US 260722

I'll run the requested searches before summarizing.

Initial searches returned no direct hits for US 260722 (only unrelated WO/2021 numbers). Let me narrow further.

Search results: negative for USPTO/CAFC records

I ran searches targeting the exact identifier 260722 (and US260722A) against public web indexes, USPTO-mirrored patent data, and CAFC 2026 material.

• No USPTO record was retrieved for US 260722 by the search tool; hits returned were for unrelated WO publications that merely contain the digit string "260722" (e.g., WO 2020/260722 "Tau Epitope and Binding Molecules"; WO 2021/260722). Per your instruction, I did not substitute results for those similar numbers.
• No CAFC 2026 docket, appeal, IPR, or opinion referencing patent 260722 was found. That is unsurprising: a July 1882 patent had a 17‑year term ending 1899‑07‑04, so it cannot be the subject of live 2026 Federal Circuit litigation.
• I could not directly query Docket Navigator, PACER, or USPTO Patent Public Search with the tools available; the searches above are the full extent of what I verified. Treat the CAFC/PTO-litigation negative as "not found in searched sources," not as a certified absence.

The following summary is grounded in the authoritative full text supplied in your message (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-30), not in search results.

US 260,722 — bibliographic data (verbatim from source)

Uncertainty flag (OCR): the source text is OCR'd from a scanned 1882 print and contains character errors that I am reporting literally rather than auto-correcting: reference letters appear as "roll 0"/"a d" (likely c and c d), "rope, a"/"rope or wire, 6;" (likely e), "projections 11 b" / "projections b 11" (likely b b), "1*" (likely r), "vertical hooks 13 t" (likely b t or t t), and the name renders variously as "VVILLSON," "WILLSON," and "OHARLEs PERRY WILLSON." The face spelling of the patentee is Charles Perry Willson. Where reference-letter identity matters for claim construction, the drawing sheets (not retrieved) would be needed to confirm.

Plain-language overview of the claims

The patent has four claims, all in "combination" form (the standard 1882 style). There is no separately numbered "independent claim 1" of modern format; claim 1 is the broadest and claims 2–4 are successively narrower combinations that incorporate the claim‑1 elements.

The common inventive core (recited in all four claims): a person-occupied carriage hanging from a rope or wire whose upper end is anchored (via a grappling hook) to a stationary heavy object; the rope's lower end is wound on a winding-roll journaled in the carriage, then passes between clamping rolls; the occupant's weight, transmitted through a lever, squeezes the clamping rolls onto the rope, generating friction that regulates descent speed. A brake-lever acting on the winding roll provides a separate, positive stop.

Claim 1 — the broadest combination.
A fire-escape combining: (a) a carriage having a winding-roll and clamping-rolls mounted in the carriage's lower part, under the floor; (b) a rope or wire wound at its lower end around the winding-roll and passing between the clamping rolls; and (c) a lever pivoted above the rolls that is adapted to force the clamping rolls together by the weight of the occupant(s). Plainly: the escape works by self-actuating weight-driven friction braking — heavier occupant, more clamping force.

Claim 2 — adds the seat-as-lever feature.
Same combination, but specified with carriage A, winding-roll h, clamping rolls c, d under the floor, rope e, and a seat a hinged to the carriage carrying projections b b on its under face. The point of novelty: the seat does double duty as the occupant's seat and as the lever that presses the upper (rubber) clamping roll onto the lower roll to bite the rope. Plainly: sit down, and your own weight both supports you and brakes the descent.

Claim 3 — adds the idler roll, grappling hook, and brake.
Same combination, now requiring: winding-roll, idler-roll, and clamping rolls all journaled in the carriage sides and located under the floor; a rope wound on the winding roll, passing around the idler roll and then between the clamping rolls; a grappling hook at the rope's upper end; a lever to force the clamping rolls together; and a brake-lever for the winding roll. Plainly: the fully equipped commercial version — anchor hook to furniture, idler to route the rope cleanly, weight-driven clamp for controlled descent, and a hand brake as backup.

Claim 4 — the specific-aggregation claim.
The combination of carriage A; hinged seat a with the hole l and projections b b on its lower face; inclined arms o with ring n; roll h; idler j; clamping rolls c d; rope e with the grappling hook at its upper end; rack-bar r; and brake-lever s — substantially as described and for the purpose set forth. Plainly: essentially the whole disclosed embodiment, recited element-by-element, including the inclined guide arms and cap/ring that center the rope above the seat, and the rack-and-lever locking mechanism for holding the winding roll locked until the occupant is seated.

Operation as described (for context on the claims)

The escaping occupant hooks the grappling hook to a bedstead or other heavy furniture, locks the winding roll via the brake-lever in rack-bar r, throws the carriage out the window (the brake prevents unwinding and descent), climbs in with feet on foot-rest q, and the seat projection b b then presses rubber roll c against roll d to clamp rope e. Releasing the brake-lever lets the carriage descend slowly, with descent speed varied by shifting body weight on the clamping rolls, or arrested by re-applying the brake.

Note on scope

Claim 4 also captures the hopper-form alternative described in the specification (Fig. 4), where the carriage's upper end is a hopper with a closed, centrally-orificed lower end; the brake-lever handle and rack sit inside the hopper; and the clamping rolls are drawn together by a person pressing a lever 25 in the hopper bottom, having bifurcated arms t t connected to vertical hooks (OCR: "13 t") that embrace the lower clamping roll — enabling multiple occupants to descend.

Bottom line

US 260,722 is an 1882, personally-owned (no assignee), now long-expired US patent to Charles Perry Willson for a weight-actuated, rope-clamping fire-escape carriage — filed 1882‑03‑15, issued 1882‑07‑04, no abstract, four combination claims, classified A62B1/08–1/10. I found no USPTO prosecution/appeal record and no CAFC 2026 activity for this number in the sources searched; I have not substituted data from similarly numbered patents. Any statement about assignment history, chain of title, or later litigation would require direct queries to USPTO Assignment Search and PACER, which were not available here.

I'll search for litigation records involving US Patent 260722.

The initial searches returned unrelated results (including a different "'722 patent" in an IPR). Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

No litigation hits yet. Let me check CourtListener/PACER-style sources and the Google Patents litigation record directly.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent 260,722

No litigation involving US Patent 260,722 was found. Based on searches of patent litigation aggregators (Unified Patents litigation/PTAB portal, CourtListener/RECAP-derived results, CAFC opinions, and general web indexes), I found no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome for any case asserting or challenging US 260,722.

What the record for US 260,722 actually shows

Per the patent's own front matter (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US260722](/patent/US260722)/en):

• Title: Fire-escape
• Inventor/Patentee: Charles Perry Willson, of Summit Point, West Virginia
• Application filed: March 15, 1882 · Granted/Published: July 4, 1882
• Legal status: "Expired – Lifetime" · Anticipated expiration: 1899-07-04
• Classification: A62B1/00 et seq. (devices for lowering persons from buildings)
• No "Litigation" tab / no litigation entries appear on the Google Patents record.

Key structural point: Under the law of its era, this patent's term would have been 17 years from grant, expiring in 1899. Any infringement action would therefore have had to be filed before mid-1899 — a period essentially outside the coverage of modern litigation databases (PACER, Unified Patents portal, CourtListener/RECAP, CAFC).

Important: hits that are NOT this patent (do not confuse)

My searches surfaced several unrelated records that use the digit string "722." I flag them so you don't auto-match them:

1. "The '722 Patent" in IPR2025-00987 / Intellectual Ventures district court litigations — refer to a modern patent (invalidity art: Lawson, Tsutsumitake, Choquier, Bird, Herz; "PointCast/Castanet/Active Desktop" system art). This is not US 260,722.
2. US application 07/260,722 → US 5,163,181A ("Multiple RF signal amplification apparatus," filed 1988) — a serial number, not patent 260,722.
3. WO 2020/260722 (tau epitope) and WO 2021/260722 (indolinone sulfonamides) — PCT publication numbers, not US patents.
4. Crown v. KYP-Sutherland references to a "'260 patent" (e.g., Crown Cork & Seal) — a different patent number, not US 260,722.

Cites found on the US 260,722 record (these are citations, not litigation)

• Cited By: US 3,307,832 (Zelm Associates, "Cargo lowering device") and US 4,645,034 (Griffith Selman D, "Descent system") — later patents that cite US 260,722 as prior art.
• Numerous "Similar Documents" (e.g., US 272,129; US 260,422; US 200,600) — related fire-escape patents, not litigation.

Caveats / limits of this search

• I could not independently query PACER's full historical docket archive or a complete 19th-century case reporter database. Litigation from 1882–1899, if any existed, would likely not appear in the databases I searched. State or federal court decisions from that era would appear in historical reporters (e.g., F. Cas., Fed. Rep.) rather than modern patent-litigation portals.
• Absence of results in modern aggregators should therefore be read as "no known/modern-recorded litigation," not as definitive proof that no suit was ever filed in the 1880s–1890s.

Bottom line: There is no known filed or pending litigation involving US Patent 260,722 in the sources searched.

I'll verify the absence of PTAB activity before drafting.

Let me check one plausible source of confusion — a modern 7-digit patent that could be mis-cited as "260,722."

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file for US 260722. The structured ODP block reports no AIA trial proceedings, and independent searching surfaced none (no IPR, PGR, or CBM docket; no PTAB FWD; no Federal Circuit appeal). Breakdown by status: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied.

Bottom-line defensive posture: this is not a "hardened patent" situation and not a "canceled claims" situation — it is a no-patent situation. US 260722 issued 1882-07-04 and its 17-year term ran out on 1899-07-04 (Google Patents legal-status entry: "Anticipated expiration — 1899-07-04"; current status "Expired - Lifetime"). Any demand letter citing US 260722 as a live, assertable patent is defective on its face: there is nothing left to infringe, and even pre-1899 acts would have been time-barred under 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year damages lookback by roughly 1905. The correct defendant response is not an IPR strategy — it is to treat the assertion itself as a red flag (see Recommended next steps).

No proceedings to describe

Because the canonical list is empty, there are no per-proceeding entries to populate. To be explicit about what I checked and what the absence means:

• No IPR. Nothing numbered IPR20xx-xxxxx names US 260722. IPRs are statutorily available against any issued patent — 35 U.S.C. § 311(a) contains no effective-filing-date floor, unlike § 321(c) for PGRs — so the empty docket is explained by economics, not eligibility: nobody spends PTAB-scale fees attacking a patent that expired in 1899 and can generate no damages.
• No PGR. Unavailable by statute: 35 U.S.C. § 321(c) limits PGR to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16.
• No CBM. Unavailable: CBM review under AIA § 18 was limited to covered business-method patents (financial-services data processing) and sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16. An 1882 mechanical fire-escape carriage — classified A62B1/00, A62B1/06, A62B1/08, A62B1/10 — is not remotely within scope.
• No appeals. With no FWD, there is no CAFC docket to report. I found nothing on CourtListener or the Federal Circuit docket tying this patent number to an appeal.
• No settlements, no estoppel, no panel. Judge panels, institution reasoning, claim-level verdicts, and § 315(e)(2) estoppel all presuppose a proceeding. None exists. Do not let anyone hand you fabricated APJ names or proceeding numbers for this patent.

Sources searched: the authoritative Google Patents record at https://patents.google.com/patent/US260722/en (specification, claims 1–4, legal-status timeline, classifications) and general web search for PTAB/CAFC activity. Nothing located.

⚠️ Number-collision artifacts — do not mistake these for proceedings or family members

The search space around "260722" is polluted by unrelated documents. None of the following is a PTAB record, and none is related to the 1882 Willson patent:

• US application serial No. 07/260,722 (filed 1988-10-21), which issued as US 5,163,181 — "Multiple RF signal amplification apparatus." This is a serial number collision, not a patent-number match, and it is the single most likely source of a false hit when someone greps for "260722" in USPTO data.
• WO 2020/260722 A1 (tau epitope binding molecules, PCT/EP2020/068314) and WO 2021/260722 A1 (PCT/IN2021/050596) — unrelated PCT publications whose numbers merely end in 260722.

Also note: the Google Patents page shows a "Cited By (2)" list — US 3,307,832 (Zelm Associates Inc. Van, "Cargo lowering device," priority 1965-03-01) and US 4,645,034 (Griffith Selman D, "Descent system," priority 1985-06-26) — plus a long "Similar Documents" list of 1880s–1900s fire-escape patents. These are forward citations and family/art listings, not PTAB proceedings, and not prior art cited during any AIA trial. Do not let a petitioner's chart convert them into "IPR grounds."

Strategic summary

Claim status: all four claims are UNTESTED — and untestable in practice. US 260722 has claims 1–4, none of which has ever been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the PTAB. Claims 1 and 3 are drafted as combinations (carriage + winding-roll + clamping-rolls + rope + lever; and adding an idler-roll, grappling-hook, and brake-lever), claim 2 recites the hinged seat a with projections b b doubling as the clamping lever, and claim 4 recites the full assembly including inclined arms o, ring n, rack-bar r, and brake-lever s. Because no proceeding exists, there is no surviving-claims list to give you and no estoppel landscape to map. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is a non-issue: estoppel attaches only to a petitioner that obtained an FWD (or that settled after institution), and there has never been a petitioner.

The real defensive asset runs the other way. US 260722 is not a threat to a defendant; it is art. Having published on 1882-07-04 (filed 1882-03-15), it is a printed publication available as prior art against later-filed claims under pre-AIA § 102(b) and AIA § 102(a)(1). Its disclosure of load-responsive clamping rolls squeezing a descent rope — the weight of the occupant generating the braking force — is exactly the kind of mechanical teaching modern plaintiffs in the escape-descent space (note the A62B1/08 subclass: "with brake mechanisms ... mechanically operated") would want to avoid. If you are defending a modern descent-control or rope-brake patent, US 260722 belongs in your § 102/§ 103 invalidity contentions, and its full text and figures are freely accessible at the Google Patents URL above. A defendant facing a demand letter that cites this patent number has an even better position than an invalidity defense — you have a no-infringement, no-remedy, time-barred, expired-patent defense that can be resolved on the pleadings.

No pattern signals exist to detect. There is no repeat petitioner (there are no petitioners), no patent-owner PTAB appeal practice (the owner, Charles Perry Willson of Summit Point, West Virginia, has been dead for over a century and the patent has been in the public domain since 1899), and no defensive aggregator in the chain — Unified Patents and similar entities do not file on expired 19th-century patents, since there is no litigation risk to abate. The absence of PTAB activity here is not the usual "well-asserted patent eventually attracts IPRs" signal; it is the signal of a patent that cannot be asserted at all.

Recommended next steps

1. If you received a demand letter or license offer citing US 260722: treat it as a fraud indicator, not a patent dispute. Verify the number against https://patents.google.com/patent/US260722/en. It is a fire-escape carriage patented 1882-07-04 and expired 1899-07-04. There is no claim to license, no infringement to enjoin, and no recoverable damages.
2. Preserve the letter and consider reporting it to the FTC and your state AG, and notifying the USPTO's Office of Enrollment and Discipline if a registered practitioner signed it. A demand on an expired 1882 patent is the classic fact pattern in patent-demand scam enforcement actions.
3. Check for a mismatched number. Given the confirmed "260722" collisions (serial 07/260,722; WO 2020/260722; WO 2021/260722), the sender may have garbled a real patent number — or may be deliberately quoting a number they know nobody will look up. Ask them, in writing, to state the patent's expiration date and its current assignee of record.
4. No PTAB path is needed or available in a useful sense. You do not need an IPR, and an IPR would be a waste of money: the patent generates no litigation exposure to eliminate. Save the § 311 filing fee.
5. Repurpose the reference offensively. If your real dispute involves a different, live patent on rope-brake descent devices, pull US 260722 into your invalidity contentions as § 102(a)(1)/pre-AIA § 102(b) art, and use its Fig. 2 (vertical central section of the carriage) and Fig. 4 (hopper-form carriage with lever 25, bifurcated arms t t, and hooks t') to show the occupant-weight-actuated clamping-roll concept was public in 1882.

Confidence note: I am highly confident in the "no PTAB activity" conclusion — the canonical ODP block says so, and my searches returned nothing contradicting it. I did not independently verify a specific PTAB decision on expired-patent institution practice in this session, so I have described that as a general practice point (expired patents are not categorically outside § 311) rather than citing a particular case number I could not confirm here. Any proceeding number you see attached to US 260722 from an uncited source should be presumed fabricated until it resolves in PTAB E2E at https://e2e.uspto.gov/ or on the PTAB Decisions page.

I'll start by attempting to surface any assignment records and inventor/assignee context for US 260,722.

Let me probe a bit further on the inventor, any corporate ties, and whether any assignee appears on the record.

Research note before the findings

US 260,722 is an 1882 patent. That single fact governs almost everything below, so I want to state the evidentiary basis up front rather than bury it:

• Patent term: filed 1882‑03‑15, issued 1882‑07‑04, expired 1899‑07‑04 (17‑year term). Google Patents lists only three legal events: 1882-07-04 Application granted, 1882-07-04 Publication of US260722A, 1899-07-04 Anticipated expiration, status Expired - Lifetime. No assignee field appears in the record.
• Database coverage: USPTO's Patent Assignment Search covers recorded patent assignments back to August 1980 only (USPTO Assignment Database Webinar, 2015-01-20, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). US 260,722's entire enforceable life ended 81 years before that coverage window opens. Any pre‑1900 recordation would live on paper reels, not in the searchable database, and would not carry a modern reel/frame citation.

I therefore cannot produce reel/frame entries, correspondents, or execution/recording dates. Fabricating them would be the failure mode here, not the deliverable. I have not inferred any assignment.

Inventors

Sole named inventor. The specification is the signature form used by independent 19th‑century inventors ("I, CHARLES PERRY WILLSON, of Summit Point, in the county of Jefferson and State of West Virginia, have invented a new and Improved Fire-Escape"), with witnesses T. Lee Shirley and H. C. Frazier and no attorney/assignee of record stated in the grant text.

Unusual patterns to note: none of the assignment-adjacent patterns (inventor departures within 12 months, etc.) are assessable, because there was never an assignee for an inventor to depart from. One tangential observation, offered explicitly as a non‑finding: a different Willson, W. N. C. Willson, also of Summit Point, W. Va., received patent 106,243 for a "Gauge for tobacco-cutters" on 1870‑03‑15 (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents). Same small town, same surname, likely family — but this is not evidence of any assignment, common ownership, or entity formation, and I am not treating it as one.

Original assignee

None. US 260,722 issued to Charles Perry Willson as an unassigned, individually owned patent.

• No assignee is named on the face of the patent.
• Google Patents shows no assignee for US260722A.
• Primary line of business / product status: not applicable in the corporate sense. If a question is "did the assignee ship a product embodying the claims" — no assignee existed. The inventor's own commercial embodiment, if any, is not documented in the sources consulted.
• Current status: the patent expired 1899‑07‑04 and has been in the public domain for over a century. No corporate successor to trace.

(Note: US260722 itself should not be confused with US260,422, a separate "Fire-escape" also published 1882‑07‑04 and listed among Google's similar documents.)

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for this patent. Stated plainly, per the requested contract:

• No recorded assignment, security agreement, merger, change of name, license, release, or correction exists in the searchable record for US 260,722 — and structurally could not exist as a searchable entry, since the Assignment Search database begins in August 1980 and this patent expired in 1899.
• There is therefore no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no assignor, no assignee, and no correspondent of record to report. I am explicitly declining to invent any.

This is itself the finding: the patent was never transferred, and its owner of record from issue until expiration was the inventor. Interpreting the null result with the caveat the prompt itself supplies — "it usually means the original assignee still owns the patent" — here it more precisely means the individual inventor held it, unencumbered, to expiry, and there is no successor-in-interest.

Per the requested output contract I am continuing to the remaining sections, but every one of them is a null result rather than an assessed signal.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 260722
    1882 : Filed 15 March by Charles P Willson
         : Issued 4 July to Willson alone
         : No assignee named on the patent
    1899 : Patent term expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal below is not present on the record, and that is a hard negative rather than an "unclear" — a 139‑year‑expired, never‑assigned patent cannot be an assertion vehicle. I flag the one place where the word "present" would be technically misleading.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No transfer of any kind appears in the record, and no licensing LLC exists to receive one. No reel/frame to cite, because there is none.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee named Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi‑LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, or any Spangenberg entity. The sole owner of record is an individual who died long before these entities existed.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / not assessable. There is no correspondent of record, since no recording was ever made. A single appearance would not be a finding, and here there is not even one.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero consecutive assignments in any window, let alone <24 months.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No assignment exists, and no infringement suit naming this patent exists; the patent's 17‑year term ended in 1899, and any cause of action would have been time-barred over a century ago.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No corporate assignee existed to enter Chapter 7/11. (The prompt's examples — Kodak, Nortel, Polaroid, Sun → Oracle — are all 20th/21st‑century portfolios with no analogue here.)
7. Privateering — not present. No operating company and no NPE to act as its proxy.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN (all founded ~2008–2014). Non‑assertion here arises from statutory expiration, not from defensive acquisition.

Verdict

Insufficient data — with the substantive gloss that this is a null chain, not a suspect one.

The assignment record for US 260,722 is empty, and it is empty for a structural reason: the patent issued 1882‑07‑04 to Charles Perry Willson as sole unassigned owner, expired 1899‑07‑04, and the USPTO's searchable assignment database does not reach back before August 1980 (USPTO Assignment Database Webinar, 2015‑01‑20). Per the stated taxonomy, "no records, or only the original assignment" maps to Insufficient data; I did not select any NPE category because there is not a single recorded transfer, correspondent, or reel/frame in the chain, and asserting a troll pattern here would require exactly the speculation the constraints prohibit.

Verify the absence directly at the USPTO Assignment Center (search patent number 260722) and the Assignment Search index; the patent text, claims, and legal-event history are at Google Patents US260722A. Classifications for reference: A62B1/06, A62B1/08, A62B1/10 (rope-lowering devices with mechanically operated brake mechanisms). The two forward citations shown on Google Patents — US3307832A (Zelm Associates, 1967) and US4645034A (Griffith Selman D, 1987) — are prior-art citations, not ownership-chain links, and should not be read as such.

I'll search for the specific patent and its citation record.

1. Verification of the target patent

The number was searched literally as 260722; unrelated hits for similarly numbered records (e.g., US application 07/260,722 → US5163181A, and US260422A) are not this patent and are excluded.

Claims of US260722, for reference:

1. Carriage with winding-roll + clamping-rolls under the floor, rope/wire on the winding-roll passing between the clamping-rolls, and a lever pivoted above the rolls forcing the rolls together by occupant weight.
2. Same, with carriage A, winding-roll h, clamping-rolls c/d, and hinged seat a with projections b b serving as both seat and clamping lever.
3. Same, further with an idler-roll, a grappling-hook, and a brake-lever for the winding-roll.
4. The specific combination: carriage A, hinged seat a with hole l and projections b b, inclined arms o with ring n, roll h, idler j, clamping-rolls c d, rope e with grappling-hook, rack-bar r, brake-lever s.

2. The citation record of US260722 — the key finding

US260722 has no cited prior-art references at all. The Google Patents record for US260722A contains no "Citations" section (i.e., no references cited by the examiner or applicant during prosecution) — consistent with an 1882 case prosecuted without a modern prior-art citation practice and with no search report published. The only reference-related tables on the record are:

• Cited By (2) — forward citations (later patents that cite US260722), and
• Similar Documents — a machine-generated similarity list, not a citation.

Per the page legend, the asterisk in those tables is defined as "* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party."

Consequence for your question: the two "cited" patents are later in time than US260722's March 15, 1882 filing and July 4, 1882 grant, so they are categorically incapable of being § 102 prior art against any of claims 1–4 of US260722. A reference must predate the invention date / filing date to anticipate. I therefore report them below in their correct role — as forward citations, i.e., art in which US260722 was itself used as the prior-art reference.

3. The two forward citations of US260722

3a. US3307832A — "Cargo lowering device"

• Full citation: US 3,307,832 A, "Cargo lowering device," assignee Zelm Associates Inc Van (Van Zelm Associates), filed/priority 1965-03-01, published 1967-03-07.
• Record status: listed under Cited By (2) for US260722; it appears on US3307832A's own record as one of 8 citations ("US260722A (en) * — 1882-07-04 — Fire-escape").
• Brief description (from the record's claim text): A cargo lowering device using a metal tape whose end is formed into a coil in a storage container on a base member; a metal-bender energy-absorbing means comprising a pair of spaced rod-like members over which the tape passes once; a velocity-sensitive energy-absorbing device with a pulley-like member rotatably driven by the tape extraction; and a load-selective control member whose cylindrical face bends increments of the tape beyond its elastic limit to absorb drop energy.
• § 102 analysis against US260722 claims 1–4: None anticipated. US3307832A postdates US260722 by ~83 years and cannot be § 102 art against it.
• Reverse direction (US260722 as art against US3307832A): US260722 was cited / is available as prior art against US3307832A. On the text available to me, US260722 does not appear to anticipate US3307832A claim 1 or claim 4, because those claims require a metal-tape, plastically-deforming bender energy absorber and a velocity-sensitive energy-absorbing device, whereas US260722 discloses only a rope/wire with weight-actuated clamping rolls and a friction brake-lever — no metal-bending, no velocity-responsive mechanism. The overlap is limited to the generic concept of a flexible load-bearing element paid out over/through rolls under load. I could not retrieve the full citation list of US3307832A (the record shows 8 citations) to say what other art the examiner relied on, and I do not have the complete text of US3307832A's dependent claims.

3b. US4645034A — "Descent system"

• Full citation: US 4,645,034 A, "Descent system," inventor Griffith Selman D, filed 1985-06-26, published 1987-02-24.
• Record status: listed under Cited By (2) for US260722.
• Brief description: I could not retrieve a reliable description or claim text for US4645034A from the available search results. Based on the title and citation relationship, it is a later personal-descent/lowering system cited against/with the 1882 rope-and-roll escape. I am flagging this as unverified rather than characterizing its disclosure.
• § 102 analysis against US260722 claims 1–4: None anticipated — US4645034A postdates US260722 by ~103 years and cannot anticipate it. A claim-by-claim § 102 analysis in the reverse direction (US260722 as art against US4645034A) cannot be responsibly done without the claim text of US4645034A, which I do not have.

4. "Similar Documents" list — dates relevant to § 102

Google Patents lists these as similar (machine similarity, not citations). Applying the § 102 timing test against US260722's March 15, 1882 filing / July 4, 1882 grant, the only member of that list that pre-dates the filing is:

• US200600A, "Improvement in fire-escapes," published 1878-02-26 — the only entry in the similar-documents table that is temporally capable of being § 102 art.

All others postdate the filing (e.g., US260422A 1882-07-04; US272129A 1883-02-13; US285606A 1883-09-25; US287492A 1883-10-30; US293627A 1884-02-19; US300090A 1884-06-10; US304603A 1884-09-02; US340573A 1886-04-27; US374244A 1887-12-06; US450796A 1891-04-21; US453134A 1891-05-26; US482813A 1892-09-20; US538398A 1895-04-30; US542641A 1895-07-16; US554587A 1896-02-11; US579823A 1897-03-30; US641809A 1900-01-23; US666028A 1901-01-15; US696711A 1902-04-01; US696931A 1902-04-08; US715308A 1902-12-09; US775157A 1904-11-15; US916247A 1909-03-23; US1190389A 1916-07-11). US260422A warrants a caveat: it shares the same July 4, 1882 publication date as US260722, so it is prior art only if its own filing date precedes US260722's March 15, 1882 filing — the record I retrieved does not give its filing date.

5. Direct answer and stated limits

• Prior art cited in US260722: none. The patent's own citation record is empty; there are no § 102 references of record.
• Patents citing US260722 (forward citations): exactly two — US3307832A (filed 1965-03-01, published 1967-03-07, Van Zelm Associates Inc) and US4645034A (filed 1985-06-26, published 1987-02-24, Griffith Selman D). Both postdate US260722 by decades and therefore do not anticipate claims 1–4 of US260722 under 35 U.S.C. § 102; they cannot, in principle, be anticipatory references against this patent.
• Only chronologically eligible candidate located: US200600A (1878-02-26, "Improvement in fire-escapes"), listed under Similar Documents, not as a citation. I have not verified its disclosure, so I make no anticipation assertion about it.

Limitations to disclose: (1) I searched via the Google Patents record and general web search; I did not obtain a USPTO PatentCenter/Global Dossier prosecution-history file for the 1882 case, so I cannot rule out prior-art references named in the original paper file that Google Patents does not index — but 19th-century US patents were not examined against cited references in the modern sense. (2) I could not retrieve the claim text of US4645034A or the full 8-reference citation list of US3307832A, so I have not performed a claim-by-claim § 102 anticipation analysis in the reverse direction for those two patents. Treat any statement about their claim scope as unverified.

I'll ground this analysis in the actual prior-art citations on the page before reasoning about § 103.

Let me check the remaining cited references and the one same-day sibling document.

Obviousness Analysis of US260722 ("Fire-escape") under 35 U.S.C. § 103

I. Threshold: the statute postdates this patent by seventy years

The specification of US260722 states: "SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 260,722, dated July 4, 1882. Application filed March 15, 1882. (No model.)" The page also lists "Anticipated expiration 1899‑07‑04."

35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952 and took effect January 1, 1953 — i.e., more than half a century after US260722 expired. Any § 103 analysis of this document is therefore a retrospective/hypothetical exercise, not a live validity question. For completeness:

• Pre‑1952 standard actually applied at the time: the judge‑made "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1851), later phrased by the Supreme Court as requiring a "flash of creative genius" in Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941).
• Modern framework (applied here, by analogy): Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content of prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations) and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (motivation may be implicit; predictable combination of known elements; mere aggregation of familiar elements not inventive).
• Caveat against hindsight: In re McLaughlin, 443 F.2d 1392 (CCPA 1971); the motivation must be supported by the record, not assumed — In re Magnum Oil Tools Int'l, 829 F.3d 1364 (Fed. Cir. 2016); In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977 (Fed. Cir. 2006).

II. What the page's "Prior Art" section actually contains

The page provides three separate data sets, and only one of them is legally cognizable prior art. I have not auto-corrected any identifier or date below; all are reproduced as the page presents them.

Two structural points about the page's presentation:

1. The two "Cited By" entries run the wrong direction. "Cited By" means those later patents cite US260722 — not that US260722 was examined against them. US3307832A and US4645034A were flagged with the page's '' mark, which the page's own legend defines as " Cited by examiner." Even so, a 1965 or 1985 reference cannot be used in a § 103 combination against an 1882 filing. Cf. the fundamental rule that § 103 may only be predicated on art qualifying under § 102.
2. The "Similar Documents" list is a similarity artifact, not a citation record. Google Patents generates it by classification/text overlap; 23 of the 24 entries postdate the patent. Only US200600A is antecedent.

III. The claims, and the one qualifying reference

Claim 1 (as printed on the page, with its OCR idiosyncrasies preserved) requires the combination, with a carriage, of: (a) a winding-roll; (b) clamping-rolls "arranged in its lower part under the floor thereof"; (c) a rope or wire wound around the winding-roll at its lower end and passing between the clamping-rolls; and (d) "a lever pivoted above the rolls and adapted to force the clamping-rolls together by the weight of the occupant or occupants."

Claim 2 adds the hinged seat a with projections b b — "whereby the seat serves the double purposes of a seat and a lever to operate the clamping-rolls." (The OCR renders the rolls as "clan1ping-rolls a d"; the specification uses c and d, and claim 4 uses "c d." I flag this lettering inconsistency rather than correcting it.) Claim 3 adds an idler-roll, a grappling-hook at the upper end of the rope, and a brake-lever for the winding-roll. Claim 4 is the full aggregation: carriage A, hinged seat a with hole l and projections b b, inclined arms o with ring n, roll h, idler j, clamping-rolls c d, rope e with grappling-hook, rack-bar r, and brake-lever s.

US200600A (Bowman, 1878) — the sole qualifying reference — discloses a device "to be connected with an ordinary rope, by which a person may readily and easily lower himself from upper-story windows," consisting of:

• a clamp formed of "three strips of wood or other suitable material … the center strip, B, being arranged to play between the other two," strips A and B "forming the jaws of the clamp," each grooved to receive the rope;
• a hand-screw E "for governing the tension" — clamping force is operator-applied by screw, not generated by the occupant's weight;
• a clevis F carrying "a basket or swing-seat or belt," plus staples G "for suspending other persons or goods";
• a lever H with a hook, described as "secured to the side of a window-frame, from which to suspend the rope of this device."

Mapping US200600A onto claim 1: Bowman teaches a rope-clamp and a load-carrying seat, and teaches variable descent control. It does not teach (a) a carriage with a winding-roll around which the rope is wound at its lower end; (b) clamping rolls, much less rolls "under the floor" of a carriage; or (d) a lever pivoted above the rolls whose clamping force derives from the occupant's weight. Bowman's clamp is jaw-type and its actuation force is manual (screw E). Four of the four claim-1 elements are therefore either absent or present only in a materially different form.

IV. Combinations that would be needed — and why the listed record cannot supply them

To invalidate claim 1 on the record shown, one would need to combine:

1. US200600A (rope, clamp, suspended seat, controllable descent), with
2. an unnamed second reference teaching a carriage-mounted rope storage roll (the "winding-roll"), and
3. an unnamed third reference teaching that the clamping rollers be located beneath the carriage floor, actuated by a lever pivoted above them and pressed by the occupant's weight.

Those second and third teachings appear nowhere in the page's prior-art section. Assembling them requires selecting elements from outside the record and then arranging them to match the claim — the classic hindsight reconstruction condemned in McLaughlin and Kahn.

Motivations a challenger could articulate (on this record, all would be unsupported):

• Substitution of one known clamping means for another. Replacing Bowman's screw-actuated jaws with a lever-actuated roller clamp could be argued as a predictable substitution of known elements (KSR). But claim 1 does not merely claim a clamp — it claims the clamp actuated by the occupant's weight, which Bowman expressly does not do (Bowman requires the person to "turn the screw up tight" and then "by turning the screw back again until the tension is decreased" adjust descent). A weight-actuated lever and a hand screw are alternative, not equivalent, means of generating clamping force. Nothing in the listed art supplies the weight-actuation teaching or any reason to prefer it.
• Compactness/stowage. Winding the rope about a roll journaled in the carriage would be motivated by a desire to store the line in the carrier. But no listed reference suggests this, and Bowman's design deliberately leaves the rope hanging on the separate lever H at the window-frame.
• Safety/duplication of function. Making the seat double as the clamping lever (claim 2) economizes parts. But Bowman's seat hangs from a clevis and performs no clamping function; the motivation is only visible once one knows the answer.

Analogous art. Even if additional references existed, they would all sit in CPC A62B1/00–1/14 (the page classifies US260722 in A62B1/06, /08, /10; US200600A in A62B1/06, /14), so the field-of-endeavor and reasonably-pertinent tests would be satisfied. That helps a challenger but does not cure the missing disclosures.

No secondary considerations of record. The page contains no evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others, or copying. Under Graham, that factor is neutral here.

V. The two "Cited By" references cannot carry any § 103 weight

US3307832A (1965/1967) discloses a cargo lowering device with a pulley-like member 11, a velocity-sensitive energy absorber 13, and a lever 16 whose cylindrical end 21 "extend[s] into the space between rod-like members 14 and 14'" to deform a metal element — i.e., lever-controlled clamping/deformation of a strap. US4645034A (1985/1987) discloses a spool 30 for cable storage with friction discs 41/42 acting as a drag brake, rollers (21B, 21C, 23) producing snubbing contact, and a lever 25 "operable by the user of the apparatus."

Structurally these are superficially closer to claims 1–3 than Bowman is (spool + roller snubbing + lever). But both postdate the 1882 filing by 83 and 103 years. A reference that is not prior art under § 102 cannot be used in a § 103 combination (KSR addresses motivation and predictability; it does not repeal § 102). Their proper role here is evidentiary only: they show that the Willson concepts of a carriage-mounted take-up spool, roller snubbing, and lever-controlled clamping remained the operative vocabulary of the art a century later. That is interesting for claim-construction intuition — it is legally inert for obviousness.

VI. Unresolved items I will not fill in by assumption

• US260422A ("Fire-escape," 1882‑07‑04) appears in the Similar Documents list with a publication date identical to US260722's grant date. Whether it qualifies under pre-AIA § 102(a) or § 102(e) turns entirely on its filing date relative to Willson's March 15, 1882 filing (and to Willson's actual date of invention), which the page does not state. I do not know its disclosure with any confidence and have not assumed one.
• The OCR is unreliable in places ("clan1ping-rolls a d"; "projections 11 b"; the repeated substitution of "a" for "e" for the rope). I have interpreted identifiers as printed and flagged the discrepancies rather than silently normalizing them.
• Supplementary art exists that is not in this page's list. A search surfaced US259279A (Rose and South; "Application filed March 13, 1882," granted June 6, 1882), which describes elbow-levers pivoted at the top of a frame and pressed by the basket-cords carrying the occupant's weight — structurally close to the "lever … adapted to force the clamping-rolls together by the weight of the occupant" of claim 1; and US199199A (Greene, filed 1877‑07‑02) and US200190A (Graves, filed 1877‑07‑09), both pre-dating references showing friction-brake/sheave lowering devices with guide rollers. These are outside the page's prior-art section, so I do not rely on them, but a complete invalidity analysis would have to consider them, particularly US259279A given its March 13, 1882 filing date two days before Willson's.

VII. Conclusion

On the prior art presented on this page, claims 1–4 of US260722 are not rendered obvious under § 103. The page supplies exactly one reference that pre-dates the March 15, 1882 filing — US200600A — and Bowman discloses a screw-actuated jaw clamp with a suspended basket and a window-frame suspension hook. It discloses none of the carriage, the winding-roll, the under-floor clamping rolls, the weight-actuated pivoted lever, the hinged seat-as-lever, the idler-roll, the grappling-hook, or the rack-bar-and-brake-lever combinations that the claims require. The 23 later "Similar Documents" and the two "Cited By" entries (US3307832A, US4645034A) all postdate the patent and are unusable as § 102/§ 103 art. Any combination that reached the claims would have to be constructed from references not on the page, and the motivation for that construction is visible only in hindsight — precisely what KSR's "predictable variations" rationale does not authorize and what Magnum Oil and Kahn forbid assuming.

Claims 1 and 4 diverge most in vulnerability: claim 1's broad "lever … operated by the weight of the occupant" formulation is where a challenger with better art would focus, whereas claim 4's specific aggregation (carriage A + hinged seat with hole l and projections b b + inclined arms o with ring n + roll h + idler j + rolls c d + rope e with grappling-hook + rack-bar r + brake-lever s) would be the hardest to reach without hindsight.