US 3612122

I'll search for docket/litigation information on this patent number, then summarize from the authoritative full text provided.

Search results on litigation / docket activity

I searched for US 3612122 in connection with court/docket records (including CAFC 2026 activity). I found no authoritative litigation, PTAB, ITC, or Federal Circuit docket entries for US 3612122. The only search hits referencing "3612122" in a US-patent context were:

• A citation-list entry: US 3612122 is cited as prior-art literature in DE202010010705U1 ("Eierschalenentferner," Amit, Noah, 2010).
• Unrelated documents that merely share the number string (e.g., EP3612122A2 — Medicrea International, patient-specific spinal implants; DE3612122A1 — Nissan, rear-wheel steering; a USPC "3612122" class-subclass entry). These are different documents and are not being substituted for the US patent.

Caveat: this was a general web search, not a direct PACER/PTAB/CAFC docket query, so I cannot positively rule out a sealed or very recent filing. Nothing indicates litigation exists, and given the patent expired in 1988, active 2026 enforcement litigation would be implausible.

US Patent 3,612,122 — "Egg opener"

(Sourced from the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US3612122/en)

Cited prior art (5): US 1,924,789 (Horvath, "Egg opener device," 1933); US 2,798,521 (Bourque, "Egg cutter," 1957); DE 723,443 (Martin Lehr — egg cup with cap and swivelable head knife, 1942); DE 943,672 (Hermann Erlmeier, "Egg cutter," 1956); GB 734,339 (1955).

Cited by (4): US 4,137,837 (Warren); US 6,536,114 B2 (Lawless, "Boiled egg shell ripper"); DE202010010705U1 (Amit); USD1,111,709 S1 (Brownfield, "Egg separator dish," 2026).

Abstract: "A device for opening an uncooked liquid egg, a soft-boiled egg, or a hard-boiled egg. The egg is placed into a cavity in the egg holder. Then a knife blade is thrust into the shell to start a break. The knife blade is then rotated to force the break open so that the albumen and yolk may be readily removed. A trough is provided on the egg holder to facilitate the pouring out of the albumen and yolk of an uncooked egg. The knife blade is then removed."

Claims — plain language

There is one independent claim (claim 1); claims 2–5 depend from it.

• Claim 1 (independent). An egg opener with three elements: (a) a base shaped to form an egg receptacle; (b) a piercing element with a sharp point that can pierce the shell of an egg sitting in that receptacle; and (c) guide means on the base that (i) supports the piercing element for straight-line (translatory) movement along a path aligned with the piercing point, so it can move into and out of the shell, and (ii) mounts the element so it can rotate about an axis coinciding with that same path, so that after piercing, rotating the element separates the shell into two parts.

  • Note the OCR artifact in the description/claims as published on Google Patents: the text runs claim 1's tail into claim 2 ("…for separating said shell into two arts 2. An egg opener according to clatm l w ereln…"). The clean, authoritative reading is in the "Claims (5)" record: claim 1 ends "…for separating said shell into two parts." I have not auto-corrected the identifier—just flagging the source artifact.

• Claim 2 (dep. on 1). The piercing element is a relatively broad blade fitted with a handle, and the blade/handle assembly is supported in the guide. Broadness matters because the broad face wedges the shell apart as it is rotated.

• Claim 3 (dep. on 2). The guide means is a bore in the base that intersects the receptacle, sized to receive the blade and handle.

• Claim 4 (dep. on 3). The base and handle carry interengaging stop portions that limit how far the blade can travel toward the egg (i.e., a penetration-depth limiter, and—per the specification—a visual alignment indicator for blade orientation).

• Claim 5 (dep. on 1). The base is formed with an upwardly opening cavity that serves as the receptacle, plus a trough extending away from the recess to carry the albumen of an opened egg away from the receptacle.

How it works (specification summary)

A holder (1) has a cavity (2) with a bottom lip (3) that sets the egg at the correct height and accommodates varied egg sizes; part of the egg protrudes below the lip. The knife blade (6) is thrust through a hole/bore (5) to pierce the shell and start a break, then the handle (7) is turned a quarter turn, causing the broad blade to wedge the shell open. Stops (8) on the handle hit the sides of the holder to limit penetration and indicate blade position (flat side visible when aligned; end-view only after the quarter turn). For an uncooked egg the holder is tilted so contents slide out along the trough (4) into a vessel. The unit can be hand-held or rested on a surface, and may be made of wood, ceramic, plastic, or other materials.

Uncertainty flags

• Assignee/ownership: Records show only "Individual" (Richard C. Bjork); Google Patents states its assignee listing "may be inaccurate" and that no legal analysis was performed. A chain-of-title search (USPTO Assignment database) would be needed to confirm ownership history.
• Expiration: "Expired – Lifetime" with anticipated expiration 1988-10-12 is the listed status and is not a legal conclusion.
• Docket search: As stated, I found no CAFC 2026 (or other) litigation involving this specific number; treat that as "nothing found," not as certified absence.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 3612122.

Let me check litigation-specific databases and a few more targeted queries.

Let me try a few more targeted sources before concluding.

Litigation Search — US Patent 3,612,122

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving US Patent 3,612,122.

What I searched

• Google Patents entry for the patent (the authoritative full text supplied and fetched at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3612122](/patent/US3612122)/en)
• General web queries targeting the exact number: 3612122 patent lawsuit, "3612122" litigation, "US3612122" infringement case, "3,612,122" patent lawsuit district court, and a targeted query against the Unified Patents litigation portal.

No district court case, ITC action, PTAB/IPR/PGR proceeding, or CAFC appeal was returned naming US 3,612,122 as a patent-in-suit.

Corroborating indicators from the patent record itself

• Google Patents has no "Litigation" section for this patent. The page lists only Cited By (4), Citations (5), and Similar Documents. Google Patents typically surfaces a litigation panel when a patent has been asserted in US district court; its absence is meaningful negative evidence.
• The cited-by references (US 4,137,837; US 6,536,114; DE 202010010705 U1; USD 1,111,709 S1) are later, unrelated patents that merely cite '122 as prior art. Nothing suggests the '122 patent was itself asserted.
• Legal status: "Expired – Lifetime," with statutory expiration on 1988-10-12 (17 years from the 1971-10-12 grant). Any cause of action on the patent would have been time-barred more than 37 years ago.

Disambiguation (important — do not conflate)

Several of my search hits contained the digit string "3612122" but are different patents. I did not count these as results for US 3,612,122:

• DE 3,612,122 A1 — Nissan rear-wheel steering control (German patent; unrelated).
• EP 3,612,122 A2 — Medicrea International, patient-specific spinal implants (unrelated).
• Teva ANDA No. 212212 — an FDA ANDA number, not a patent (appeared in Paragraph IV complaints).
• The "DICAR '212 patent" and Theranos/Fuisz "'612 patent" — entirely different US patents sharing a short suffix.
• US 6,601,534 / US 5,057,965 / US 5,051,732 etc. — numbers appearing in IPC/CPC classification codes ("3612122" as a USPC class string), not patent citations.

Caveat on completeness

I was limited to the searches shown and could not directly query PACER, Docket Alarm, or the Unified Patents case-list API for the exact number (those are paywalled/login-gated or returned no indexed hits). Given (a) the patent expired in 1988, (b) it was a consumer kitchen gadget ("Egg opener") issued to an individual inventor (Richard C. Bjork, Mill Valley, Calif.) with no corporate assignee, and (c) the complete absence of any litigation reference in the patent record or general web, I assess the likelihood of any undiscovered litigation as very low. But I cannot state with absolute certainty that no case ever existed — only that none is known or discoverable from the sources searched, and that I found nothing supporting any such case.

If you need a definitive negative, the authoritative check would be a direct PACER "party/patent" search on 3,612,122 in the Docket Alarm or Unified Patents litigation databases, which I was unable to query directly here.

PTAB / AIA Trial Activity — U.S. Patent No. 3,612,122 ("Egg Opener")

Verification note: Sourced first from the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal): "The USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest." I then ran independent web searches for any PTAB docket, IPR/PGR/CBM number, Board decision, or Federal Circuit appeal naming US 3,612,122 or inventor Richard C. Bjork. Nothing surfaced. No proceeding numbers are reported below because none exist to report — I will not fabricate one.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (zero IPRs, zero PGRs, zero CBMs; breakdown: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0). Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB record at all — but you almost certainly don't need one, because the patent's own face shows it expired 1988-10-12. This is not a "hardened by IPR survival" patent; it is a dead pre-AIA patent whose last claim lapsed thirty-eight years ago. Any demand letter citing claims 1–5 of US 3,612,122 is not a licensing opportunity — it is a signal that the sender has not run a basic status check.

Key docket facts (from the patent's face):

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No proceedings to itemize

There is no IPR20XX-##### — Petitioner v. Bjork to write up, so the requested per-proceeding header block has nothing to populate. For completeness, here is what the searches did and did not produce:

• No PTAB trial numbers. Searches for an IPR/PGR/CBM involving "3612122," "US3612122," and "Bjork egg opener" returned no Board docket. The only patent-office-looking hits were unrelated: an examiner's form in Apple Inc. v. … IPR2015-00354 citing different patent 7,774,280 (whose application number happens to be 10/162,212 — a coincidental digit string, not US 3,612,122), and an unrelated SEC filing keyed to the ID "3612122."
• No Federal Circuit appeal. No CAFC docket or CourtListener opinion naming this patent was found.
• No ex parte reexamination certificate identified in the record I reviewed. I did not find affirmative evidence one was never filed; I simply found none, and I flag that as a limit of this search rather than a finding.
• Not a false negative from the ODP block alone: the absence is corroborated by web search, and it is expected here. Well-asserted patents attract IPRs; a utensil patent that never generated litigation — and that expired in 1988, before the AIA trial regime existed at all (IPR began 2012-09-16) — never would.

One near-miss worth naming so it isn't misread as a proceeding: the DE 20 2010 010 705 U1 utility model ("Eierschalenentferner," Amit/Noah, published 2010-11-25) lists US 3,612,122 in its cited patent literature (Zitierte Patentliteratur). That is a foreign prior-art citation in a German utility model, not a PTAB filing and not a U.S. proceeding of any kind. Similarly US 6,536,114 B2 ("Boiled egg shell ripper," Lawless) and US 4,137,837 A appear in the patent's "Cited By" list — these are later patents that cite the '122 reference; citing a patent is not challenging it.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: all five claims UNTESTED — and all five EXPIRED. Claims 1–5 of US 3,612,122 were never subjected to any AIA trial, any reexamination I could locate, or any court validity holding. They were also never adjudicated in any forum. The operative fact for a defendant is therefore not claim-level survival but term: the patent issued 1971-10-12 under the pre-URAA 17-year term and lapsed 1988-10-12. A patent that expired before the AIA existed cannot be infringed, cannot be the subject of a live damages theory, and cannot support a § 271 action. Claim 1 (base with egg receptacle + piercing element + guide permitting translatory movement and rotation about the same axis) is the broadest claim; claims 2–4 add the broad blade/handle, the bore intersecting the receptacle, and the interengaging stops; claim 5 adds the upwardly opening cavity and the albumen-conveying trough. All are moot. Note the printed claim set contains OCR/typo artifacts in the original ("two arts 2," "clatm l w ereln," "an eg") — the official claim text should be pulled from the USPTO Patent Center copy if exact quotation is ever needed, because the Google Patents rendering is unreliable at those spots.

Estoppel landscape: inapplicable. There is no petitioner, so there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel, no § 325(e)(2) estoppel, and no privity chain. Conversely, because no IPR was ever filed, a defendant also has no IPR-based invalidity shortcut — you cannot point to a Board judgment ratifying invalidity. You don't need one: expiration is a complete defense, and unlike a § 102/§ 103 attack it requires no expert, no claim construction, and no estoppel analysis. The prior art cited by the examiner during prosecution (US 1,924,789 Horvath; GB 734,339; DE 723,443 Lehr; DE 943,672 Erlmeier; US 2,798,521 Bourque) remains useful only as historical context for the crowded field of egg-opening devices — it has no current legal function.

Pattern signals: none. There is no repeat petitioner (there are no petitioners). There is no patent owner prosecuting PTAB appeals (Richard C. Bjork, an individual inventor in Mill Valley, California, appears nowhere in the PTAB or CAFC record I searched). No defensive aggregator — Unified Patents or otherwise — ever touched this patent, which is unsurprising: aggregators target asserted patents, and this one shows no assertion history. The single meaningful "signal" is a null: zero litigation, zero IPRs, zero reexaminations over the patent's entire enforceable life. That is the profile of a hobbyist utensil patent, not an assertion asset.

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Recommended next steps

1. Do not spend on an IPR. Do not spend on a validity opinion. If you have received a demand letter or a complaint asserting US 3,612,122, the response is a one-page letter attaching the patent's face page showing "Anticipated expiration 1988-10-12" and the status "Expired – Lifetime" (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3612122/en), plus the Patent Center status printout. Assert that the patent is expired; there can be no infringement.
2. Preserve the letter. A demand with no licensed product, no damages model, and no standing against an expired patent is evidence of a bad-faith assertion. If the sender is a recurring serial-assertion entity, the correspondence belongs in any fee-shifting or § 285 record — but note that a single baseless letter against an expired patent is weak ground for § 285 standing alone; the stronger posture is to refuse to engage and to document the refusal.
3. Verify status directly, once. Pull US 3,612,122 in the USPTO Patent Center and confirm maintenance-fee/expiration status and that no reexamination certificate, reissue, or certificate of correction is outstanding. I found no such documents via web search, but web search is not a substitute for the official file wrapper. PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov) will confirm the "no proceedings" result; CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com) will confirm the absence of any CAFC appeal.
4. Do not treat this as a "hardened patent" case. Because no IPR was ever filed, there is no Board judgment, no FWD to quote, and no disposition to link. The requested "link to the FWD and quote the disposition" step is impossible here by definition — no FWD exists. Any statement that claims of the '122 patent were "canceled," "sustained," or "held unpatentable" would be fabricated, and I make none.

Confidence statement: I am highly confident there are no AIA trial proceedings on US 3,612,122 — the ODP block is explicit and two rounds of targeted web search returned nothing. I have lower (but still high) confidence that no ex parte reexamination was ever filed, since that is an absence-of-evidence inference from search rather than a direct query of the reexam database.

I'll search for assignment records and ownership-chain evidence for US 3,612,122.

Assignment & Ownership-Chain Analysis — US Patent 3,612,122 ("Egg opener")

Primary sources consulted: the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US3612122/en (including its legal-events and assignee fields); searches directed at the USPTO Patent Assignment Search (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html, https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/); and general web queries on the patent number and on the inventor name. The 2014 USPTO "What are Assignments?" webinar deck at https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf confirms the coverage limitation cited below (records back to August 1980 only).

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Inventors

Pattern notes (and an explicit non-finding): With a single inventor and no corporate assignee, the classic "all inventors departed the original assignee within 12 months" fire-sale precursor cannot be evaluated — there was no original corporate assignee to depart from. I found no evidence regarding Bjork's employer, no employment-agreement record, and no evidence of later inventor-side transfers.

Unverified lead, flagged as such: a 2015 patent (US 8,955,395 B1, inventor "Bjork," Mill Valley / San Mateo, Calif. area, filed 2012, bicycle power sensor) surfaced in searching. The patent number is unrelated and I could not confirm it is the same person or a relative — 43 years separate the two filings, so this is at most a thread for identification work, not an ownership finding. I am not treating it as one.

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Original assignee

There is no original corporate assignee of record. The patent issued to the inventor personally:

• Google Patents lists Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual, with the caveat that "the listed assignees may be inaccurate" and that no legal analysis was performed.
• The front page of the printed patent (as reproduced in the full text) shows the References Cited block, the examiner (Robert C. Riordon), assistant examiner (J. C. Peters), and Attorney: Gordon Wood — but no "Assignee:" field naming a company, which is where an assignee would normally appear on a 1971 grant to a corporation.
• The specification itself contains no reference to a company, product line, or corporate embodiment.

Primary line of business / product: None determinable. The patent describes a consumer kitchen gadget — a holder (1) with cavity (2) and lip (3), a knife blade (6) with handle (7) and stops (8), a blade bore (5), and a pour-off trough (4) — stated to work on uncooked, soft-boiled, and hard-boiled eggs and to be makeable of "wood, ceramics, plastic, or other materials." That phrasing (open-ended materials, "the device is simple in construction," hand-held or table-top use) is characteristic of an individual inventor's one-off household product, not a manufactured commercial line. I found no evidence that the device was ever manufactured, marketed, or sold by any entity.

Current status of the original owner: Not determinable. The patent expired – lifetime on 1988-10-12 (17 years from the 1971-10-12 grant), per the legal-status data on Google Patents. Whether the inventor is deceased, and any estate/probate transfer of the (by then worthless) patent right, is not on any public record I could reach. I am not guessing.

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center shows no recorded assignment records for US 3,612,122. There is nothing to enumerate.

Basis for that call, stated precisely:

1. Google Patents legal events for this patent contain only four entries — Application filed by Individual (1969-08-06); Application granted (1971-10-12); Publication of US3612122A (1971-10-12); Anticipated expiration (1988-10-12). No "Assignment" event appears. Google Patents surfaces recorded assignment events ("Assignment of assignors interest") from the USPTO data when they exist; the absence is meaningful negative evidence.
2. The USPTO assignment database only covers documents recorded from August 1980 forward (per the USPTO's own webinar deck linked above). This patent was filed in 1969 and issued in 1971, so any pre-1980 instrument would be structurally absent from that database. Any post-1980 recording would have had to occur during the patent's remaining life (August 1980 – October 1988).
3. My searches did not surface any assignment record page, reel/frame, assignor/assignee pair, or correspondence address for this patent. The only hits connecting "3612122" to a US-patent context were prior-art citation lists (e.g., DE 20 2010 010 705 U1, https://FreePatentsOnline.com/DE202010010705U1.html, which cites "3612122 | 1971-10-12 | Bjork"; and the Justia page for US 6,536,114, https://patents.justia.com/patent/[6536114](/patent/6536114), which cites "3612122 | October 1971 | Bjork").

Correspondent of record: None. There is no assignment correspondent for this patent because there is no recorded assignment. The only attorney appearing anywhere in the record is Gordon Wood, listed on the face of the patent as the prosecution attorney of record — that is a prosecution designation, not an assignment-recording correspondent, and it must not be conflated with one. No reel/frame, no recording law firm, and no repeat correspondent exists to report.

Caveat on completeness (stated rather than papered over): I was not able to execute a direct, live query against the Assignment Center's search interface; the assignment-record pages did not surface in search results. So the finding is "no recorded assignment is known or discoverable from the sources searched," which is very strong but not a certified negative. The correct authoritative check is a patent-number query at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (and a parallel assignor-name query on BJORK, RICHARD C. to catch any portfolio recording that names him without naming the patent number).

Format note: The task instructions say that if the Assignment Center has no records, I should "say so plainly and stop after this section." Because the same instructions demand the remaining sections in a fixed order and include "Insufficient data (no records…)" as a verdict option, I have supplied all sections below with explicit no-data determinations rather than truncating the deliverable. The operative finding is exactly what is stated above: no recorded assignments.

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Timeline diagram

Nothing transferred — the chain is a straight line from inventor to expiry.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 3612122
    1969 : Application filed by Richard C Bjork
         : Named as individual sole inventor
    1971 : Patent issued
         : No assignee named on face
    1980 : USPTO assignment database opens
         : No recording appears later
    1988 : Patent expired
         : Rights lapsed

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

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

US 3,612,122 was filed 1969-08-06 and issued 1971-10-12 to its sole inventor, Richard C. Bjork, as an individual, with no assignee named on the face of the grant and no recorded assignment of any kind — Google Patents lists only four legal events (filing, grant, publication, and anticipated expiration on 1988-10-12) and no assignment event, and the only attorney appearing in the record, Gordon Wood, is the prosecution attorney, not an assignment correspondent. That absence is itself the finding: the patent remained inventor-owned for its entire term and lapsed in 1988, which is the opposite of the shell-entity/cascading-transfer/asserter pattern this analysis is designed to catch. The verdict is not "NPE" in any degree and not "defensive aggregator" — it is a twenty-year-old individual-owned consumer gadget patent about which no post-issuance ownership data exists to reconstruct.

Verify at: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (patent-number query on 3612122; assignor-name query on BJORK, RICHARD C.). Note the August 1980 coverage floor — a null result there does not establish that no pre-1980 transfer ever occurred, only that none was recorded in the searchable window.

I'll research each cited prior-art reference for US 3,612,122.

Let me get more detail on the remaining references.

Step 1 — USPTO / database identification of "3612122"

Searching for the exact number 3612122 returns a single US document, and I am treating it literally (no normalization):

Do not conflate — the same digit string appears in different documents that are not US 3,612,122 and are excluded: EP 3,612,122 A2 (Medicrea), DE 3,612,122 A1 (Nissan), FDA ANDA 212212, and USPTO/USPC class‑string hits. None of these were counted.

Step 2 — The five references cited on the face of US 3,612,122

All five were cited by the examiner (marked * on the Google Patents citation list). Their bibliographic data below is taken from the '122 front page, from Google Patents, and from FreePatentsOnline.

Statutory timing. Every reference predates the 1969‑08‑06 filing date by 13 years or more. Under the pre‑AIA § 102 statute that governs this 1969 filing, each is available as a § 102(b) statutory bar (printed publication/patent more than one year before filing) and, a fortiori, as § 102(a) art. Timing is not a contested issue for any of the five.

Step 3 — Reference‑by‑reference anticipation mapping (§ 102)

Element key for claim 1 (the only independent claim), abbreviated:
(a) base forming an egg receptacle; (b) piercing element with a sharp point; (c) guide on the base supporting the element for translatory (straight‑line) movement along a path coincident with the point; (d) the same mounting permitting rotation about an axis coinciding with that same path so the shell separates into two parts. Claims 2–5 add: broad blade + handle (2); the guide being a bore intersecting the receptacle (3); interengaging stops limiting blade travel (4); upwardly‑opening cavity + trough for albumen (5).

Net assessment. The only reference with a realistic § 102 case against independent claim 1 is US 1,924,789 (Horvath); the three German/UK references (R2–R4) and Bourque (R5) are best characterized as art directed at the sub‑elements (receptacle, blade, egg‑cup geometry) and as § 103 combinations. The claimed novelty resides in the dual capability of the mounting — translatory advance along a path coincident with the piercing point, then rotation about that same axis — as recited in claim 1(c)–(d) and mechanized by the bore (claim 3) and interengaging stops (claim 4).

Step 4 — Important caveat on "anticipation"

The '122 patent granted over these five references, all of which were of record. That means the examiner did not find any of them to anticipate claim 1 as presented — otherwise claim 1 would have been rejected. The § 102 mapping above is therefore a hypothetical re‑assessment, not a statement of what the USPTO held, and it is deliberately framed as "potentially anticipates."

Evidence limitations I want on the record:

• I retrieved bibliographic data (numbers, dates, titles, classes) for all five references, and substantive German text only for DE 723,443.
• I was not able to pull the full specifications and claims of US 1,924,789, DE 943,672, GB 734,339, or US 2,798,521 in this session. Descriptions for R3–R5 rely on title/classification only, so no element‑by‑element § 102 conclusion can responsibly be stated for them.
• The OCR source for the '122 claim set contains artifacts (e.g., "two arts 2. An egg opener according to clatm l w ereln…"). I have quoted claim 1's proper terminus ("…into two parts") from the authoritative "Claims (5)" record without altering any identifier.

Highest‑value next step for a definitive answer: obtain full‑text images of US 1,924,789 (and, secondarily, US 2,798,521 and DE 943,672) from USPTO PatentCenter / Google Patents and map their claims line‑for‑line against '122 claim 1.

I'll pull details on the cited prior art references to ground the § 103 analysis.

Let me pull specifics on the remaining cited references.

Let me try to retrieve the front-page details of the two German references and GB 734,339.

Obviousness Analysis — US Patent 3,612,122 ("Egg opener") under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Date note / contradiction flag: the task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the system context for this session states 2026‑09‑24. I flag this rather than silently reconciling it; nothing in the analysis below turns on the four-month difference. All content is built on the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3612122](/patent/US3612122)/en and the five references in that record's Prior Art (Citations) section.

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1. Framework and legal standard

Obviousness is assessed under the Graham v. John Deere factors: (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the prior art and the claims; (3) the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art; and (4) secondary considerations. Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), a combination is obvious where the elements are known and combined "according to known methods" to yield "predictable results," and the "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions" is not patentable.

Two threshold points materially help the obviousness case here:

• Same field of endeavor / analogous art is not in dispute. All five cited references sit in the egg-handling kitchen-utensil space. The '122 patent is classified A47J43/14 ("Devices or machines for opening raw eggs or separating the contents thereof"), and the two German references are classified A47G19/28 ("Egg-cups; Openers for boiled eggs"). These are the same problem space: holding an egg and opening its shell.
• The device is structurally simple and entirely mechanical — a holder, a broad blade, a bore, two stops, and a trough (specification at the '122 record). Simplicity cuts toward obviousness, because there is little room for unpredictable interaction among elements.

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2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (Graham factor 3)

A person having ordinary skill in the art ("PHOSITA") would be a mechanical/industrial-design artisan with roughly 2–4 years' experience designing small hand-operated kitchen utensils (egg cups, egg cutters, juicers, hand tools), familiar with the standard expedients of the cutlery and tableware trades: fixed and pivotable blades, bores/slots as blade guides, handles, depth-limiting shoulders/stops, and drainage/pouring channels. No advanced degree is required. The artisan would routinely look to prior egg cups and egg cutters when asked to improve on an egg opener. This skill level is low, which broadens the range of what is "obvious."

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3. Scope and content of the cited prior art (Graham factor 1)

Supplementary art located during this analysis (NOT part of the patent's cited-reference list — treat with caution): DE 195 2496 U ("Egg opener," source https://patents.google.com/patent/DE1952496U/en) discloses an egg cup base with a cup pushed over the egg, an axis 8 carrying a handle 9 on the cup's end face, a crank 10 to which a knife 11 is fixed, the crank being transversely displaceable in the axis and spring-biased out of a slot in the cup wall so that, once the cup is seated, the crank is pushed inward and the knife 11 pierces the eggshell, after which axis 8 is rotated at handle 9 to cut the shell ring-wise. That is, in substance, a pierce-then-rotate-about-the-same-axis egg opener. I have not verified its publication date, so I do not rely on it as § 102 art; it is offered only as evidence of what the field already knew.

State-of-the-art corroboration from the record's own "Cited By" / "Similar Documents" lists: US 4,137,837 (egg-white/yolk separator); US 6,536,114 B2 (boiled egg shell ripper); US 2,823,715 (egg cracking device); US 3,494,397 (eggshell cracker); US 2,827,936 (egg cracker); USD 1,111,709 S1 (egg separator dish); and, for troughs/pouring channels in food receptacles generally, US 2,701,593 (orange juicer), US 3,464,344 (juice extractor), US 3,249,068 (food container). These are not § 103 combinable references on their own, but they demonstrate that egg-holding vessels with drainage/separating conduits and egg-shell-opening blades were a crowded, well-developed art by 1969.

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4. Claim-by-claim obviousness

Claim 1 (independent) — likely obvious

Claim 1 requires: (a) a base forming an egg receptacle; (b) a piercing element with a sharp point to pierce a shell in the receptacle; (c) guide means on the base supporting the element for translatory movement along a path coincident with the point, and mounting it for rotation about an axis coinciding with that same path, so rotation separates the shell into two parts.

• Element (a) — base/receptacle: fully disclosed by DE 723,443 (the egg cup itself; the egg-receiving cup is the base). Also inherent in US 1,924,789 and US 2,798,521.
• Element (b) — piercing element: disclosed by DE 723,443's Köpfmesser (head knife) and, more squarely, by the supplementary DE 195 2496 U knife/crank that is pushed into the shell. US 1,924,789 and US 2,798,521 are egg openers/cutters and would likewise supply a shell-engaging blade.
• Element (c) — guide + rotation about the piercing axis: DE 723,443 mounts its knife for swivel/rotation through a slot in the cap — i.e., a guide opening intersecting the receptacle that constrains the knife while permitting rotation to open the shell. The only arguable gap is that DE 723,443 frames the motion as schwenkbar (pivotable/swiveling) rather than a pure axial plunge + coaxial rotation. That gap is closed by (i) the supplementary DE 195 2496 U, whose crank is transversely displaceable in the axis and then rotated about it — literally translation + coaxial rotation; and (ii) the ordinary artisan's knowledge that a blade mounted in a bore can both slide and spin in that bore.

Rationale for combining: Both DE 723,443 and US 1,924,789/US 2,798,521 address opening an egg's shell while the egg sits in a holder. Combining them is the use of a known technique (blade-in-slot, swivel-to-open) applied to a known device (egg holder) ready for improvement, to yield the predictable result of a clean break. KSR rationale (D) and (A). Nothing in the references teaches away; the '443 background paragraph affirms the desirability of exactly this arrangement.

Conclusion: Claim 1 is very likely obvious over DE 723,443 in view of one of US 1,924,789 / US 2,798,521 (and, if it qualifies as prior art, DE 195 2496 U). If US 1,924,789 in fact discloses a plunging-and-rotating opener, claim 1 may even be anticipated under § 102 — I cannot confirm this without its text.

Claim 2 — likely obvious

Adds "a relatively broad blade provided with a handle supported in said guide." DE 723,443's instrument is a Köpfmesser — a knife (blade) — and the supplementary DE 195 2496 U expressly provides a handle 9 on the axis 8. Adding a handle to a blade inserted in a guide is the paradigm of a simple substitution of a known element to obtain predictable results (KSR rationale (B)), and the '122 specification itself concedes that the broad face is what wedges the shell — a purely geometric consequence of blade width, not an inventive contribution. Claim 2 is likely obvious.

Claim 3 — likely obvious

Adds that the guide means is "a bore in intersecting relation to said receptacle and adapted to receive said blade and handle therein." DE 723,443's Schlitz (slot) in the cap through which the knife swivels is a guide opening intersecting the egg-receiving volume; a "bore" is the geometrically obvious, round-cornered equivalent of a slot for receiving a round-ish blade-and-handle shaft. Substituting a bore for a slot is a design choice with predictable results (KSR rationale (B)/(C)), and the supplementary DE 195 2496 U again shows the blade/crank passing through an opening in the cup wall. Claim 3 is likely obvious.

Claim 4 — likely obvious

Adds "interengaging stop portions [on base and handle] for limiting the movement of said blade toward said egg." This is the '122 patent's stops 8 that govern penetration depth. The prior art directly supplies the concept: DE 723,443 describes an anchoring device that secures the required distance between the hinged lid and the lower flap for the head knife, and a set screw (Stellschraube) fixing the sleeve's height — i.e., structure that limits/defines knife position relative to the egg. Independently, a shoulder or stop on a handle to limit insertion depth is a ubiquitous mechanical expedient (a "known work in one field" applied with predictable results; KSR rationale (F)). Claim 4 is likely obvious. Note that the '122 specification recites an additional function for the stops — visual indication of blade orientation (flat side visible vs. end-on after a quarter turn) — but that is an inherent, unclaimed benefit of the structure, and claim 4 recites only the movement-limiting function. A court could nevertheless find a secondary, non-obviousness argument here if the orientation-indicating function were read into the claim, but as literally drafted, claim 4 reads on any depth-limiting shoulder.

Claim 5 — the strongest claim, but still probably obvious

Adds "an upwardly opening cavity forming said receptacle and a trough extending away from said recess for conveying the albumen of an opened egg away from said receptacle."

• Upwardly opening cavity receptacle: squarely disclosed by DE 723,443 (egg cup) and by every other reference.
• Trough for conveying albumen away: this is the one element for which I found no express disclosure in the five cited references. That is the claim's best non-obviousness argument. However, the obviousness case is still strong:
  1. Analogous field, same problem. Draining/pouring channels are standard in liquid-handling receptacles — see the record's "Similar Documents," e.g., US 3,464,344 (juice extractor) and US 2,701,593 (orange juicer), and the "Cited By" art US 4,137,837 (egg white/yolk separator) and USD 1,111,709 S1 (egg separator dish). The problem of routing egg contents to a vessel was a recognized one in the art.
  2. The '122 specification frames the trough as a convenience feature, not a technical advance. Its stated object is simply that "the yolk and albumen ... may be easily poured from the egg opener into a vessel" — a predictable result of providing a spout/channel on a tilting receptacle.
  3. Known technique applied to a known device. Adding a pouring trough/spout to an egg-holding cup so that tilting the cup directs liquid contents is squarely KSR rationale (C)/(D) — improving a similar device in the same way (adding a pour channel) to obtain a predictable result.

Conclusion: Claim 5 is probably obvious over DE 723,443 in view of the general kitchen-receptacle art, but it is the claim most vulnerable to a non-obviousness argument because (a) no single cited reference discloses a trough, and (b) the examiner apparently did not cite art expressly showing one. A patent owner would argue the trough, in combination with a receptacle that also receives a penetrating blade and a tilting pour, was a specific, non-obvious arrangement. Given the crowded nature of the art and the purely predictable function of a pour channel, that argument would likely fail, but it is the most contestable point in the patent.

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5. Consolidated motivation to combine (KSR rationales)

The examiner's citation of all five references in the same field establishes that these are analogous art. The motivations are:

1. Same field, same problem (opening an egg's shell while it is held in a receptacle), so the artisan would naturally consult egg cups, egg cutters, and egg openers together.
2. Express acknowledgment of the combination in the art. DE 723,443's background section concedes the pre-existence of egg cups with (i) a cap and a knife swivelable through a cap slot, and (ii) a swivelable knife with a hinged lid. This is an admission that the very elements of claim 1 were known to combine.
3. Design incentive / known market force. The '122 specification and the crowded "Similar/Cited-By" record show a long-felt effort to open eggs cleanly (fewer shell fragments) and to handle uncooked liquid eggs — providing the "design incentive" and "market force" drivers recognized in KSR rationale (F).
4. Predictable results. Every claimed element operates according to its established function: a sharp point pierces; a broad blade wedged by rotation splits; a bore guides; a stop limits depth; a trough drains. There is no unpredictable interaction, and the device "does no more than yield predictable results."

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6. Anticipation-adjacent point (why § 103, not § 102, is the live question)

DE 723,443 alone comes very close to the claim 1 concept (receptacle + cap-mounted knife swivelable through a slot to open an egg), but on the retrieved text its knife is described as schwenkbar (pivoting/swiveling), not expressly as a blade that (a) translates into the shell and then (b) rotates about the same axis of travel. That distinction is what keeps the analysis primarily in § 103 rather than § 102. If US 1,924,789 (Horvath) or the supplementary DE 195 2496 U discloses a blade plunging axially and then rotating about that axis, claim 1 would likely be anticipated outright. I could not verify either reference's full text, so I state this conditionally.

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7. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

• Commercial success / long-felt need / failure of others: I found no evidence of commercial success, licensing revenue, industry praise, or failed attempts by others. Google Patents shows the assignee as "Individual" (Richard C. Bjork), with no corporate chain of title surfaced.
• Copying: no evidence of copying by competitors is in the record.
• Nexus: even if any commercial evidence existed, no nexus to the claimed subject matter has been shown.
• Age of the art and expiration: the patent issued 1971‑10‑12 and is listed "Expired – Lifetime" with anticipated expiration 1988‑10‑12. Any secondary-considerations record would necessarily be decades stale.

Accordingly, secondary considerations do not overcome the strong prima facie obviousness case for claims 1–4, and would likely not save claim 5.

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8. Overall conclusion and uncertainty flags

Conclusion: On the evidence in the patent's own Prior Art section, claims 1–4 are very likely obvious under § 103 (DE 723,443 in view of US 1,924,789 and/or US 2,798,521, with US 2,798,521 and DE 943,672 corroborating; the supplementary DE 195 2496 U reinforcing claim 1's plunging-and-rotating blade). Claim 5 is probably obvious but is the most defensible claim, since no cited reference expressly discloses the trough and the examiner appears not to have relied on trough-showing art.

Uncertainty flags (do not treat as verified):

• US 1,924,789 (Horvath): full specification not retrieved in this session despite targeted searching. My characterization rests only on its title and examiner-citation status. If it discloses a plunging-and-rotating blade, claim 1 may be anticipated, not merely obvious.
• US 2,798,521 (Bourque): only the bibliographic record (title, classes, dates) was retrieved (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/2798521.html); the disclosure was not read.
• DE 943,672 (Erlmeier) and GB 734,339: content not retrieved; the GB reference has no title or assignee shown even in the '122 record.
• DE 195 2496 U: content retrieved and highly on-point, but it is not one of the five references the patent cites, and I have not confirmed its publication date; I therefore do not treat it as § 102 art. Treat it as corroborative evidence of the state of the art only.
• The "art" retrieved includes OCR-fragmented German and unrelated documents (e.g., EP 3,612,122 spinal implants, NL 2,018,892 poultry-egg handling) that share digit strings but are different documents and were excluded, consistent with the disambiguation in the previously generated sections.

Per the operating rules, nothing above auto-corrects any patent or reference identifier; where the record itself contains OCR artifacts (e.g., "two arts"/"clatm l w ereln"), the clean reading is taken from the "Claims (5)" record without altering the identifier itself.