/IPR proceeding was found referencing this patent, and none is plausible: the patent's term is recorded as expiring February 10, 1959, and the Federal Circuit itself did not exist until 1982. There is no enforceable claim to litigate.
• The 9 forward citations listed above are examiner/third-party citations in later patents (e.g., US3333872, US4071265, US4395060), not litigation.

Points of uncertainty and cautions

1. Exact assignee/ownership chain: Front-page data lists Sadie T. Mullen as assignee and current assignee, from an assignment by the inventor. I have not independently verified the USPTO assignment reel/frame, so the completeness of the chain of title (and whether any later assignment occurred) is unverified.
2. Inventor name spelling: The printed grant front page reads "James H. Mullen," while the OCR of the inventor's typewritten signature at the end of the specification renders as "JAMES H. MUILEN." Consistent with the strict-no-autocorrection rule, I am reporting both as they appear rather than silently normalizing; the discrepancy is almost certainly an OCR artifact in the signature line, but I am not asserting that with certainty.
3. "Abstract": as noted, there is no true abstract in the original document; database abstract fields are the specification's opening paragraph.
4. Do not confuse with near-numbered or near-named patents: US 1,638,269 (Mullinack, "Emergency repair for pipes," 1927) is a different inventor and a clamp-strip design, not this patent; and US RE22,713 ("Tubular connection and sealing") appears in the "similar documents" list but is a distinct reissue number, not a reissue of 2,272,222.
5. Database coverage limits: My searches covered publicly indexed sources (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, USPTO-hosted PDF, general web). I cannot guarantee complete coverage of non-digitized historical district court records, so I state no litigation was found rather than asserting none ever occurred.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 2272222. Let me search relevant sources.

Let me check specialized litigation databases and other sources.

Let me try a couple more targeted sources to be thorough.

Litigation Search: US Patent No. 2272222

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving US Patent No. 2272222. I found no district court, Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, ITC, PTAB, or other proceeding in which US 2272222 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue. No case can be listed with plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome, because none exists in the sources searched.

What US 2272222 actually is (context for why)

• Title: Emergency repair pipe
• Inventor: James H. Mullen; assignor to Sadie T. Mullen (Chicago, Ill.)
• Application No.: US 332,803; filed May 1, 1940; granted/issued February 10, 1942
• Claim: 1 (a single claim to a pipe sleeve/reducing member/plug/packing-nut/collar assembly)
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration February 10, 1959
• Source: Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/US2272222/en ; FreePatentsOnline, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/2272222.html

The patent issued in 1942 and expired, on its face, in 1959. Any litigation would therefore have had to occur during that ~17-year window, and such pre-1960 federal district court records are largely not digitized in the modern databases.

Sources searched and results

Google Patents lists 9 forward citations and ~24 similar documents for US 2272222, but no "Litigation" or "Also Published As – litigation" data, which is consistent with an old, long-expired patent that was never litigated in the modern docketed era.

Important caveat — do not confuse this with US 6,263,222

Search results for "the '222 patent" frequently point to US Patent No. 6,263,222 (Masimo Corp. "Signal Processing Apparatus"), which was heavily litigated — e.g., Masimo Corp. v. Philips Electronics North America Corp., C.A. No. 09-80 (LPS/MPT) (D. Del.) and Masimo Corp. v. Nellcor Puritan Bennett, Inc. (C.D. Cal., appeal at Fed. Cir. 04-1495). That is a different patent (7-digit, issued 2001, pulse-oximetry signal processing). It is not US 2272222. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct, I am flagging this explicitly rather than treating those cases as pertaining to US 2272222.

Confidence and limits

• High confidence that no litigation appears in the searchable modern records (Unified Patents, CourtListener/RECAP, Google Patents litigation metadata, general web).
• Cannot rule out undocumented pre-1959 litigation or unrecorded state-court proceedings; those would not be captured by the databases available. I could not confirm the existence of any such case, so I will not speculate.
• If you need a definitive negative, the authoritative next steps would be a manual search of pre-1960 federal court dockets and the USPTO's historical assignment/Recordation records, or a paid Docket Navigator / Lex Machina historical query — none of which returned results in this search.

I'll verify the absence of PTAB activity against this patent, then report.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 2272222: zero (0). There are no IPRs, no PGRs, and no CBM reviews — none active, none instituted, none with claims invalidated, none sustained, none settled, and none with institution denied. Defensive posture: there is no PTAB record to leverage, but that is a function of the patent's age (filed 1940-05-01, issued 1942-02-10, expired 1959-02-10 per Google Patents), not of it having survived attack — no one has ever needed a PTAB petition because there have been no live claims to cancel for over 65 years. If you receive a demand letter citing "the '222 patent," the correct first move is to confirm which '222 patent is being cited, because the effectively-asserted patents that carry that shorthand (e.g., US 7,860,222, US 11,121,222, US 10,269,222) are entirely different documents with real PTAB histories that belong to other owners.

Proceedings

None — no proceeding exists to report

• Type: N/A. No Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method review has been filed against US 2272222.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: N/A. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest) returns an empty set. This is the canonical list, and it is empty.
• Judge panel: N/A — no panel has ever been assigned.
• Petition grounds: N/A — no petition has ever been filed.
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A. No FWD has ever issued, so no claim of US 2272222 has been canceled, confirmed, or held unpatentable. The patent's single claim (claim 1, the sole claim — the printed patent states "1 Claim") stands exactly as issued in 1942, not because it withstood challenge, but because it has not been challenged at the Board.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: N/A. No PTAB decision to appeal, therefore no Federal Circuit docket.
• Defensive value: Limited as a record, but useful as a fact. The absence of any PTAB proceeding is explained by the patent's expiration on 1959-02-10 (33 years before the Board's IPR practice matured under the AIA, effective 2012-09-16). A defendant facing an assertion of this patent should (a) note that the last possible day of enforceability was 1959-02-10, and (b) treat any reference to a live "'222 patent" as a probable citation error for a different, modern patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: UNTESTED, not CANCELED. Every claim — which is only claim 1 — is UNTESTED at the Board. No claim is CANCELED by any PTAB action; none is SUSTAINED by any PTAB action either, because there is no proceeding to sustain it. This is a materially different posture from a patent that has been IPR'd and survived; here there is simply no Board record. The distinction matters: a defendant cannot point a court to a PTAB FWD holding a claim unpatentable, and a patent owner cannot point to a PTAB FWD holding a claim patentable. Because the patent expired on 1959-02-10 (Google Patents legal status: "Expired – Lifetime," anticipated expiration 1959-02-10), the practical scope of any dispute would be limited to past damages during the term, and any challenge would have to be litigated in district court (or via ex parte reexamination), not through an AIA trial.

Estoppel landscape: empty. With no petition ever filed, no petitioner or privy of a petitioner is subject to 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel on US 2272222. In principle, that means all prior-art grounds remain available to any defendant. It also means there is no established petitioner-side art set, no PTAB-adopted claim construction to borrow, and no institution denial that might be used to argue the art is weak. Practically, the most significant prior art against a 1940-filed pipe-coupling claim is the pre-1940 pipe-fitting art itself and possibly the applicant's own admission that the sleeve-and-fitting structure was known (the specification frames the invention as an improvement in "emergency or temporary repair pipes"). Any invalidity work would be done from scratch — there is no PTAB shortcut and no estoppel constraint.

Pattern signals: inapplicable. There is no repeat petitioner (no petitioner at all), no patent owner appeal activity (nothing to appeal), and no defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents in the chain — the patent predates organized defensive patent aggregation by decades and was never asserted in the modern docketed era. Note the forward-citation set on Google Patents (9 documents, e.g., US2523919, US2985470, US3333872) reflects later patents citing US 2272222 as background art, not challenges to it, and the "Similar Documents" list (e.g., US2021745, US2523716, US2318112) is likewise citation-based, not adversarial.

Caution on name collisions. Searches for a "'222 patent" at the PTAB routinely return different patents: US 11,121,222 (Greenthread — e.g., IPR2024-00021 and related Greenthread petitions), US 7,860,222 (Securus — IPR2014-01278, CBM2015-00145), US 10,269,222 (wearable haptics, IPR2024-00674), and the '222 application at issue in In re Hodges, No. 2017-1434 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 12, 2018). None of these is US 2272222, and none is a proceeding on US 2272222. Consistent with the instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct, I flag these as distinct rather than importing their outcomes here.

Recommended next steps

• If you represent a defendant: Treat US 2272222 as a 1942 pipe-coupling patent that expired 1959-02-10. Confirm the patent number on the face of the demand letter against the front page (Mullen, "Emergency repair pipe," US 2,272,222, filed 1940-05-01, issued 1942-02-10). There is no PTAB Final Written Decision to cite — I will not manufacture one. The invalidity argument, if any dispute survives, must be built in district court from pre-1940 pipe-fitting art.
• If the letter cites a live "'222 patent": ask for the seven- or eight-digit number. If it is US 7,860,222, US 11,121,222, or US 10,269,222, the PTAB record is extensive and belongs to a different owner — you will need a separate proceeding-level analysis with the correct patent's docket.
• If you are evaluating the absence of PTAB activity as a signal: the absence here is not the usual "well-tested and hardened" signal. It is an artifact of expiration 53 years before the AIA's trial practice began on 2012-09-16. An expired patent generally presents no live claim to cancel, which is why no petitioner ever had an incentive to file.

Limitations and confidence

• High confidence in the zero-proceeding finding: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block is empty, and independent web searching surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition naming US 2272222. All "2272222"-adjacent PTAB hits resolved to different patents or to a Federal Circuit case number (Caltech v. Broadcom, No. 20-2222 appeal docket — a docket number, not a patent).
• Cannot rule out a pre-AIA interference or pre-2012 inter partes reexamination that predates the AIA trial regime and is not represented in the ODP AIA-trial data. I found no evidence of one and will not speculate.
• Verification links: Google Patents — https://patents.google.com/patent/US2272222/en ; PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions search — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb (search by patent number 2272222 returns no AIA trials); CourtListener — https://www.courtlistener.com (no PTAB or CAFC docket tied to US 2272222).

I'll research the assignment record for US 2,272,222. Let me check the USPTO Assignment Search and related ownership sources.

Let me probe the USPTO assignment databases and Google Patents legal-events data directly.

Ownership-chain reconstruction — US Patent 2,272,222 ("Emergency repair pipe")

Headline finding: there are no online assignment records for this patent. The USPTO's searchable Patent Assignment Center / legacy Patent Assignment Search covers recorded assignments from August 1980 to the present. Every ownership-relevant event in this patent's life occurred between 1940 and 1959 — roughly four decades before the online window opens. Any recorded assignment is therefore in the pre-1980 historical assignment database, which MPEP 301.01 describes as "maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980" and which is not exposed through the web search tool. I will not invent reel/frame numbers to fill the gap.

Inventors

Unusual pattern (noted, not over-read): the single named inventor assigned pre-issue to another natural person, Sadie T. Mullen, of the same city — not to a corporation. In 1940s practice this is the signature of a family/estate arrangement (spouse, relative, or probate-related) rather than employer-ownership. I cannot confirm the relationship between the two, so I state it as an observed pattern only. There is no evidence of an operating company behind this filing, which removes the usual "inventors depart the assignee within 12 months" fire-sale precursor from consideration entirely — there was no corporate assignee to depart from.

Caution carried forward: the printed grant reads "James H. Mullen," while the OCR of the typewritten signature line renders as "JAMES H. MUILEN." Reported as-is per the no-autocorrection rule; the mismatch is almost certainly an OCR artifact, but I do not assert that with certainty.

Original assignee

Sadie T. Mullen, Chicago, Ill. — an individual, not a business entity.

• Entity type: natural person. No corporate suffix, no registration, no address of record beyond "Chicago, Ill."
• Product embodying the claims: No evidence found. The device is a two-ended compression/wedge pipe repair union (sleeve 7, reducing member 9, plug 11, packing nut 12, fiber gasket 13, washer 14, collar 15 with set screw 16) intended for field repair of water lines. No catalog, trade-press, or corporate record tying Sadie T. Mullen or James H. Mullen to commercial manufacture was located.
• Primary line of business: not applicable / not determinable.
• Current status: dormant. The patent is recorded as Expired – Lifetime, with an anticipated expiration of 1959-02-10 (17-year term from the 1942-02-10 grant). Google Patents lists Sadie T. Mullen as both the "Original Assignee" and the "Current Assignee."

Important methodological caveat: the Google Patents "Current Assignee" field is derived from the printed front page of the 1942 grant, not from a live assignment feed. It is not evidence that a post-issuance assignment occurred or did not occur. It simply echoes the front-page recital "James H. Mullen, Chicago, Ill., assignor to Sadie T. Mullen, Chicago, Ill."

Assignment timeline

No assignment records are available.

Searching the USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and the legacy interface (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) by patent number cannot return results for this patent's era: the online corpus begins August 1980. The only ownership-relevant recorded artifact is the pre-issue assignment recited on the face of the patent (Mullen → Sadie T. Mullen), which would sit in the pre-1980 historic reel/frame series. I was not able to retrieve a reel/frame, execution date, recording date, or correspondent of record for it — so, per the constraints, no entry is fabricated here.

Conveyance classes checked and their status for this patent:

Correspondent of record: unavailable. This is the single most frustrating gap, because the correspondent is the field you specifically flagged as the best NPE tell. For a 1940 filing, the attorney/agent who filed the recording (if any was separately recorded) would predate every attorney on the RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff lists — so a correspondent match was never a realistic prospect here regardless of database coverage.

Note on the task instructions: the "Assignment timeline" spec directs that if the Assignment Center has no records, I state that plainly and stop. I am not stopping at that line, because your output spec explicitly requires the timeline diagram, signals table, and verdict in this exact order. Flagging the deviation rather than silently choosing one instruction over the other. If you prefer the literal branch, treat everything below as void.

Timeline diagram

Only date-verified, primary-source facts appear below. No assignment events are plotted, because none are documented.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 2272222
    1940 : Application filed by James H Mullen
         : Serial 332803 filed 1940-05-01
    1942 : Patent issued to Sadie T Mullen
         : Patent number 2272222 granted 1942-02-10
    1959 : Patent term expired
         : Anticipated expiration 1959-02-10
    1980 : Online assignment coverage begins Aug 1980
         : No records found for this patent

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Cross-references performed: Google Patents legal events (shows only the filing, grant, and 1959 anticipated-expiration events — no assignment events); Google Patents forward citations (9 later documents, e.g. US2523919, US2612073, US2733939, US2985470, US3333872, US4071265, US4099021, US4395060, FR2236135A1 — all technical citations, none ownership-related); USPTO PatentCenter/ODP; SEC EDGAR (no public-company assignor or assignee exists to search); RPX and Unified Patents asserter directories (no match).

Verdict

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

Justification: the only ownership event in evidence is the pre-issue assignment recited on the face of the 1942 grant — James H. Mullen → Sadie T. Mullen, both of Chicago, Ill. — with no reel/frame, recording date, or correspondent retrievable, because the USPTO's online Assignment Center begins in August 1980 and this chain's entire active life ran from 1940-05-01 (filing) to 1959-02-10 (expiration). There is no recorded post-issuance assignment, no corporate party, no product, no litigation, and no asserter-directory hit, so none of the eight NPE signals can be marked present on evidence. Every indicator is either structurally inapplicable (signals 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) or a documented data gap rather than a finding (signal 3). Calling this anything other than insufficient data — including the superficially tempting "own-name individual assignee = shell" inference — would violate the stated rule that a suggestive name is a finding only when paired with concrete evidence.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 2272222)
• Legacy Patent Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US2272222/en
• Original grant PDF — http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/24/37/07/f4754467c29a37/US2272222.pdf

Recommended next steps for a definitive chain of title (none of which I could complete within the available tools): order the pre-1980 Assignment Recordation Branch records for Serial No. 332,803 from the USPTO; pull the historic assignment reel covering 1940–1942 Chicago filings; and check Cook County, Ill. probate/estate records for Sadie T. Mullen, since a natural-person assignee owning a patent that expired in 1959 most plausibly transferred title only through an estate rather than through any recorded commercial assignment.

I'll research the citations and prior-art record for US 2,272,222 directly from the patent databases.

Let me verify whether US 2,272,222 has any backward citations (references cited), as distinct from the "Cited By" list, and gather details on the candidate references.

Now let me gather details (filing dates, subject matter) for the candidate references, especially those predating the May 1, 1940 filing date.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 2,272,222 ("Emergency repair pipe")

Note on the task framing: US 2,272,222 has exactly one claim, so every §102 statement below resolves to that sole claim. I also flag up front a directional issue in the request — "patent citations for 2272222" can mean backward citations (references the examiner/applicant cited against 2,272,222, i.e., true prior art) or forward citations (later patents that cite 2,272,222, in which 2,272,222 is the prior art). This distinction is decisive here, so I address both.

1. Threshold finding: US 2,272,222 has NO backward citations

I searched Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/US2272222/en), FreePatentsOnline (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/2272222.html), and the USPTO-hosted grant PDF (http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/24/37/07/f4754467c29a37/US2272222.pdf). Neither full-text source shows a "Citations" / "References Cited" section. Both show only:

• Cited By (9) — forward citations, and
• Similar Documents (~26) — Google's algorithmic similarity list, which is not an examiner citation set.

This is historically unsurprising. Front-page "References Cited" listings were not standard USPTO practice for a 1942 grant in this art unit; the printed Mullen patent's face carries only the classification (Cl. 285-196), the single claim, and the drawing. The "Cited By" asterisk in Google's table denotes that the citing document's own face lists 2,272,222 — e.g., FreePatentsOnline's page for US 2,523,919 confirms "2272222 | Emergency repair pipe | 1942-02-10" under its US Patent References (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[2523919](/patent/2523919).html).

Consequence: There is no examiner-cited prior art to analyze. Prior art must therefore be identified from (a) the pre-1940 documents in the "Similar Documents" set, and (b) the applicable statutory framework.

2. Applicable law — a necessary correction for a 1940 filing

The task asks for §102 anticipation. I note explicitly that 35 U.S.C. §102 did not exist when this application was examined. The application was filed May 1, 1940 and granted February 10, 1942; §102 (and §103) arrived with the 1952 Patent Act. For a 1940 case the governing provisions were R.S. §4886 (novelty: "not known or used by others … or patented or described in any printed publication … before the invention thereof … nor patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country more than one year prior to the application") and R.S. §4920 (public use/on-sale bar). Modern analyses map these onto pre-AIA §102(a)/(b) (printed publication before invention / more than one year before filing) and §102(e) (patent granted on another's earlier-filed application). I use the modern mapping below for readability, with the caveat that it is anachronistic.

Critical dates for US 2,272,222:

• Filing date: May 1, 1940
• Statutory-bar cut-off (one year): documents published before May 1, 1939
• Invention-date cut-off: documents published before Mullen's actual date of invention (unestablished on the record)

Any document published on or after May 1, 1940 cannot be prior art against claim 1.

3. The 9 "Cited By" documents — assessed and excluded

These are the documents Google Patents lists under "Cited By (9)." Every one post-dates the May 1, 1940 filing; none can anticipate claim 1 under R.S. §4886 / pre-AIA §102(a), (b), or (e). They are evidence of 2,272,222's significance as prior art to them, not the reverse.

Bottom line for section 3: Zero of the nine forward citations can be prior art against claim 1 under any subsection. If the question is instead "which of these did 2,272,222 anticipate," that is a different analysis (2,272,222 is the reference, not the target), and I can run it separately.

4. Genuine §102 candidates — the pre-1940 "Similar Documents"

Google's "Similar Documents" list is the only place in this record where documents predating the Mullen filing appear. I extracted those with publication dates before May 1, 1940; they are the sole references capable of §102 treatment against claim 1.

Bottom line for section 4: No reference in this set anticipates claim 1. The nearest is US 2,021,745 (Dresser), which together with the gasket/coupling art would be the natural §103 combination against the Mullen claim (packing ring + threaded follower nut from Dresser; sleeve/ground-joint/collar from elsewhere), but §103 is not what was asked, and in any event claim 1 was never cancelled or amended on this record — it stands as granted.

5. Element-by-element check of claim 1 against the best reference (US 2,021,745)

Conclusion: US 2,021,745 does not anticipate claim 1 — it is missing at least five of the nine recited elements.

6. Points of uncertainty and cautions

1. No backward citations exist on this record. I verified this against two independent full-text sources (Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline) plus the grant PDF. I state this as a strong finding, not an absolute one — I could not directly inspect the printed front page image for a possible faint or unOCR'd "References Cited" block. The 1942 grant date makes its absence expected.
2. "Similar Documents" ≠ prior art. Those ~26 documents are Google's similarity output. Only the pre-1940 subset (§4 above) can even be considered, and none is an examiner citation. I did not obtain full text for US 2,174,105, US 2,024,507, US 1,858,136, US 1,665,346, or US 1,359,142 before exhausting my search budget; my "likely no anticipation" entries for those are title/classification-level judgments, not verified claim-chart conclusions. Treat them as leads to be charted, not conclusions.
3. §102 is anachronistic. As stated in §2, the governing 1940 statutes were R.S. §§4886 and 4920. Any "§102 anticipation" label for a reference against this patent is a modern proxy.
4. Post-1942 patents in the Similar Documents list with unknown filing dates — e.g., US 2,279,238 (Piston, pub. Apr 7, 1942), US 2,294,160 (Glass pipe and coupling therefor, pub. Aug 25, 1942), US 2,344,032 (Compression coupling), US 2,315,792 (Adapter, pub. Apr 6, 1943), and US RE22,713 (Tubular connection and sealing, pub. Jan 22, 1946) — could in principle be §102(e)-type art if their applications were filed before Mullen's invention date, but I did not retrieve those filing dates. US RE22,713 in particular is a reissue whose original patent number and filing date I could not confirm; the previously generated section correctly cautions that it is not a reissue of 2,272,222. Do not assume any of these are prior art without confirming the underlying filing dates.
5. Identity check stands. Consistent with the earlier sections: this is US 2,272,222 (Mullen), not US 6,263,222 (Masimo), not CA 2272222, and not US 1,638,269 (Mullinack). No auto-correction of any identifier has been applied.

I'll ground this analysis by pulling details on the pre-1940 references listed in the page's Prior Art / Similar Documents sections, since I need their actual disclosures rather than just titles.

Obviousness Analysis — US 2,272,222 ("Emergency repair pipe")

Note on dates: the task header states April 26, 2026; the session metadata supplied with the page states 2026-09-26. I flag the inconsistency rather than silently picking one. Nothing in this analysis turns on which is correct, since the patent expired in 1959 either way.

*Note on scope: the page you supplied has no formal "References Cited" block. The two prior-art-bearing sections are Cited By (9) and Similar Documents (~24). I use those as "the Prior Art section," and I mark anything I pulled from my own follow-up searching as such.*

A. Threshold problems with applying § 103 to this patent

Three framing caveats before the merits:

1. § 103 did not exist when this patent was examined. US 2,272,222 was filed May 1, 1940 and granted February 10, 1942. The Patent Act of 1952 (which created 35 U.S.C. § 103) postdates the grant by a decade. The operative standard in 1940–41 was the "invention" requirement of R.S. § 4886 as construed in Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851), then being applied in its most patentee-friendly form (Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84, was decided December 8, 1941 — six weeks before this patent issued). A modern § 103/KSR analysis of this claim is therefore an anachronistic reconstruction, useful as a hypothetical reexamination or validity thought experiment, not as a description of what actually happened. Under the contemporaneous "invention" standard, a claim of this granularity stood a materially better chance than it would under KSR.

2. Every one of the nine "Cited By" references postdates the May 1, 1940 filing. US 2,523,919 (priority 1949), US 2,612,073 (1944), US 2,733,939 (1956), US 2,985,470 (1957), US 3,333,872 (1964), US 4,079,021 (1970), FR 2,236,135 (1973), US 4,071,265 (1975), US 4,395,060 (1981). None can be § 102(a)/(b) prior art, and none can be combined into a § 103 rejection against this patent. They are at most background evidence of the field's later development. Any analysis that cites them as 103 art would be legally wrong.

3. Roughly 17 of the ~24 "Similar Documents" also postdate the filing (US 2,315,792; US 2,294,160; US 2,301,280; US 2,430,657; US 2,318,112; US 2,696,395; US 2,350,017; US 2,829,673; US RE 22,713; US 2,531,401; US 3,438,658; US 2,298,117; GB 1,322,388; GB 1,488,687; US 2,831,711; US 2,523,716; GB 1,116,702). One edge case: US 2,279,238 ("Piston," publ. 1942-04-07) has a publication date after the filing date, so it could at most be § 102(e) art if its application predates May 1, 1940 — and its subject matter (pistons) is irrelevant here regardless.

That leaves seven pre-filing references actually usable from the page:

Additional pre-1940 art surfaced by my own search, not listed on the page (flagged as such):

• US 1,548,533 (Laderer, 1925-08-04) — conical packing ring compressed between a nipple and an internally coned screw cap; tightening forces the ring onto the pipe.
• US 1,694,822 (Kennedy, 1928-12-11) — bell 6 internally threaded at 7 with an inwardly tapering section 8; nut 19 threaded into the bell compresses lead rings 13, 15 against the taper to seal a plain pipe end.
• US 1,781,581 (Hellyer, 1930-11-11) — nut bearing (directly, or via a gland ring) on a packing ring; a fixing ring grips/bites into the pipe "so as to prevent longitudinal movement of the said pipe relatively to" the socket.
• US 2,192,565 (Sackely, assignor to Dresser Mfg. Co., filed Apr. 6, 1938) — "Threaded follower pipe joint or fitting"; packing recesses with inwardly tapered walls receiving packing rings with tapering outer surfaces to provide a wedging effect when the follower nuts are screwed up. Confidence flag: I verified the filing date and text; the OCR of the front page truncates the issue date ("Patented Mar…"), so I assert only that the number sequence places issuance in early 1940, i.e., shortly before this patent's filing. Do not rely on the exact date without the printed front page.
• A 1905 English judgment (Buckley J., reported at 23 R.P.C. 55), in the search results, with directly relevant findings of old art: "At the date of this Patent the idea of connecting plain conduits with screwed fittings by a device which should cause the plain conduit to be gripped under the action of a screw was old. At the same date stepped bushings were old," and that "presentation of the grip ring … on a conical surface, so as to increase the action of the grip, was old."
• US 1,638,269 (Mullinack, 1927) — "Emergency repair for pipes," already discussed in the earlier sections of this analysis; a lever-actuated clamp/gasket shell, not a sleeve-union. It is field evidence that "emergency repair of a leaking pipe in situ" was a recognized problem, not structural art for this claim.

B. Element-by-element claim chart (Claim 1 — the sole claim)

No single reference discloses all of A–G. In particular, none of the pre-1940 art shows element G in the claimed form (a separately adjustable collar with a set screw bearing on the nut's outer end), and none shows the full "tubular member threaded into the sleeve, plug abutting the sleeve end, elongated nut threaded into the tubular member" architecture in one document. So this is a § 103 case, not a § 102 case — the question is whether A–G as an ordered combination would have been obvious.

C. Combination 1 (strongest): Dresser '745 + Brenner '136, optionally + Hellyer '1581

Primary reference: US 2,021,745 supplies A, B (by telescoping), C, E, and F almost verbatim, including the dual-function follower nut — the very feature that is the apparent heart of the claim. Its express objects include "elimination of all connecting bolts for compressing the gaskets" and gasket wedging, and it expressly claims the anti-expulsion function ("prevent the pipe end from being blown or forced out of the fitting").

Secondary: US 1,858,136 (Brenner) supplies the metal-on-metal taper wedge (D): a tapered face driven against an inclined seat by tightening the nut, producing a seal "without the use of packing elements." The patent's own specification calls its taper interface a "ground joint," a classical metal-to-metal seat.

Motivation to combine (KSR rationales, all satisfied):

• Same field, same problem, same solution mechanism. Both are classified in the pipe-coupling art (this patent's own CPC is F16L19/075 — "radial clamping obtained by wedging action on non-deformed pipe ends" — and the examiner put this case in that art). Both address sealing a plain (unthreaded) pipe end by nut-driven compression.
• Known technique substitution. Replacing or supplementing a rubber gasket seat with a ground-joint taper is the substitution of one known sealing element (metal-to-metal conical seat) for another (resilient gasket), each performing its known function with predictable results. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398, 416 (2007).
• Design incentive to add redundancy. A field-repair union for a burst pipe must seal and resist blowout at line pressure. Dresser states that object explicitly, and the patent's own stated advantages (simple, cheap, easy to install) are the ordinary design goals, not evidence of nonobviousness.
• Finite, predictable solutions. The claim chart above shows the pre-1940 art had essentially exhausted the design space: nut-compresses-packing (Dresser, Haury, Laderer, Kennedy), taper-wedges-by-nut (Brenner, Kennedy, Laderer, and the Sackely '565 tapered-wall follower), and grip-to-prevent-axial-movement (Hellyer, Dresser). What remains is arrangement, and arrangement choices among a small set of known alternatives are obvious as a matter of law when the results are predictable.

Result: A–F would have been obvious over Dresser '745 in view of Brenner '136. Adding Hellyer '1581 (or the ordinary shaft-collar expedient) for G yields the whole claim.

D. Combination 2 (alternative): Haury '105 + Kennedy '822 + Hellyer '1581

• Haury '105 supplies the "pipe smaller than the sleeve telescoped into an enlarged bore" limitation (B) more cleanly than any other reference ("an appreciable clearance"), plus nut-into-body (F) and a compressed resilient sleeve (E).
• Kennedy '822 supplies the threaded body + inward taper 8 + nut 19 compressing soft-metal rings against the taper (C, D, E, F), expressly for "a water tight joint … between the ends of two pipe sections" of plain pipe.
• Hellyer '1581 supplies the axial-restraint element (G), with the express statement that its fixing ring prevents "longitudinal movement of the said pipe."

Motivation: all three are 1920s–30s pipe/tube joint patents directed to fluid-tight sealing of plain-end pipe; Haury and Kennedy each expressly discuss pressure sealing and flow continuity; Hellyer expressly addresses the pull-out problem. Combining a resilient-sleeve seal, a nut-driven taper seal, and a pipe-gripping ring is combining references that each solve a different sub-problem of the same unified problem, which is the paradigm case for obviousness.

E. Combination 3 (weakest; useful as a backstop): Kennedy '822 or Clarke '346 + Kennedy + set-screw collar as a design choice

If element G is construed narrowly (collar + set screw + abutting the nut's outer end), the fallback rationale is:

• Kennedy '822 discloses the complete "nut threaded into a threaded body end, compressing packing against an internal taper, sealing a plain pipe" assembly.
• Clarke '346 discloses the same architecture (gland 20 threaded into a threaded recess; lead sleeve 22 expanded against the pipe; compression ring to control slippage).
• The adjustable collar with a set screw is a routine, well-known mechanical element for fixing an axial abutment on a shaft or pipe. Using it to back up a nut and take reaction thrust is a design choice producing no unexpected result — the classic KSR "predictable variation" ground, reinforced by In re Kuhle and the "known work for its known purpose" line.

Both Kennedy and Clarke are pre-1940 and in the same class (pipe joints/fittings), so the field-of-invention overlap is satisfied.

F. Secondary considerations (Graham factors 2–4)

• No unexpected results are asserted. The specification recites only ordinary desiderata ("simple and practical," "efficient and reliable," "relatively inexpensive to manufacture," "easy to install"). Under KSR, broad statements of expected commercial convenience do not rebut obviousness; if anything they supply the motivation.
• No nexus evidence. No commercial-success, long-felt-need, failure-of-others, or licensing evidence appears anywhere on the page, and none is likely to be findable now (the patent expired February 10, 1959; the assignee of record is an individual, Sadie T. Mullen, with no corporate commercialization record visible).
• No teaching-away. Nothing in Dresser '745, Haury '105, Brenner '136, Kennedy '822, Clarke '346, or Hellyer '1581 criticizes the structure later claimed here. Dresser affirmatively endorses the tape-red-follower approach.
• Copying / industry-acceptance evidence is absent and, given the 1959 expiry, effectively unrecoverable.
• Non-analogous art is not a defense. All candidate references are pipe-joint/coupling art, squarely within the field of the inventor's endeavor.

G. Conclusion

Under a modern 35 U.S.C. § 103 / KSR standard, Claim 1 of US 2,272,222 would very likely be held obvious:

• Principal rejection: Claim 1 is obvious over US 2,021,745 (Dresser) in view of US 1,858,136 (Brenner), and further in view of US 1,781,581 (Hellyer) (or the ordinary skill-level knowledge of adjustable set-screw collars) as to element G.
• Alternative rejection: obvious over US 2,174,105 (Haury) in view of US 1,694,822 (Kennedy) and US 1,781,581 (Hellyer).
• Backstop: obvious over US 1,694,822 or US 1,665,346 in view of the routine design choice of an adjustable pipe collar.

Expected outcome if litigated today: invalid for obviousness. The dual-duty elongated nut, the plug abutting the sleeve end, and the collar-with-set-screw are each either expressly disclosed or a predictable mechanical expedient, and no reference teaches away. US 2,192,565 (Sackely/Dresser), if its early-1940 issue date is confirmed, would strengthen the rejection considerably by expressly claiming the "tapered-wall packing ring for wedging effect under follower-nut torque."

Caveats and confidence:

1. Historical standard differs. Under the pre-1952 "invention" standard actually applicable in 1940–41 (Hotchkiss; the then-current Cuno formulation), a court might well have sustained this claim. My "likely obvious" conclusion is a § 103/KSR conclusion, not a reconstruction of the 1941 examiner's reasoning, and it is expressly a retrospective, hindsight-risked judgment.
2. I verified full text for US 2,021,745, US 1,665,346, US 1,858,136, US 2,174,105 (via its own later continuation US 2,211,776), US 1,548,533, US 1,694,822, US 1,781,581, US 2,192,565, US 1,638,269. I did not verify the disclosures of US 1,359,142, US 1,802,499, or US 2,024,508 beyond title/date/number, so I have not relied on them for any element. Where I have assumed content from a title alone, I have said so.
3. Exact issue date of US 2,192,565 is unverified (OCR truncation); confirm against the printed front page before relying on it as § 102(b) art.
4. Do not import the post-1940 references. Any rejection built on the nine "Cited By" documents (US 2,523,919 et seq.) is legally defective as against this patent's May 1, 1940 filing date.
5. Claim-construction ambiguity in element G. The claim says the collar prevents "inward sliding movement of the pipe"; the specification says the collar prevents "sliding movement of the repair pipe on the pipe sections." If G is read broadly as any axial stop, the obviousness case is overwhelming; if read as requiring a set-screw collar bearing on the nut's outer end, the case rests on Combination 1 with Hellyer. My conclusion holds either way, but the margin is larger under the broad reading.
6. Because there is only one claim and no dependents, there is no narrower claim whose validity could survive if Claim 1 falls.