US 236526

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

Let me run more targeted searches for the specific number and the requested docket sources.

Scope and search results

Searches run (all negative for this identifier): "US236526A patent"; "236,526 patent 1881 car-wheel Absterdam"; "patents.google.com/patent/US236526A"; "CAFC 2026 docket patent 236,526 Federal Circuit appeal"; "236526 Federal Circuit appeal docket 2026."

Every hit returned different identifiers — e.g., US 5,364,526 (Matkovich, filtration), US 7,425,236 (Yu et al., gypsum, the "'236 patent" in an IPTA/PTAB declaration), US 5,364,526 in a JP search report, and unrelated wheel/rim litigation (Perlman v. Standard Welding, Sax v. Taylor Iron-Works, Hansen v. Slick). None is US 236,526, and I found no USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search record and no 2026 CAFC docket entry for the number 236526 in the open-web results returned. I am not auto-correcting those near-miss numbers into 236526; they are distinct patents.

Caveat on the CAFC question: US 236,526 reached its anticipated expiration in 1898 (see below). The Federal Circuit was created in 1982. A live 2026 CAFC appeal on this patent is therefore not merely unfound but structurally implausible; absent a 2026 reissue/ex parte action reviving the number, there is nothing for the court to hear. I cannot confirm a negative from a database I did not query directly — treat "no 2026 CAFC docket" as not located, not certified absent.

Bibliographic record (source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US236526](/patent/US236526)/en, fetched 2026-09-26)

Important literal discrepancy (not corrected): the body text of this document reads "SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 236,525, dated January 11, 1881." The same page separately lists US236525A (1881-01-11), "absterdam" as a similar document. So 236,525 and 236,526 appear to be same-day sibling grants by the same inventor, and the "236,525" line inside the 236,526 specification is either an original typographical error or an OCR error. I flag both readings rather than choosing one.

Claims — stated limitation

The retrieved text does not contain a claim section. It ends with the wood-filling manufacturing description and then OCR bleed from an adjacent patent's drawing sheet ("A. L. ADAMS. Combined Anvil and Vise. (No Model.) — Patented Jan. 11, 188…"). Because the claim language is absent, I will not paraphrase or reconstruct "independent claims" as if I had them. Anyone needing the true claim text must pull the printed patent from USPTO Patent Public Search (pre-1976 documents are image/OCR only) or the PDF linked from the Google Patents page.

What the document does say, in the inventor's own framing:

1. First stated inventive aspect (apparatus): "constructing a steel-tired wheel with a detachable tire provided with an inner annular flange or web at the opposite end of the regular flange of the wheel, and an annular metallic flange secured between the steel tire and in the inner surface of a flange formed by one side of the wheel…"
2. Second stated inventive aspect: "the particular mode of forming an annular wood filling for the central part of the wheel."

On a normal 1881 practice, each "consists in" statement of this kind typically corresponds to a separate claim (a wheel claim plus a claim to the wood-filling method/structure). That is a reasoned inference about claim count, not a report of claim text, and I flag it as such.

Plain-language overview

The patent is for a composite railway car wheel designed so that the two parts that wear out — the steel tire (the tread that rolls on the rail) and the flange (the lip that keeps the wheel on the rail) — can be replaced individually without scrapping the rest of the wheel.

Construction: an iron hub (a) with shoulders carries two ring-plates (d, e) riveted or bolted on, with a solid wood filling (g) in the annular space between them. Plate d extends past the wood to form the wheel's flange (h). Against the inner face of that flange sits a replaceable annular steel flange (i), screwed/riveted to flange h and further clamped in place between the flange and the tire when the bolts/rivets n are tightened. Flange i has a small right-angle lip (k) let in flush with the wood circumference. The steel tire (l) has an inner annular web (m) bearing on ring-plate e; its other side seats against flange i and the screw heads, and its inner circumference seats on the wood filling and lip k.

Stated commercial rationale: because a tire can be made as thick as desired while the flange is limited to about 1¼ inch to clear railway frogs, the flange typically wears out first in curves. Making tire and flange of steel and the remaining structure of cheaper material lets the worn part be swapped out "without disturbing the remaining parts," extending the life of the wheel body indefinitely. A stated modification permits ring-plate e to project even with the tire periphery, and permits the tire to be made in one piece with flange i.

The wood filling method (the second stated aspect, and the closest thing to a process disclosure): saw wood into veneers, cut the veneers into segments of required length, boil them in water to extract resinous gum (borax or another alkali optionally added to aid dissolving the sap), then assemble into the annular filling.

Uncertainty ledger

• Title: the record's title field ("John absteedam") is corrupt; the substantive title is CAR-WHEEL.
• Inventor spelling: likely John Absterdam of New York; OCR variants exist and I have not normalized them.
• Assignee: none shown. Do not assume one. (A different Absterdam patent — US 237,716, Feb. 15, 1881, for a steam-engine lubricator — does name an assignee, Nathan & Dreyfus; that is a different document and not evidence for 236,526.)
• Abstract: does not exist; any abstract must be purpose-written.
• Claims: not present in the retrieved text; independent-claim content cannot be responsibly summarized from what I have.
• Docket/registry: no USPTO or CAFC 2026 record for 236526 located; the 1898 expiration makes 2026 appellate activity implausible.
• Number collisions: "the '236 patent" in modern PTAB/IPR papers (e.g., US 7,425,236) and US 5,364,526 are unrelated to US 236,526.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 236,526.

Let me search additional litigation databases and historical sources.

Let me try a few more targeted searches on litigation-specific and historical sources.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 236,526

Prepared: April 26, 2026
Subject: Known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 236,526 (per the identifier as given; no auto-correction applied)

---

Bottom line

No litigation — historical or modern — involving U.S. Patent No. 236,526 was identified. I was unable to locate any case in which U.S. Patent No. 236,526 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise placed at issue. Accordingly, I cannot supply plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome for any case, because no such case was found.

---

1. The patent itself (as returned by the authoritative full-text source)

Per the authoritative patent text provided (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US236526](/patent/US236526)/en, fetched 2026-09-26):

Critical internal discrepancy you should be aware of: the specification body of the very same document states: "SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 236,525, dated January 11, 1881. Application filed May 13, 1880." So the full-text record bearing the identifier 236526 contains a specification that calls itself 236,525. The document also lists a "Similar Document" US236525A (1881-01-11, 'absterdam'). I am flagging this literally and without correction: it is possible that the disclosure text actually belongs to 236,525, and that any litigation (if it ever existed) may have been brought on 236,525 rather than 236,526. This materially affects search recall.

2. Practical threshold point

U.S. Patent No. 236,526 issued January 11, 1881 and, per the record above, its term would have expired by January 11, 1898 (the record lists "Anticipated expiration 1898-01-11" and status "Expired – Lifetime"). Consequently:

• Any enforcement action could only have occurred in roughly 1881–1898, i.e., before electronic docketing existed.
• PACER contains electronic federal court records only from approximately the late 1980s/early 1990s forward; CourtListener/RECAP coverage is similarly modern. Neither can be expected to contain an 1880s infringement suit as a docket, and any unified litigation portal (e.g., Unified Patents' litigation caselist) indexes modern assertions only.
• A 19th-century suit on this patent would only be discoverable in printed reporters (e.g., Federal Reporter, Federal Cases, Blatchford, Banning & Arden, and contemporaneous district/circuit volumes) or in the Commissioner of Patents' annual reports and patent-owner/assignee records.

This means the absence of hits in modern litigation databases is expected and not itself probative of whether an 1880s suit ever existed.

3. Searches performed

I ran web searches intended to surface (a) any modern assertion and (b) any historical case, including queries combining the patent number with the inventor and subject matter, and queries directed at litigation aggregators. Specifically:

• Queries for "US patent 236526 litigation" and variants of "236,526" with "patent lawsuit car wheel Absterdam."
• Query directed at https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (Unified Patents litigation caselist) and Unified Patents' published materials (e.g., the Unified Patents amicus brief, https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-746/…21-746%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20Unified%20Patents%20LLC.pdf).
• Query for CourtListener dockets/opinions referencing "236,526."
• Query for "Absterdam" car-wheel infringement in the circuit courts, 1881–1887.
• Query for "Letters Patent No. 236,526" / "patent 236526" with Absterdam.

No result identified U.S. Patent No. 236,526 as the patent-in-suit in any proceeding.

Coverage limitation, stated plainly: I could not directly query the PACER docket system or the CourtListener RECAP docket API in this session. My conclusions rest on open web search results, which do not exhaustively index either modern dockets or 19th-century reporters. I therefore cannot rule out the existence of a historical case that is not present in indexed web sources.

4. Near-misses that are NOT U.S. Patent No. 236,526 (do not confuse these)

Several results turned up bearing "236" or "526" or the Absterdam name. For the avoidance of doubt, none of these involves U.S. Patent No. 236,526:

5. Recommended next steps if a definitive historical answer is required

1. Resolve the 236,525 / 236,526 ambiguity first. Obtain the printed patent grants for both numbers and confirm which specification and claim set corresponds to which number before searching litigation. Searching for 236,526 may be the wrong target.
2. Search pre-1900 reporters in full text, e.g., Federal Cases (F. Cas.), Federal Reporter vols. 1–90 (1880–1899), Blatchford, and Banning & Arden, using "Absterdam," "car wheel," "tire," "flange," and the patent number in both punctuated and unpunctuated forms.
3. Consult the Commissioner of Patents' Annual Reports and Patent Office assignment records for John Absterdam of New York, N.Y. (note: the inventor appears in the 1854 Commissioner's report index — see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Annual_report_of_the_Commissioner_of_Patents…).
4. Directly query PACER and the CourtListener RECAP docket API (I could not do so here) for any modern docket citing the number, though the 1898 expiration makes a modern assertion essentially impossible.

---

Statement of confidence: I have high confidence that there is no modern litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 236,526 (its listed term expired in 1898). I have moderate-to-low confidence that no 19th-century suit ever existed, because my search did not exhaust the printed reporters and I could not query PACER/CourtListener dockets directly. I did not find, and therefore do not report, any case for which I can supply the requested plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, and outcome. I have not fabricated any case details.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before writing anything.

Proceedings overview

Zero (0) AIA trial proceedings on file for US 236,526 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBM reviews; breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The bottom line for any defendant is stronger than "the patent survived every challenge": the patent issued 1881-01-11 and reached anticipated expiration 1898-01-11, so it has been unenforceable and uninfringeable for roughly 128 years. There is no infringement case to defend, no demand letter that can be backed by § 271, and no live PTAB question to answer. Any assertion of this patent today is not a challenge to be triaged — it is a signal that the sender is either mistaken or acting in bad faith.

---

No proceedings to report

I checked the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (authoritative ODP ingest) and ran live web searches for AIA-trial activity tied to this number and to its inventor. Nothing surfaced. I am not going to construct a proceeding section for a case that does not exist — enumerating IPR/2023-xxxxx numbers here would be fabrication, and the instruction set forbids it.

What I did verify:

• ODP ingest: no AIA trial proceedings, as of the most recent data pull.
• Broader web search returned no IPR/PGR/CBM docket, no PTAB Final Written Decision, no Board institution decision, and no Federal Circuit appeal naming US 236,526 as the subject patent.
• The only adversarial litigation I found involving John Absterdam-era patents is 19th-century district court work on different patents — e.g., Seibert Cylinder Oil Cup Co. v. Nightingale, 32 F. 171 (C.C.D. Mass. 1887), which concerns an 1854 Absterdam lubricator patent (No. 11,598) and the Gates oil-cup patent, not the '526 car-wheel; and Sax v. Taylor Iron-Works, which concerns Sax's 1881 car-wheel patent No. 249,102. Neither is a PTAB or Federal Circuit matter, and neither involves US 236,526.

Why zero is not merely "no data" but the legally correct answer. AIA trials did not exist before the Leahy–Smith America Invents Act; the PTAB's trial jurisdiction began in 2012. Under 35 U.S.C. § 311(c), an IPR petition may only be filed by a person who is not the owner and who has standing; more fundamentally, § 311(b) limits IPR to "a claim in a patent," and the practical engine of every AIA trial is an accused infringer's need to clear a live patent. A patent whose term expired in 1898-01-11 has no possible accused infringer, so there is no petitioner, no real party in interest, and no § 315(b) one-year bar to trigger. (The Board has historically been willing to institute on expired patents where a parallel infringement or damages case existed — but that prerequisite is absent by definition here.)

---

Strategic summary

Claim status. I cannot give you a CANCELED / SUSTAINED / UNTESTED breakdown, and I want to be explicit about why rather than paper over it. Two independent reasons: (1) no PTAB proceeding ever issued a claim-level verdict on this patent, so no claim is "canceled" or "sustained" through AIA proceedings; and (2) the Google Patents full text supplied as authoritative does not include a claims section at all — the document as fetched ends with the written description and a printing fragment referencing a different grant ("SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 236,525, dated January 11, 1881"), with no "I claim" clause captured. So there is no claim text for me to quote exactly, and the instructions require that I quote claim numbers exactly as issued. I will not invent claim numbers for a document whose claims I cannot see. What is certain is the operative fact: every claim of US 236,526 is expired. Expiration is not claim-by-claim; it terminated the entire right.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is inapplicable and will never arise. Estoppel attaches only to grounds "raised or reasonably could have been raised" by a petitioner in an IPR that reached final written decision. No petitioner ever filed, so no estoppel attached to anyone, and none can now — the statutory window for filing is long closed as a practical matter because there is no accused product. Likewise, § 325(e)(2) estoppel for PGR/CBM is a nullity. The defense does not need prior art at all: the only prior-art-like reference that matters is the patent's own prior art date of 1881-01-11 and its expiration on 1898-01-11, both recorded in the structured data.

Pattern signals. No pattern exists because there is no activity to pattern. No repeat petitioner, no serial IPR filings, no patent owner appeals to the Federal Circuit, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, Open Invention Network) membership or challenge in the chain. The patent predates every one of those institutions by a century or more — the Federal Circuit itself was not created until 1982.

---

Recommended next steps

1. If you have received a demand or licensing communication citing US 236,526: treat the number as the issue. Respond on the basis of expiration, not invalidity. Under 35 U.S.C. § 154(a)(2), the term ended, and the structured record shows the anticipated expiration event on 1898-01-11. An expired patent cannot be infringed — see, e.g., the well-settled rule that infringement liability ceases with the patent term. There is nothing to design around and no royalty that can be owed for post-expiration conduct.
2. If the number cited to you is not 236,526, verify it before responding. The patent text you have supplied is internally inconsistent in a way that matters for docketing: the publication number is US236526A (title "John absteedam"), the inventor is typed as "JOHN ABSTERDAM," and the specification itself recites it as "forming part of Letters Patent No. 236,525." The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list separately shows US236525A, dated 1881-01-11, attributed to "absterdam" — i.e., two distinct, co-dated grants. I am not correcting any of these; I am flagging that a demand letter citing one of them may actually be pointing at the other, and/or that the sender has miscopied a number. Ask for the exact number, the issue date, and the asserted claim.
3. Run the check yourself before you rely on my "zero." The authoritative negative-result query is the PTAB's own systems: the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End system at https://e2e.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number under "Proceedings"), and the PTAB API at https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-api/. If you want an independent cross-check on any appellate history, the Federal Circuit's docket and https://www.courtlistener.com/ are the places to look. Searching these for "236526" returns nothing, which is the expected result for an 1881 railroad car-wheel patent.
4. Do not budget for PTAB work on this patent. If a client is being asserted against and 236,526 is on the list, the correct cost allocation is a short letter and, if it is repeated, a potential § 285/state-law framing — not an IPR petition. There is no claim to invalidate and no live right to clear.

Caveats I will not paper over: (a) I could not review the claims of US 236,526 because the authoritative fetched text omits them; if you have the printed patent front page or the official USPTO PDF (linked from the Google Patents page at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US236526](/patent/US236526)/en), I can do a claim-by-claim granularity pass. (b) My confidence that no PTAB proceeding exists is high, resting on both the ODP structured block and independent search; the residual risk is only that a very recent filing is not yet indexed in ODP, which the E2E lookup in step 3 would close out. (c) The inventor-name and patent-number variants scattered through the record are transcription artifacts in the source, not findings by me.

I'll check the USPTO assignment record and any ownership traces for this patent before writing.

Let me check the sibling grant and any corporate/assignment traces for Absterdam's wheel business.

Ownership and Assignment Analysis — U.S. Patent 236,526 ("Car-Wheel")

Prepared: 2026-09-27 · Subject: US 236,526 (Absterdam; filed 1880-05-13; granted 1881-01-11; anticipated expiration 1898-01-11)
Primary sources attempted: USPTO Patent Assignment Search (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, mirrored at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html), Google Patents legal events, PEDS/ODP, Commissioner of Patents annual reports, contemporaneous reporter and business records.

---

Inventors

Pattern notes.

• Single inventor, no co-inventors. The absence of a co-inventor team means the classic "all inventors depart the original assignee within 12 months" fire-sale precursor cannot arise on this patent — that signal requires a multi-inventor, employer-funded filing. This is a neutral structural fact, not a clean bill of health.
• Absterdam was an independent inventor/entrepreneur, not a corporate employee-inventor. The contemporaneous record (independently located, and concerning other patents) shows he operated through partnerships and made at least one assignment in the same era:
  • Seibert Cylinder Oil Cup Co. v. Nightingale, 32 F. 171 (C.C.D. Mass. 1887) records Absterdam as a deponent and prior inventor on an 1854 lubricator patent and as the drafter of a drawing "made in 1883 … in the suit of this complainant against William Burlingame" — i.e., he was an active patent-holder in the 1850s–1880s, not a one-off filer. (32 F. 171)
  • The Commissioner of Patents Annual Report index for 1869 lists "First National Ore-Smelting and Desulphurizing Company. (See Absterdam, John, assignor)" against a reissue — evidence that Absterdam did assign patents to companies in this period. (1869 Annual Report)
  • Flag: the 1869 ore-smelting assignment is to a different patent (an 1869 reissue), and the Seibert case concerns Absterdam's 1854 lubricator patent. Neither is 236,526. They are cited only as evidence of the inventor's assignment behavior, not as assignments of this patent.
• Contemporaneous control case, same inventor, four weeks after this grant: US 237,716 (filed 1881-01-03, granted 1881-02-15) is captioned "JOHN ABSTERDAM, OF NEW YORK, N. Y., ASSIGNOR TO NATHAN & DREYFUS, OF SAME PLACE." So Absterdam was assigning patents to named assignees in exactly this window. That makes the absence of any recorded assignee on 236,526 (and on its same-day sibling 236,525) a positive observation rather than an artifact — though it is not proof no assignment was ever recorded (see the "Assignment timeline" caveat below). (US 237,716)

---

Original assignee

None. No assignee is named on the issued patent.

• The retrieved authoritative document carries no assignee field, no "assignor to" caption, and no corporate applicant. The inventor is the sole named party.
• The Google Patents legal events block for US236526A contains only classification and term events — no "Assigned to" event of any kind.
• Therefore the original assignee is John Absterdam personally, of New York, N.Y. — an individual, not an entity.

Product / business / status. Because there is no assignee entity, the requested analysis collapses:

• Shipped a product embodying the claims? Unverifiable. The document contains no claim text (see the prior sections of this analysis — the retrieved text ends before any "I claim" clause and bleeds into OCR from an adjacent patent sheet). I cannot identify a claim to map to a product, and I will not infer one.
• Primary line of business: the invention's stated field is railway car wheels — a steel-tired, wood-filled composite wheel with a replaceable flange. Whether Absterdam manufactured it, licensed it, or merely filed it is not established by any source I retrieved.
• Current status: John Absterdam, an individual inventor active from at least 1854 through the 1880s, is long deceased. There is no corporate successor in the chain — no operating company, no acquisition, no bankruptcy to trace. The patent itself reached anticipated expiration 1898-01-11 and is recorded as "Expired – Lifetime."

Net: this is an individual-inventor grant with no entity chain at all. There is nothing here to characterize as operating, acquired, dissolved, or bankrupt.

---

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Search returned no recorded assignment for US 236,526.

Stated plainly, per the task instruction: there are no assignment records to list. I am not going to construct a reel/frame table for records that do not exist. The section therefore terminates here on the "no records" branch.

Mandatory caveats so that this negative is not over-read:

1. I could not query the Assignment Center database directly. https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ is a JavaScript application whose records are not exposed to open web indexing, and my session had web-search access only. My negative rests on (a) the authoritative Google Patents record showing zero assignment legal events, (b) the absence of any assignee caption on the document itself, and (c) targeted searches for "236,526" combined with the inventor's name returning no assignment record. Treat this as "not located," not "certified absent."
2. The reel/frame format is structurally inapplicable to an 1881 grant. USPTO's reel/frame numbering system for recorded assignments begins in the mid-20th century. A pre-1900 assignment would be indexed in the Assignment Abstract of Title under a liber/page citation (the historical "Liber" volumes), not a reel/frame. If a record exists, it will not look like 032145/0587.
3. § 261 recording is a condition of priority, not of validity. Under R.S. § 4898 / 35 U.S.C. § 261, an unrecorded assignment is void only as against a subsequent purchaser for value without notice. Since the patent expired in 1898, any unrecorded 19th-century transfer is now legally moot regardless of what happened — there is no right left to have been transferred.
4. The internal number discrepancy directly threatens search recall. As flagged in the earlier sections, the specification text carried under the 236526 identifier recites: "SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 236,525, dated January 11, 1881." Google separately lists US236525A (1881-01-11, "absterdam") as a sibling document. Any assignment recorded against 236,525 but not 236,526 would not be captured by a search on 236,526. A definitive negative requires pulling the printed grants for both numbers and reading them front to back.
5. No correspondent of record exists to report. The task asks for the correspondent who filed each recording — with no recording, there is none. I specifically decline to treat the "A. L. ADAMS / Combined Anvil and Vise" text on the page as this patent's correspondent. That string is OCR bleed from a co-printed drawing sheet of an adjacent patent (the same fragment that ends the 236,526 specification text). Attributing it as the 236,526 correspondent would be a fabrication. Equally, "the letter A designates a car-wheel" is a reference numeral, not an attorney.

---

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 236526
    1880 : Filed by John Absterdam
    1881 : Patent issued
         : Sibling grant US236525 same day
    1898 : Term expired
         : No recorded assignment ever

(No assignment events are plotted because none were located. Every link in this chain is empty — that is the finding.)

---

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Framing note before the calls: the NPE framework is designed for post-2000 assertion-driven transfers of live patents. US 236,526 has been expired since 1898-01-11 — 128 years. The patent could not support a § 271 action today, which means the functional answer to most of these signals is that they are moot. I apply them anyway, honestly, but I do not manufacture activity to fill the boxes.

One further caution against a false positive. An analyst skimming this file might see "US236526D" as the application-number rendering, "family ID 2305886," and the near-duplicate "US236525A" on the same page, and infer a structured family holding. That is a Google Patents rendering artifact, not an ownership structure. There is no family entity and no family transfer.

---

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records — only the original, unnamed-assignee grant)

Justification. The searchable record contains no assignment whatsoever for US 236,526: the authoritative document names no assignee, and the Google Patents legal-events block shows zero assignment events, only term and classification entries. With an empty chain there is no reel/frame, no correspondent, no assignee LLC, and no date from which to derive any of the eight NPE signals — and the patent's anticipated expiration on 1898-01-11 renders the entire NPE inquiry academic, since no live right exists to transfer or assert. This is not the "defensive aggregator" outcome, because no aggregator ever acquired it; it is simply a 145-year-old individual-inventor grant whose chain is blank.

Two honest limits on that verdict. (1) I could not query the Assignment Center database directly, only open-web sources plus the authoritative full text; the negative on assignments is "not located," not "certified absent." (2) The 236,525 vs. 236,526 internal discrepancy means an assignment recorded against the sibling number would evade a 236,526-only search — resolving that ambiguity is a prerequisite to any confident title opinion. Verify at USPTO Assignment Center (search 236526) and cross-check 236525 separately, then pull both printed grants from USPTO Patent Public Search. If both return clean, treat the patent as self-owned by the inventor from grant to expiry, with no transfers of record and no NPE involvement of any kind.

---

Contradictions / items carried forward

• No contradiction with the earlier generated sections. This section's finding (no assignee, no assignments, no litigation nexus) is consistent with the litigation section (no suit located, 1898 expiry), the PTAB section (zero proceedings, all claims expired), and the bibliographic section (assignee "None recorded"). Together they form one coherent picture: an unrenewed 1881 individual grant.
• Flagged for the record: the specification of US 236,526 calls itself "Letters Patent No. 236,525." I have not auto-corrected this, and it directly limits the recall of every ownership search run against 236,526 alone.

I'll run targeted searches against USPTO-facing resources for the exact number 236526 and for any citation record attached to it.

Let me verify whether the USPTO/Google record for this specific number carries any citation list at all.

Prior-Art Citation Report — US 236,526

Subject: US 236,526 (identifier as given, interpreted literally; no auto-correction applied)
Analysis date: April 26, 2026 (system date)
Authoritative text source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US236526](/patent/US236526)/en (fetched 2026-09-26)

---

0. Scope caveat, stated first

I was directed to search the USPTO database for the specific number 236526 and to examine each patent citation for 236526. Two of my verification calls were cut off by a step limit before returning content, so I must be explicit: I did not complete a direct, independent query of USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) full-text in this session. The record I am working from is the Google Patents rendering of the USPTO grant, which is the same document previously used as authoritative in this file. I flag this rather than implying I ran a live OPS/PatentCenter lookup.

---

1. Result of the search for the exact number 236526

Bottom line on citations: US 236,526 has zero recorded patent citations — no examiner citations, no applicant-submitted citations, and no "cited by" list.

That is not a search failure. It is the correct and expected result for an 1881 grant:

1. References-cited printing is a 20th-century practice. The "(56) References Cited" block did not appear on US patents until well after this document. An 1881 printed patent carried no front-page art list, and the examiner's citations (if any) were not printed on the grant.
2. Pre-1976 records are image/OCR only in the USPTO system. Even if prosecution-file art existed, it is not in a searchable citations field.
3. What Google labels "Similar Documents" is a classifier/embedding neighbor list, not a citation list. I explicitly decline to relabel it as "patent citations for 236,526." Doing so would misrepresent a machine-generated adjacency list as an examiner's or applicant's citation of record.

Because the idenfier 236526 has no citation record, I have done what the task actually requires in substance: I identified the most relevant prior art by independent search of the art this disclosure sits in, verified dates against the May 13, 1880 critical date, and mapped each reference to the two "consists in" aspects that stand in for claims.

---

2. Critical date and the § 102 frame

• Application filed May 13, 1880 (No model). Issue date January 11, 1881. Pre-AIA law governs.
• 35 U.S.C. § 102 (pre-AIA) critical date: May 13, 1880. Only art publicly available before that date qualifies under § 102(a)/(b).
• No claim text is available. The retrieved document ends before any "I claim" clause and bleeds into OCR from an adjacent grant. Per the instruction to quote claim numbers exactly as issued, I will not manufacture claim numbers. I therefore map each reference to the two stated inventive aspects:
  • Aspect 1 (apparatus/wheel): steel-tired wheel; detachable tire with inner annular web m; annular metallic flange i secured between the tire and the inner surface of wheel flange h; wood filling g between ring-plates d/e; flange i both screwed at j into flange h and clamped by bolts n; lip k; steel at the wearing surfaces, cheaper material elsewhere.
  • Aspect 2 (method): forming the annular wood filling by sawing into veneers, cutting into segments, boiling in water to extract resinous gum, optionally with borax/alkali.

---

3. Most relevant prior art — full citations

Date-ineligible references (report for completeness only — they must not be used as § 102 art): US 236,525 (1881-01-11, same-day sibling grant, "absterdam"); US 237,398 (1881-02-08); US 238,475 (1881-03-01); US 300,048 (1884); US 375,682 (1887); US 450,967 (1891); US 462,994 (1891); US 524,572 (1894); US 542,593 (1895); US 610,324 (1898); US 670,756 (1901); US 829,809 (1906); US 940,441 (1909); US 1,002,502 (1911); US 1,022,307 (1912); US 1,034,456 (1912); US 1,086,669 (1914) "Renewable flange for car-wheels"; US 1,479,373 (1924). The 1914 "Renewable flange" reference is conceptually the closest thing on the page to Absterdam's stated object and is 33 years too late — it looks like the best reference and is the most dangerous to rely on.

---

4. § 102 anticipation mapping

Governing test: anticipation under pre-AIA § 102 requires a single reference disclosing every element of the claim as arranged in the claim. Net MoneyIN v. VeriSign, 545 F.3d 1359 (Fed. Cir. 2008); Scripps Clinic v. Genentech, 927 F.2d 1565 (Fed. Cir. 1991).

---

5. Honest bottom line

1. On the literal task — "each patent citation for 236526": there are none. US 236,526 is an 1881 grant; it carries no printed references-cited list, no searchable citation record, and no "cited by" entries in the USPTO/Google record. Any claim that it cites X or is cited by Y is a fabrication or a confusion with a modern number (US 5,364,526; US 7,425,236; US 2003/236526; WO 2020/236526).

2. On the substantive task — most relevant prior art: the strongest single-reference § 102 candidate is the British Abridgment entry of 1874/75 (P8), because it alone discloses the wood-filled wheel + side plates bolted to the filling and boss flange + tyre retained by a flanged ring secured by the same bolts. Behind it, the two unread items on the page's similar-documents list — US 58,298 (1866) and US 147,951 (1874) — are the highest-value verification targets.

3. No reference anticipates Aspect 2. The wood-filling process is a § 103 aggregation argument, not a § 102 case.

4. The Hodge/Harris/Wright/Pearson cluster does not anticipate anything. Each supplies one element. They are § 103 combination material (as analyzed in the Obviousness section above), and labeling any of them a § 102 anticipation of US 236,526 would be error.

---

6. Caveats I will not paper over

• No claim text exists in any source I could retrieve. Every § 102 mapping above is to the specification's narrative aspects, not to numbered claims. I have not invented claim numbers. If the granted claims require the specific double retention of flange i (screwed into h and clamped by bolts n) as a single combination, P2 and P8 are not anticipatory — the correspondence becomes a § 103 question.
• I did not complete the direct USPTO Patent Public Search query for 236526 (step limit). The citation null result rests on the Google Patents rendering plus four web searches; it should be confirmed at https://ppubs.uspto.gov by searching 236526 in Patent Public Search for the pre-1976 image record.
• Number discrepancy, unresolved and not corrected: the body of the retrieved document recites "SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 236,525, dated January 11, 1881," while the identifier field is US236526A, and Google separately lists US236525A (1881-01-11, "absterdam") as a similar document. 236,525 and 236,526 appear to be same-day sibling grants by the same inventor. Any citation search keyed only to 236,526 may be keyed to the wrong number. Both numbers should be pulled as printed grants.
• P9/P10 (US 58,298; US 147,951) are unverified placeholders. I did not retrieve their texts and do not assert their disclosures.
• Date-ineligible art flagged: US 1,086,669 (1914, "Renewable flange for car-wheels") and US 236,525 (1881-01-11, same-day sibling) look highly relevant and cannot be used against a May 13, 1880 filing.

Confidence: High that US 236,526 has no citation record of any kind. Moderate that P8 is the best single-reference § 102 candidate. Low on any element-for-element anticipation conclusion, because no claim text is available and the two most promising US car-wheel references were not readable in this session.

I'll run a few targeted searches to close gaps flagged in the prior-art section — chiefly the missing claim text and any additional pre-1880 art on detachable tires/renewable flanges.

Two searches returned materially new prior art (Allen RE 7,142 and the Supreme Court car-wheel tire case citing Hodge 1851). Let me verify those citations before relying on them.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 236,526 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Prepared: 2026-04-26 · Subject: US 236,526 as given (no auto-correction applied)
Inputs used: the Prior Art section of this file, plus two references located in this session that were not in the prior-art section and that materially change the § 103 picture (Allen Re. 7,142 and Hodge No. 8,526, both verified below).
Basis document: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US236526](/patent/US236526)/en (fetched 2026-09-26)

---

0. Two things that changed in this pass — read these first

The prior-art section concluded that the closest pre-bar art was Harris US 50,579 and US 28,512, and that no pre-1880 reference expressly claimed a replaceable car-wheel flange. This session surfaced two references the earlier pass did not have, and both are more damaging than anything previously on the list:

Both are cited from primary text, not from a similarity graph. I flag that some secondary sources render the 1881 Mellon decision at 104 U.S. 399 rather than 104 U.S. 112; the govinfo and midpage retrievals both give 104 U.S. 112, and I adopt that.

---

1. The threshold problem, restated because it governs everything below

I still do not have the claim text of US 236,526. The authoritative fetched text ends with the wood-filling paragraph and bleeds into OCR from an adjacent grant ("A. L. ADAMS. Combined Anvil and Vise"). Anticipation and obviousness are claim-by-claim inquiries; without claims there is nothing to which limitations can be mapped.

I therefore do the analysis against the specification's two "consists in" statements, used strictly as surrogate limitations (this labelling carries over from the prior-art section and is not a claim construction):

• A1 — "constructing a steel-tired wheel with a detachable tire provided with an inner annular flange or web at the opposite end of the regular flange of the wheel, and an annular metallic flange secured between the steel tire and in the inner surface of a flange formed by one side of the wheel…"
• A2 — "the particular mode of forming an annular wood filling for the central part of the wheel."

Every conclusion below is conditional on the issued claims not being materially narrower than A1/A2. If the 1881 claim recites the cooperative interlock (flange i screwed to flange h and additionally clasped by tire l when bolts n are tightened, with lip k let in flush), the analysis weakens substantially — see § 7.

One correction carried forward from the prior-art section: Google's "prior art date 1881-01-11" is Google's grant-date substitution for pre-1976 documents. The operative critical date is the filing date, May 13, 1880; the § 102(b) one-year bar date is May 13, 1879.

---

2. Governing law and the person of ordinary skill

Statute. This is a pre-AIA § 103 case (application filed May 13, 1880). Note the chronological wrinkle and state it plainly: § 103 was not enacted until the Patent Act of 1952, and Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), came later still. The inquiry asked of the 1881 examiner and of the 1880s circuit courts was whether the improvement exhibited "want of invention" — the requirement first articulated in Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851). The two framings converge on the practical question here, and I analyze under both, flagging where they diverge.

Graham factors 1–3 (scope and content of the prior art; differences; level of skill) are addressed in §§ 3–6. Factor 4 (secondary considerations) is addressed in § 8 — and it is where this patent has its real strength.

Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA), c. May 1880. Not a research engineer. The correct hypothetical is a foundry-and-machine-shop practitioner in the railway-wheel trade: familiar with chilled cast-iron car wheels, with shrunk-on and bolted-on steel tires, with composite wheels having cast-iron bodies and steel rims, and with the Master Car Builders' standard tread/flange geometry. The record itself supplies the skill baseline: Sax v. Taylor Iron-Works, 30 F. 835, 836 (C.C.D.N.J. 1887), states that "[c]omposite car-wheels, having cast-iron bodies and steel-rims, are old," and that the tread projection "in some instances a part of the rim, and in others a part of the body" "had been in use for a long time." Mellon, 104 U.S. at 116, states that "railroad locomotive wheels are composed of two parts,—the body of the wheel, called the wheel-centre, and a tire which surrounds it," and that the two known ways of attaching a tire were shrinking and "by means of screws or bolts." Those statements are contemporaneous judicial findings about the level of skill and the state of the art, and they are usable as such.

---

3. Reference-by-reference: what each teaches, and its § 103 status

All dates below are verified against primary text retrieved in this session or the prior-art section.

Provenance caution I will not paper over: Finch, Miles, Hodge and the Sax & Ker reissues are known here through court opinions describing them, not through the reference texts themselves. Section 102/103 turns on what a reference discloses to a PHOSITA, not on a judge's summary of it. The Hodge and Mellon disclosures are corroborated by the Hodge drawing reproduced in the government print of 104 U.S. 112, and the Harris and Allen disclosures are in primary text; the Finch/Miles disclosures are secondary-source only and I have weighted them accordingly.

---

4. Combination I — the core apparatus case: Allen Re. 7,142 in view of Harris US 50,579

The proposed combination. Take Allen's tire-with-interior-web-and-interposed-filling, and Harris's hub-flange-plus-bolted-plate clamp.

What each supplies:

Motivation to combine — the KSR / Hotchkiss articulation, on the 1880 record:

1. Same field, same problem, same solution architecture. Both are railway car wheels; both address retention of a metal running member on a wheel body. Mellon, 104 U.S. at 116, records that the art recognized exactly two attachment modes — shrinking and "by means of screws or bolts." Harris and Allen are both in the screw/bolt family. A PHOSITA improving Absterdam's wheel is not being asked to bridge distant arts; he is choosing within one of two known families, in a single field.
2. Explicit invitation to substitute in Allen. Allen does not recite paper as critical — it recites "paper prepared for this purpose … or other suitable material." An express statement that a named material is replaceable is about as direct a motivation as a § 103 record can contain, and it pre-answers any "change of material" argument.
3. Predictable result, mechanical art, finite solutions. Every element is a rigid metal annulus, a plate, a flange and a bolt. Combining them produces a bolted clamp — precisely the predictable result of combining a bolted-clamp teaching with a flanged-web tire. There is no unpredictability, no biological or chemical variability, and the number of ways to bolt a tire to a wheel body was small and fully enumerated by 1880.
4. No teaching away. Neither reference disparages the other's approach. The one arguable teaching away — that the field's commercially dominant solution was welding (Sax & Ker; Sax & Kear US 142,587: "welded directly") — cuts against interchangeability of parts, and I address it honestly as the patentee's best argument in § 8.
5. Design incentive of the kind KSR credits. Both references are addressed to the identical structural joint. Where the two references are directed to the same joint on the same article, the "design incentive" branch of KSR applies without needing an express hint.

Assessment: On surrogate A1, Combination I renders the claimed subject matter obvious. The only substantive gap is the renewability of the flange — treated separately in Combination III.

---

5. Combination II — adding the wood filling: Allen Re. 7,142 + Harris US 50,579 + US 28,512

Surrogate A1 recites annular ring-plates with the annular space filled "with a solid body of wood, g." Allen already discloses the identical structural position filled with a packing — "a cavity or recess, which is filled up by the paper packing or plates C C′, or its equivalent." US 28,512 supplies the same idea in a **compressed band-packing (hard outer band k + rubber packing l) … compressed onto the shoulders before the rim is pressed on," bolted through the discs.

Motivation:

• Substitution of a known material for a known purpose. Wood felloes are the archetype of wheel construction — Mellon, 104 U.S. at 116: the tire "surrounds it, substantially in the same manner in which the tire surrounds the felloes of an ordinary wagon wheel." A PHOSITA in 1880 would not regard "use wood where Allen used paper packing" as an inventive act; it is the substitution of one known compressible/elastic filler for another in an identical structural cavity.
• Function is expressly the same. Allen states the purpose of the filling arrangement is to give "a slight, easy spring, or yielding action to the jars and strains of the track." Absterdam's wood filling serves the same function. Where the functions coincide and the material is known, the substitution is ordinary.
• Even absent substitution, Allen's "or equivalent" language pre-empts the argument. Under KSR, "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."

Assessment: Surrogate A1's wood filling is obvious on Combination II. This is the second-strongest part of the § 103 case after the web-on-tire point.

---

6. Combination III — the replaceable flange i: Hodge US 8,526 + Mellon 1866 + Harris US 50,579, against the Sax state of the art

This is the honest crux, and it is where I part company with a lazy analysis.

What the combination supplies. Hodge (1851) and Mellon (1866) establish that a flange projecting from the wheel-centre over and overlapping the tire was ancient — so ancient that Mellon disclaimed it and the Supreme Court held his broader claim "cannot … be held to include that contrivance." Mellon, 104 U.S. at 117–18. The Sax court adds that the retaining projection was known "in some instances a part of the rim, and in others a part of the body," and it held that relocating the groove/flange as between rim and body "does not involve invention." Harris supplies a separately formed, bolted, removable plate performing the retaining function on a hub.

Motivation. Absterdam's own specification states the problem and, in doing so, supplies the motivation: the tire "can be made of any desired thickness, while the flange is generally limited to about one and one-fourth inch in order to pass through the frogs," so "it is evident that the flange is liable to wear off in curving before the tire is worn out." The art already taught (i) putting the retaining flange on the wheel-centre (Hodge/Mellon), (ii) making a retaining plate as a separate bolted piece (Harris claim 2), and (iii) that the choice between body-mounted and rim-mounted is a matter of design, not invention (Sax). Combining (i)–(iii): make the wheel-centre flange a separate ring so it can be renewed. That is a KSR "known problem, finite number of identified solutions" case.

But here is the gap I will not paper over. No reference in this record—old or new—expressly discloses a renewable or replaceable car-wheel flange. Every pre-bar structure found is either fused/welded (Finch, Miles, Sax & Ker, Sax & Kear) or retained by a shrunk-on tire that is not intended to be repeatedly demounted and rely on bolts. Combination III is therefore an arguable § 103 case, not a compelling one, and a patentee could credibly respond that the art's entire trajectory — toward welding — taught away from a bolted, detachable, individually-renewable running flange.

Assessment: Moderate confidence of obviousness on the replaceable-flange element, materially weaker than Combinations I and II. The absence of an express replacement teaching is the patentee's best § 103 defense on this element.

---

7. Why the claim text may still save this patent — the "cooperative interlock" point

The specification recites something that is not in Harris, Allen, US 28,512, Hodge, or Mellon, taken singly or together:

flange i "is not only held in position by the screws j, screwed or riveted into the flange h, but is firmly held in its place, clasped between the inner side of the tire l and flange h, by tightening the bolts or rivets n"; and the tire's inner circumference "bears firmly upon … the small flange k of the annular flange i."

That is a dual-mode retention — the replaceable flange is fastened by its own screws and additionally clamped by a separate bolted stack — plus a flush lip k keyed into the filler. If the issued claim requires both fastenings in cooperation, a § 103 challenger must find a reference teaching redundant retention of a removable part, and none of the references above does so directly. Harris' bolts b do double duty (securing the plate and pressing the rim), and Allen's bolts pass through web, filling and plates — so an argument exists, but it is an argument, not a demonstration.

Practical consequence: the obviousness exposure on this patent is claim-dependent, and the claims are the one thing missing from the authoritative source. This is not a formality — it is the difference between "very likely obvious" and "genuinely contestable."

---

8. Graham factor 4 — secondary considerations (the patentee's case)

I assess these because § 103 requires them, and because on this record they run in the patentee's favor more than the primary references suggest.

Favorable to non-obviousness:

1. Long-felt but unresolved need — the strongest point. Absterdam stated the problem in 1880: the flange, capped by frog clearance, wears out before the tire. Thirty-four years later the art was still filing on it: US 1,086,669, "Renewable flange for car-wheels" (Feb. 10, 1914); US 1,321,999 (Perkins, demountable rim with "a detachable flange, 77," ~1920); the Baker split-rim/removable-outside-flange line in Universal Rim Co. (7 F.2d, 1925). Roughly 30–45 years of continued effort to make a wheel's flange renewable is classic long-felt-need evidence, and it is close to the best kind: it shows the need, the failure of others, and that the eventual solutions kept circling Absterdam's problem statement.
2. Failure of others / teaching away. The field's actual 1869–1873 solution was the welded joint (Sax & Ker; Sax & Kear US 142,587: "welded directly"). A welded joint is the antithesis of a renewable part. A patentee can argue that the art's dominant teaching pointed away from detachment.
3. The 1887 Sax holding cuts both ways. The same court that found composite iron-body/steel-rim wheels old also found Sax's fused-joint claims anticipated — but it did not hold that a renewable flange was old. Sax thus supplies the state of the art without supplying the specific element at issue.

Unfavorable or neutral:

1. Commercial success — unestablished. Per the assignment section, no trade catalogue, advertisement or corporate record for an Absterdam car-wheel product was located. There is no nexus evidence to rely on.
2. Copying — unestablished. No litigation over 236,526 was located (per the litigation section).
3. Unexpected results — not shown. Nothing in the specification asserts a result beyond the intended one ("the same wheel may be continually used by simply replacing the worn-out part"). Absent an asserted difference in kind, the "new and useful result" reasoning of Mowry v. Whitney, 81 U.S. 620 (1871), is unavailable to distinguish this from a mere substitution of parts.

Note the interaction: the long-felt-need evidence is genuinely strong, but it must be weighed against KSR's caution that a combination of familiar elements may still be obvious notwithstanding such evidence. On the substitute-limitation A1 analysis the references are strong enough that a court could find obviousness even crediting factor 4. On a narrow claim reciting the cooperative interlock (§ 7), factor 4 could carry the day.

---

9. Surrogate A2 — the wood-filling process. Cannot be analyzed on this record.

The second stated inventive aspect is a process: saw wood into veneers → cut into segments of required length → boil in water to extract the resinous gum → optionally add borax or another alkali to aid dissolving the sap → assemble into the annular filling.

No pre-1879 reference for any of these steps appears anywhere in this file, and I will not manufacture one. Veneering, segment cutting, steam/water boiling to extract sap, and alkaline (borax) treatment of wood were each, I believe, independently known in the woodworking and wood-preserving arts well before 1880 — but I have not verified that against any specific document, and an unverified belief is not a § 103 reference.

What I can say with confidence:

• In principle this is the most vulnerable aspect, precisely because a process claim built from known wood-treatment steps applied to a wood filler would be a textbook Hotchkiss "double use" / KSR predictable-results case.
• In fact it is supported by nothing on this record. If a § 103 challenge were ever mounted, this is where a searcher should spend the money: pre-1880 patents and printed publications on (a) laminated/veneered wood manufacture, (b) wood preservation by boiling and alkaline lixiviation (borax/soda), and (c) wooden felloe and filling manufacture for wheels.

Assessment: Not determinable. Recommend the search in § 11 rather than an unsupported conclusion in either direction.

---

10. Bottom line

The single sentence that matters: on the references now in hand, US 236,526 is a § 103 case, not a § 102 case — and it is a strong § 103 case on the broad apparatus disclosure and a weak-to-moderate one on the specific cooperative interlock that the specification itself emphasizes as the point of the invention.

---

11. What must be done before this analysis can be relied on

1. Obtain the issued claims. USPTO Patent Public Search, pre-1976 image PDF, for both 236,526 and 236,525. The internal "Letters Patent No. 236,525" line in the 236,526 body text remains unresolved and could mean this entire analysis is being run against the wrong document. Everything in § 7 turns on this.
2. Pull the primary texts of Allen US 128,939 / Re. 7,142, Harris US 50,579, US 28,512, Hodge US 8,526, and the Mellon 1866 patent. I have Allen, Harris and (via the government print of 104 U.S. 112) Hodge's Fig. 2 from primary or near-primary sources; US 28,512's date is unverified and must be confirmed, and Finch 1849 and Miles 1875 exist on this record only as judicial descriptions — they must be read before being relied on.
3. Class 295 novelty/obviousness search, 1860–1880, for pre-bar art on renewable/detachable flanges and mechanically-fastened detachable tires — the one category where no reference has been found and where the patent's fate likely lies. Also search the Commissioner of Patents' annual indexes 1870–1880 under "car-wheels," "tires," and "flanges."
4. Prior-art search on the wood-treatment process (A2) as described in § 9 — none has been run.

Confidence in the analysis above: Moderate-to-high as to the individual reference disclosures and dates for Harris, Allen and Hodge. Moderate as to the overall § 103 conclusion, because it is pitched to surrogate limitations rather than to claims. High that the earlier "no citation record and no claim text" findings still hold, and high that no single reference anticipates.

No fabrication: every reference cited above was retrieved in this session or the prior-art section, with its URL given. Where a date or disclosure is unverified (US 28,512; Finch 1849; Miles 1875) I have said so rather than smoothing it over, and I have not supplied the plantiff/defendant/claim data that the underlying documents do not contain.