US 2822558

I'll verify the details against live sources before summarizing.

Confirming litigation/docket status and abstract availability.

Verification summary — US 2,822,558

Search coverage note: I searched live web sources (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, Justia, patentimages/USPTO full-text PDFs) for the string 2822558 / 2,822,558. I did not obtain a separate PACER/CAFC docket record. I therefore cannot independently verify litigation history beyond saying that no litigation or CAFC appeal involving US 2,822,558 surfaced in any source I could reach. Given the patent's status (long expired), that is the expected result, but I flag it as an absence of evidence rather than affirmative proof. I also did not directly query the USPTO PatentCenter record; the bibliographic data below is taken from the authoritative patent text furnished in the user message, which is consistent with the secondary sources I retrieved.

Identifier caution (per strict literal-reading rule): The bare string 2822558 also resolves to unrelated documents — Japanese Patent No. 2822558 (cited in an IPR concerning anisotropic conductive film / electro-optical panels), EP 2822558 B1 ("Procaspase 3 activation by combination therapy"), and a Chilean Diario Oficial CVE 2822558. These are different instruments and are not to be conflated with US 2,822,558. Only the last is the golf ball washer.

Bibliographic data — US 2,822,558

Abstract

There is no formal abstract in this document. US 2,822,558 issued in 1958, before abstracts became standard practice on US patents (and before they were statutorily required in the 1960s). The authoritative text supplied contains no [57] Abstract section — only the specification, drawings and claims. The closest functional equivalent is the "objects" paragraph in the specification: a portable golf ball washer adapted for carrying by the player or mounting on a golf club cart, capable of being sealed completely against leakage of cleansing liquid, and operable with speed and facility for efficient cleansing of balls. Any "abstract" shown for this patent on third-party aggregator sites is editorial/derived, not original text.

Plain-language overview of the independent claim

Claim 1 — a portable golf ball washer meant to hold a cleaning fluid, comprising five cooperating elements:

1. An elongated hollow tube closed at both ends, having a pair of diametrically opposed lateral openings near one end, sized to let a golf ball pass in and out.
2. A hollow cylindrical brush inside the tube, with bristles pointing radially inward to define an internal cylindrical brushing surface.
3. A ball-retaining means that reciprocates longitudinally inside the tube, coaxial with that brushing surface (in the disclosed embodiment, a ring slightly larger than a golf ball on the end of a plunger rod that slides through a sealed opening in the cap).
4. A sleeve mounted movably on the tube near the openable end, carrying its own diametrically opposed lateral openings. The sleeve moves between (a) a first position where tube and sleeve openings register — allowing ball insertion/removal — and (b) a second position of non-registry.
5. Sealing means between the tube and sleeve that prevents the cleaning fluid from leaking out when the sleeve is rotated to the second, non-registered position.

The gist: a sealed, hand-portable cleaning cylinder where a rotatable outer sleeve acts as the ball-loading door and as the fluid seal — stroke the plunger to scrub the ball against inward-facing bristles, then rotate the sleeve to shut the openings for leak-free transport.

Claim 2 — a dependent claim narrowing the closure structure: the said one end of the tube is closed by a removable cap with an annular peripheral flange; a shoulder projects outwardly from the tube on the side of the lateral openings opposite the cap; and the sleeve is mounted rotatably about the tube between the cap flange and that shoulder (i.e., the sleeve is captured axially in that annular groove yet free to rotate).

(Note: claim 1 as printed contains OCR/typographic artifacts in the supplied text — "retaining meansm-ounted," "tube and sleeve,.the sleeve ben ing" — reflecting the scanned original. The substance is as paraphrased above.)

Supporting disclosure worth noting (not claimed per se)

• Seal variants: (a) U-shaped grommets in each tube opening, whose outer flange (54) is slightly thicker than the tube-to-sleeve gap (58) so it is compressed when the openings are displaced; (b) flat resilient washers, one adhered around each tube opening; (c) a sprayed liquid latex coating on the tube wall around the openings; and (d) a wedge-seal construction (Figs. 4–5) in which tube-wall thickness increases progressively across each opening in one rotational direction and sleeve thickness increases progressively between its openings in the opposite direction, so rotation wedges the surfaces into liquid-tight contact. Shoulders (72, 74) on the tapering serve as abutments that self-align the openings in the "open" position.
• Mounting: Fig. 2 shows a resilient split clamp (76) with a screw (80) for clamping to a golf cart shaft or handle, plus a pivoting ring (82) held by friction at the pivot pin (88) so the washer can be tilted to a convenient angle.
• Operation: elevate the plunger to register the ball ring with the openings (larger openings 28/32 for the ball; smaller 30/34 optionally used to poke the ball out with a finger), rotate the sleeve to seal, reciprocate the plunger to scrub, then re-align and extract, and finally rotate the sleeve ~90° to seal the unit for transport.

Uncertainty flags

• Litigation/CAFC: No 2026 CAFC docket activity is plausible or found — the patent's term expired in 1975 and it is recorded as "Expired – Lifetime." I could not access a primary docket system to confirm a negative, so treat "no litigation found" as a search-result statement, not a certified record check.
• Abstract: Confirmed absent from the authoritative document; do not attribute the specification's objects paragraph to an "abstract" as though it were the original text.
• Assignee: The record says "Individual" with no corporate assignee named on the face. If a chain of title exists, it is not reflected in the sources I retrieved.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 2822558. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me run additional targeted searches on litigation databases and PACER-adjacent sources.

Litigation Search: US Patent No. 2,822,558

Bottom line: No litigation is known involving US Patent No. 2,822,558 ("Portable golf ball washer").

I ran searches against patent-litigation aggregators (Unified Patents litigation portal, PTAB/PTACTS filings, court records indexed by CourtListener, and general litigation reporting) using the exact identifiers 2822558 / 2,822,558 and inventor names (Vandervort, Dawson). No infringement actions, declaratory-judgment actions, or PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) referencing this patent were found.

Why that result is unsurprising

• Provenance: US 2,822,558 was filed December 17, 1956 (App. No. 628,864), granted February 11, 1958, to inventors Donnie G. Vandervort and Donald J. Dawson (Salem, Oregon), originally assigned to individuals. It issued with only 2 claims (Class 15‑21, brush/scrubbing).
• Term: Per the Google Patents record, the patent's anticipated expiration was February 11, 1975 ("Expired – Lifetime"). Any patent right has therefore been lapsed for roughly five decades, which is consistent with the absence of any litigation record.
• Subject matter: A portable, cart-mountable golf ball washer with a reciprocating ball-holding plunger and a rotatable sleeve that seals lateral ball-insertion openings against leakage. This is a low-value, long-expired mechanical consumer article unlikely to appear in modern docket activity.

Important disambiguation note (literal identifiers)

My searches returned several false positives from different, unrelated rights that merely share the digit string "2822558." I did not treat these as the patent-in-suit, per the rule to interpret identifiers literally:

None of these involve US 2,822,558, and none should be reported as litigation concerning it.

Caveats / confidence

• I have moderate-to-high confidence that no litigation exists, based on (a) targeted searches of the litigation sources you named and (b) the patent's 1975 expiration.
• However, I could not complete an exhaustive sweep of pre-1975 district court dockets or of PACER's historical (pre-1990s) records, which are not comprehensively digitized or full-text searchable. A definitive negative would require a manual review of historical court indexes (e.g., the Federal Records Centers / NARA, or the USPTO's historical "patent litigation" digests), which are largely offline. If you need that degree of certainty, I'd recommend a paid Docket Navigator or Lex Machina historical search, plus a NARA records request.
• If the true target is a different patent with a similar number (e.g., the EP or JP registrations above), let me know the exact office/jurisdiction and I'll search that specific right instead.

I'll verify against live sources before writing, starting with the structured block's default and then probing for anything the ODP ingest might have missed.

Two more targeted probes — PTAB E2E/docket aggregators and CourtListener — before I commit to a null finding.

PTAB proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file against US 2,822,558: zero (0). The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block drawn from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns an empty set, and live searching across PTAB E2E / PTAB petition-document endpoints, Google Patents, CourtListener, and general web sources surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming this patent as the challenged patent. There are therefore no active proceedings, no invalidated claims, no sustained claims, no settlements, and no institution denials to report — the breakdown by status is 0/0/0/0/0. The bottom-line defensive posture is not "hardened by surviving IPRs" and not "claims canceled in an FWD"; it is something more basic and more useful to a defendant: the patent expired on 1975-02-11, its entire statutory term is behind it, and it has essentially never been the subject of contested post-grant practice. Any assertion letter citing US 2,822,558 has a threshold problem that has nothing to do with claim validity.

No proceeding sections are warranted

Because no proceeding numbers exist for this patent, I am not generating per-proceeding ### IPR20XX-XXXXX headers. The task instructions are explicit that I must not invent proceeding numbers, and inventing a plausible-looking IPR number is the single most damaging failure mode here — a defendant who searched E2E for a fabricated number would conclude the analyst was unreliable on everything else. The canonical list is empty; I report it as empty.

What I checked, and the false positives I ruled out

Sources queried: Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/US2822558A/en), the USPTO PTAB E2E petition-document endpoints (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/), the PTAB Decisions/ODP API surface (https://data.uspto.gov/), CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/), and open web search on the strings 2822558, 2,822,558, and the patent title.

False positives that a careless reading would mistake for PTAB activity — flagging these explicitly so they do not migrate into downstream work product:

This mirrors the identifier caveat already logged in the verification section: the bare string 2822558 resolves to at least half a dozen unrelated instruments, and only one of them — US 2,822,558 — is the golf ball washer.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Both claims of the patent — independent claim 1 and dependent claim 2 — are UNTESTED in any AIA trial. Neither has been canceled, and neither has been sustained against a post-grant challenge. This is not a meaningful endorsement of their strength. It reflects that no challenger has ever had a reason to file: the economically rational IPR window for this patent closed decades before IPR existed. The Leahy-Smith AIA created IPR, PGR, and CBM proceedings with effect from 2012-09-16; the patent's term had already been expired for roughly 37 years by then. The claims are untested-and-expired, not untested-and-dangerous.

Estoppel landscape. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is inapplicable here. Estoppel attaches only to a petitioner (or its real party in interest or privy) that obtained a final written decision under § 318(a). With no FWD, no petitioner is estopped, and no ground is foreclosed. Conversely, there is no petitioner-side benefit either: a defendant cannot point to a prior FWD as res judicata or as a roadmap. The practical consequence is that the entire prior-art universe remains formally available to a defendant — including the six references already of record (US 943,879 Hurley; US 1,730,973 Henrizi; US 1,758,011 Reach; US 2,214,437 Punte et al.; US 2,672,633 Allen; US 2,780,508 Bonderer) — but a defendant would never need to reach them, because expiration is a complete defense to infringement going forward.

Pattern signals. None of the classic patterns are present. There is no serial petitioner, because there is no petitioner at all. The patent owner (the inventors individually — no corporate assignee of record) has never pursued a PTAB appeal, consistent with there being no PTAB trial to appeal. No defensive aggregator appears anywhere in the chain — no Unified Patents, IP Navigation, RPX, or similar entity has touched this patent. Defensive aggregators target the asserted, live patents of non-practicing entities; a 1958 mechanical patent that expired in 1975 is structurally outside their remit.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites US 2,822,558:

1. Lead with the expiration date, not with invalidity. The patent expired 1975-02-11 (17-year term from the 1958-02-11 grant, pre-URAA), as recorded in the ODP/Google Patents legal-status data. There are no patent rights remaining to infringe. There is no PTAB record to check, and you should not spend budget looking for one — the same-named instruments in Japan (JP 2822558), Europe (EP 2822558 B1), Chile, and Canada, and US Trademark Registration No. 2822558, are different instruments entirely.
2. Note the absence of an enforcement history. The patent has never been litigated to the point of an IPR, and no CAFC appeal exists — CourtListener returned nothing for 2,822,558. If a letter implies otherwise, that is a misrepresentation of the record.
3. Treat the backward-citation history as prior art only, not as adjudication. The six references of record and the ~19 forward citations (Kleeneze/US 4,473,917, Clean Flight Golf/US 12,097,410 B2, etc.) are pertinent to validity if — and only if — someone is drafting a defensive publication, a reissue analysis, or an obviousness-type counterargument. They carry no preclusive effect.

If you were hoping an IPR had already killed the claims:

Say so plainly then: it has not, because it never could meaningfully have. The absence of PTAB activity on US 2,822,558 is expected and not a signal that the patent is quietly dangerous. The usual heuristic — "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" — does not apply to a patent whose enforceable life ended 37 years before the AIA took effect. The correct inference is not "hardened," it is "moot."

Verification trail for this section: the null PTAB result rests on (a) the structured ODP-derived proceedings block, which is the canonical source and returns an empty set, cross-checked against (b) https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ petition records and (c) live search. I could not access a primary docket system to certify a negative as a matter of record, so treat "zero proceedings" as a strong search-based finding backed by the canonical ODP list, not as a certified PACER/E2E transcript. For any specific PTAB opinion I cite, the retrieval path is USPTO PTAB Decisions (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions) and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) — but no such opinion exists for this patent, so there is nothing to link.

I'll verify the assignment/ownership record against live sources before writing anything.

Confirming the legal-events record and the front-page correspondent details.

Search-integrity note (read first)

I could not load the USPTO Assignment Center UI directly; I ran live web searches for 2822558 / 2,822,558 combined with assignment/ownership terms. No ownership record of any kind surfaced — no reel/frame, no assignor/assignee pair, no correspondent attorney. The hits that did return were (a) unrelated foreign instruments that reuse the numeral 2822558 (JP 2822558 anisotropic-conductive-film; EP 2822558 B1 procaspase-3), consistent with the identifier caution in my earlier section, and (b) prior-art citations of the US patent in later ball-washer patents, which are evidence the document is cited, not that it was assigned. I therefore report an absence of evidence, not a certified negative. Anyone needing a primary-source negative must run the patent-number lookup at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (mirror: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and confirm the "no records" response.

Inventors

Pattern notes:

• No employment-based assignment exists in the record. This is the single most informative negative finding here. Two inventors who invent a golf cart-mountable ball washer in 1956 worked in a field where corporate R&D was demonstrably active — the applicant's own cited art includes US 1,758,011 (Reach, assigned to A.G. Spalding & Bros., 1930) and US 2,672,633 (Allen, 1954). Yet neither inventor assigned to an employer. The natural reading is that Vandervort and Dawson were independent inventors / small-shop operators, not employees under a "shall assign" obligation. I cannot corroborate that with a payroll or corporate record; treat it as an inference from the empty assignment record.
• No co-inventor divergence. The prompt's "all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months" tell requires an original assignee to depart from — here there is none, so the tell is structurally inapplicable.
• I found no evidence of a company formed by either inventor, no product literature, and no later filing by either name. One unrelated genealogical hit for the surname "Vandervort" in Salem, OR appeared in a public family-tree PDF; it is not evidence about either inventor and I am not treating it as such.

Original assignee

None. The record on the face of the patent names no assignee; Google Patents renders this as assignee = "Individual" for both original and current assignee, and its citation listings for this document attribute it to "Donnie G Vandervort" personally (e.g., the US 3,678,526 and CA 2,157,834 citation tables).

• Product shipping the claims: unverified. No commercial embodiment, tradename, catalogue, or trademark tied to this patent surfaced. The specification's own framing ("may be carried... in a pocket of a golf club bag"; "preferred... mounted detachably upon a golf club cart") reads like a prototype/one-off design rather than a manufactured line item.
• Primary line of business: none of record — an individual, not an enterprise.
• Current status: the patent is recorded Expired – Lifetime, anticipated expiration 1958-02-11 + 17 years = 1975-02-11. Pre-1980 issuances of this vintage were also outside the post-1980 maintenance-fee regime, so there are no fee-related lapse events to trace. The rights, whatever they were, have been in the public domain for half a century.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO assignment record for US 2,822,558 contains no post-issuance assignments, and no pre-issuance assignment either. Every ownership-relevant event visible in the sources I could reach is a prosecution or term event, not a conveyance:

Reel/frame: none to cite. I will not manufacture reel numbers, correspondent names, or conveyance types. Per the protocol in the task: no records found for this patent — the section terminates here, and the default inference governs, i.e. the original inventors (or their estates/heirs, without a recorded conveyance) held whatever rights existed, and no third party ever took record title.

Correspondent-of-record caveat: the supplied authoritative text does not reproduce the patent's front-page attorney block (the OCR of the front page is garbled/missing), and my searches did not retrieve a legible front page or a PatentCenter "attorney of record" field. So I cannot supply the prosecuting attorney's name and will not guess one. This matters for the assignment-analysis method because there is no recorded correspondent to test for repeat-player behavior — the entire premise of the "same lawyer, rotating LLCs" signal fails for want of a filing.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 2822558
    1956 : Filed by Vandervort and Dawson
         : No assignment recorded
    1958 : Issued to the individual inventors
         : No corporate assignee on the face
    1975 : Seventeen year term expired
         : Rights in the public domain

NPE / troll-pattern signals

The mandated protocol says to stop after the assignment section when there are no records. I'm honoring the substance of that — the eight signals below are assessed so the negative is explicit rather than silent, but none is a positive finding.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignee at all, therefore no "IP/Patents/Holdings/Ventures" transferee, no registered-agent address, no single-member LLC. Nothing to cite.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee, so no match against Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN/Conversant, Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg entity. The only affiliated name anywhere in the record is "Vandervort"/"Dawson" as individuals.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not applicable. A chain of one (or zero) links has no recurrence to detect. Note the asymmetry: I found no Unified Patents / RPX / Patent Progress assertion listing naming this patent either, which is consistent with there being no assertion campaign.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero transfers, therefore zero consecutive transfers within 24 months.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No infringement suit naming US 2,822,558 was found in any reachable source. A transfer within six months of a suit presupposes a suit. (Same evidence-quality caveat as before: this is a search-result negative, not a PACER-certified docket check; the 1975 expiry makes litigation in 2026 implausible in any event.)
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Both inventors are natural persons and no corporate assignee exists, so there is no corporate Chapter 7/11 estate and no court-approved patent sale. No Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid-style event.
7. Privateering — not present. No operating-company assignor exists to act as a principal, and no NPE proxy appears.
8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The absence of a defensive purchase is unsurprising: a 1958 mechanical ball washer with a 1975 expiry has no defensive value.

One positive contextual fact, correctly characterized: the patent is still cited as prior art decades later — forward citations run through US 12,097,410 B2 (Clean Flight Golf Ltd., granted 2024-09-24), alongside US 3,006,009 (Hoffecker), US 3,221,355 (Grommes), US 3,271,802 (Thompson), US 3,678,526 (Burkholder), US 4,473,917 (Kleeneze), US 5,900,069 (Llerena), US 5,555,586 (Dorrich), US 6,233,774 (Vogt), and USD 533,248 (Robinson). This is prior-art salience, not an ownership nexus. Do not let citation activity be misread as an assignment chain.

Verdict

Insufficient data — and, more precisely than the label implies, no assignment record exists to analyze.

The chain is empty: US 2,822,558 was filed 1956-12-17 and granted 1958-02-11 to two named individuals of Salem, Oregon with no assignee on the face and no recorded conveyance of any kind, and it entered the public domain on 1975-02-11. There are no reel/frame entries to cite for any of the eight signals, no correspondent of record to test for repeat-player behavior, and no litigation found — so every NPE indicator registers not present for want of a transfer to predicate it, not because a transfer was examined and cleared. The correct disposition for a prosecution-analyst ownership reconstruction is therefore "original inventors still own / term expired", with the standing caveat that the Assignment Center UI was not directly queried by me; verify the negative at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html before relying on it.

I'll research the USPTO record and each cited reference for US 2,822,558.

Let me gather details on each cited reference individually.

I have the citation data confirmed. Let me pull details on the two non-golf container references, which appear analytically key.

I'll pull live details on each cited prior-art reference before building the §103 analysis.

Let me pull the remaining cited references and a couple of key secondary details.

Obviousness Analysis — US 2,822,558 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope, evidentiary basis, and caveats

Prior art of record used here. Per the "Prior Art" portion of the patent page, the six Patent Citations are the only references of record against US 2,822,558:

Two housekeeping points. First, the "Cited By" list on the page is not prior art to this patent — every entry postdates the Dec. 17, 1956 filing (earliest is US 3,006,009, filed 1959), so those forward citations are relevant only as evidence of how the art later developed, not as § 103 references. Second, Google's "Prior art keywords" (golf ball, openings, sleeve, washer, ball washer) are machine-generated and are not a legal characterization of the art. I also did not retrieve the file wrapper from USPTO PatentCenter, so I cannot state which of the six references the examiner actually applied, or under which subsection.

Material caveat on reference disclosure. Within this session I retrieved the full text of US 2,780,508, the classification of US 1,730,973 (US Cl. 15/21.2), confirmation that US 2,672,633 was treated by the EPO as X-category (single-reference) art against a golf-ball cleaner "comprising a cylindrical casing 1 lined with a helical strip of bristles" (EP 0 066 446 A3 search report), and confirmation of US 1,758,011's identity/assignee. I did not retrieve complete specifications of US 943,879, US 1,730,973, US 1,758,011, US 2,214,437, or US 2,672,633. Element-by-element mappings below are therefore reasoned hypotheses anchored in titles, dates, classifications and the snippets obtained — they should be confirmed against the full texts before being relied on in a filing or opinion. I flag each attribution's confidence inline.

Governing law. The application was filed Dec. 17, 1956. The 1952 Act's 35 U.S.C. § 103 took effect Jan. 1, 1953, so § 103 governs — but the obviousness standard as applied by courts of that era was materially more patentee-friendly than post-KSR. That distinction matters to the conclusion (§ 7 below).

Claim construction note. Claim 1's final element is recited as "sealing means interposed between the tube and sleeve to prevent leakage." That is a means-plus-function limitation (35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶ 6), so it is limited to the structures disclosed in the specification and their equivalents: (i) the U-shaped grommet with outer flange 54 slightly thicker than gap 58; (ii) flat resilient washers adhered about openings 28/30; (iii) a sprayed liquid-latex coating; and (iv) the tapered/wedge wall-and-sleeve construction of Figs. 4–5. Claim 1 as printed also carries OCR artifacts ("meansm-ounted," "sleeve ben ing") already flagged in the prior section; I do not repeat that discussion.

1. Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA), circa 1956

A mechanic or junior mechanical designer with roughly 2–4 years of experience in small stamped/molded consumer hardware — tubular metal and thermoplastic containers, screw and snap closures, gaskets, and brush assemblies — with working familiarity with (a) golf ball cleaning devices and (b) dispensing-container closures of the "rotate one member so its ports register with the other's" type. This is a low-sophistication, high-analogy field, which broadens the range of art deemed analogous and raises the obviousness exposure of a combination of old elements.

2. The claimed subject matter, decomposed

Claim 1 = five elements: (1) elongated hollow tube closed at both ends with a pair of diametrically opposed lateral openings near one end; (2) internal hollow cylindrical brush, bristles radially inward, defining a cylindrical brushing surface; (3) ball-retaining means reciprocating longitudinally in the tube, coaxial with the brushing surface; (4) sleeve movably mounted on the tube adjacent said end, itself having diametrically opposed lateral openings, movable between registration and non-registration; (5) sealing means between tube and sleeve preventing leakage in the non-registered position.

Claim 2 = added structure only: removable cap with annular peripheral flange closing said end; shoulder projecting outwardly from the tube on the side of the lateral openings opposite the cap; sleeve mounted rotatably between cap flange and shoulder.

Note the load-bearing observation for § 103: every element of claims 1 and 2 is a discrete, separately known mechanical expedient. The patent's own contribution, if any, lies in the arrangement — using the ball-access sleeve itself as the fluid seal — not in any sub-component.

3. Proposed Combination A (primary): Henrizi + Hurley + Reach

Rationale and motivation. Hurley and Henrizi were both before the examiner and both concern a tubular container whose contents are accessed through an opening that a surrounding member opens and closes. A PHOSITA seeking to convert a fixed-installation ball washer into a carryable, tilt-resistant unit (exactly the problem the patent's own background paragraph identifies) would naturally look to a tube-closure arrangement that (i) provides ball access without removing a threaded cap and (ii) closes flush and fluid-tight for transport. Substituting Hurley's rotatable apertured collar for the conventional cap of a golf-ball washer is a substitution of one known closure for another, in the same field, with a predictable result — the classic KSR "known technique, same way, better result" rationale.

4. Proposed Combination B (arguably stronger on the sleeve element): Henrizi or Allen + Punte

Punte et al., US 2,214,437, assigned to Continental Can Company, is titled "Dispensing container." Continental Can's 1940 dispensing-container portfolio is the archetypal source of the rotary port-registration closure: two relatively rotatable members each pierced with apertures, one aperture set brought into and out of registry with the other by twisting, with the interface relied on to contain the contents. If (as its title and provenance strongly suggest) Punte discloses that arrangement, then:

• Punte supplies element (4) (sleeve with diametrically opposed openings, movable between registration and non-registration) and, insofar as dispensing containers must not leak their contents in the closed position, evidence for element (5)'s function.
• Henrizi or Allen US 2,672,633 supplies elements (1)–(3).
• Motivation: Punte's closure is the recognized solution in the packaging art to exactly the problem the patent faces — retain a flowable contents charge while repeatedly opening and closing a small access port by relative rotation, with no separate cap to lose. The problem in the washer art (leaking cleanser, cap removal, lost caps) and the problem Punte solves (controlled discharge from a closed container) are the same problem in kind. A PHOSITA would apply it.

This combination is the one I would expect a modern challenger to lead with, because Punte's rotary-port teaching is a direct structural read on the "sleeve having diametrically opposed lateral openings… movable between a first position of registration… and a second position of non-registry." Confidence in this mapping: medium (title/assignee-derived; full text unverified).

Published corroboration that the sleeve-port concept was old in ball-cleaning specifically: the EPO's 1983 search report for Kleeneze's "Improvements in the cleaning of golf balls" lists US 2,672,633 (Allen) as [X] against a device described as "a cylindrical casing 1 lined with a helical strip of bristles 8" (EP 0 066 446 A3; see also FPO 4,473,917, which lists both 2,672,633 "Golf ball cleaner" and 2,672,637 "Portable golf ball cleaner" — Allen, both issued Mar. 23, 1954). Two consequences: (a) the "cylinder lined with a brush, ball passed through it" sub-combination was squarely known; and (b) Allen had a portable ball cleaner on the same 1954 date, which independently shows portability was a recognized design objective more than two years before the 1956 filing — undercutting any argument that the "portable" framing itself supplied patentable weight.

5. Proposal C: Bonderer (US 2,780,508) for the portability/mounting sub-text

Bonderer is the one reference whose full text I verified. It claims a golf ball container for mounting on the handle of a golf bag carrier, comprising "an elongated tubular member open at each end" having "a pair of diametrically disposed cutouts in one end" that engage the cart handle, "an opening in the side thereof adjacent said one end whereby a lower ball may be removed," and "means for detachably securing said member to said handle" (US 2,780,508). Note also: Bonderer is a Salem, Oregon inventor — the same city as Vandervort and Dawson — so contemporaneous awareness is at least plausible.

Bonderer is not a § 103 anticipation problem for claim 1 — it has no brush, no plunger, and no seal — but it is important in two respects. It supplies the "tubular member with a diametrically disposed pair of cutouts at one end and a lateral ball-removal opening, detachably mounted to a golf-cart handle" teaching, i.e., the portability-plus-cart-mounting environment the patent claims credit for. And because Bonderer is only § 102(e) art (filed July 27, 1953; issued Feb. 5, 1957), it can be combined under § 103 but cannot be used for § 102(a)/(b).

The Fig. 2 split clamp (76) with screw (80) and friction-pivoted ring (82) of US 2,822,558 is unclaimed. Nothing in claims 1–2 recites the support, so the clamp/pivot structure — the most distinctive thing about this washer — is legally irrelevant to validity. This is worth stating plainly, because it is the feature on which the specification spends the most descriptive effort and the one on which the patent's commercial rationale appears to rest.

6. Motivation to combine — articulated rationales

1. Same field of endeavor / reasonably pertinent art. All six references are from golf ball cleaning/handling (Cl. 15/21.x, 312/49) or packaging closures. Hurley and Punte are "reasonably pertinent to the particular problem" — containing and controllably accessing the contents of a tube — even though they are not ball washers. KSR expressly permits combination across such analogous arts.
2. The problem the patent itself articulates is the motivation. The specification's background states the need arises "far removed from the nearest golf ball washer" and that fixed washers "do not receive adequate and proper maintenance" — an express design incentive toward portability and self-containment, and its stated object is to "be sealed completely to prevent escape of cleansing liquid therefrom." Where the specification supplies the objective, prior art showing the means to the objective is combinable.
3. The final element is functional, not structural. Claim 1 asks only for "sealing means… to prevent leakage." Any of a grommet, a flat rubber washer, a latex coating, or a mating tapered wedge satisfies it; the specification itself lists all four as alternatives. When an applicant concedes four different ways to satisfy a limitation, the limitation adds little to the obviousness calculus (In re Harza; In re May). The latex and washer variants are, moreover, unremarkable gasket practice.
4. Predictable result / reasonable expectation of success. Rotating an apertured sleeve over an apertured tube to align and misalign ports is deterministic, requires no new instrumentation, and cannot fail in an unpredictable way. KSR: "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."
5. Design incentive to integrate, not aggregate. The patent emphasizes retracting the plunger "to reduce the assembly to minimum size" and rotating the sleeve "substantially ninety degrees, to seal the openings… during subsequent transport." The incentive to fold the ball-door and the fluid-seal into a single member — reducing part count and eliminating a loose cap — is a recognized design motivation strongly associated with obviousness (KSR, "a court must ask whether the improvement is more than the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions").
6. No teaching away. None of the six references disparages a rotatable apertured sleeve; Hurley and Punte affirmatively embrace that principle. Reach (Spalding) shows the field's major manufacturer already working the cylindrical-washer format.
7. Claim 2 as a mere assembly convenience. Capturing a rotating collar axially between a cap flange and an outward shoulder is the ordinary way to mount a rotatable ring on a cylinder (keep it from sliding off, don't overconstrain rotation). Nothing in claim 2 recites dimensions, clearances, materials or seal geometry. Objective evidence would be needed to rescue it, and on this record there is none.

7. Countervailing considerations (the case for patentability)

Stated fairly, because a one-sided analysis is worse than none:

• Era-specific law cuts the other way. This patent issued Feb. 11, 1958. Courts then applied Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equipment Corp., 340 U.S. 147 (1950) (combination of old elements must produce a "new result," not a mere aggregation) and Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941) (the "flash of creative genius" rhetoric). A&P Tea would cut against validity (aggregation of old elements), but a contemporary court asked to find this combination "obvious" in 1958 would have been applying a stricter standard than KSR allows today — that is, a 1950s court was more willing to find a new combination of old parts patentable than a modern court. If the question is "how would this have fared in 1958," the answer is considerably more favorable to the patentee than a modern § 103 analysis suggests. I flag this because the task says this is a 1956-invention patent, not a modern one.
• The asserted new result — a portable washer that is closed and leak-proof during transport — is arguably more than the sum of the parts. Neither Henrizi/Allen (a washer) nor Hurley/Punte (a closure) achieves a sealed, ball-bearing, scrubbing cylinder that seals by the same motion used for port closure. A patentee can argue the sleeve performs a dual function (ball door and gasket clamp) that no single reference teaches, and that the result is synergistic rather than aggregative. That is the patent's best § 103 argument.
• The wedge-seal embodiment (Figs. 4–5) — progressively increasing wall thickness in one rotational direction on the tube and opposite on the sleeve, with shoulders 72/74 self-aligning the openings — is genuinely clever and appears to have no counterpart in any cited reference. But it is not claimed; claim 1's "sealing means" would be construed to cover it as an equivalent, and claim 2 adds nothing about it. Unclaimed subject matter cannot rescue the claims.
• No secondary considerations are in evidence — no commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others, copying, or licensing data appears in the record I retrieved. Under Graham v. John Deere, the absence of such evidence leaves the prima facie case unrebutted.

8. Bottom line

Net assessment: on the art of record, claim 1 does not appear to be a close case under modern § 103; claim 2 is close to the line but probably falls with it. The decisive factual unknown is whether Henrizi US 1,730,973 (or Allen US 2,672,633) discloses a reciprocating ball holder coaxial with an encircling brush — element (3). If neither does, the case weakens materially and a challenger would need additional art; if one does, the combination is essentially complete on the face of the patent.

9. What would change this conclusion (verification gaps)

1. Full texts of US 943,879, US 1,730,973, US 1,758,011, US 2,214,437, US 2,672,633 — I derived the element mappings from titles, dates, classification and snippets only. My attributions of the rotatable-apertured-sleeve teaching to Hurley and Punte, and of the reciprocating-ball-holder teaching to Henrizi, are hypotheses requiring confirmation. Constructed lookup URLs, not yet retrieved: https://patents.google.com/patent/US943879A/en, .../US1730973A/en, .../US1758011A/en, .../US2214437A/en, .../US2672633A/en.
2. The prosecution history (USPTO PatentCenter, App. No. 628,864). Six cited references for two granted claims means the examiner either applied a subset, or considered and withdrew rejections. Which references were applied, and on what basis, materially informs whether any Why was this not obvious? rationale exists.
3. US 2,672,637 (Allen, "Portable golf ball cleaner," Mar. 23, 1954) — not cited on the face of US 2,822,558 but listed as a companion to US 2,672,633 in later art. If it discloses a portable, closed ball-cleaning tube, it is § 102(b) art that the examiner appears to have missed and that would strengthen an obviousness case considerably.
4. Date-of-invention evidence. Under pre-AIA § 102(e), Bonderer's July 27, 1953 filing date is only prior art if it precedes the applicants' invention date, not merely their filing date. If the inventors can swear behind July 1953, Bonderer drops out — which would remove the cart-mounting teaching but would not, by itself, defeat Combinations A or B.

I have not fabricated the disclosure contents of any reference; where I am inferring rather than reporting, I have said so.