US 370348

I'll verify the patent record against live sources before summarizing.

US Patent 370,348 — Verification Note First

Before the summary, one search-hygiene point, per your "do not auto-correct" rule: hits for the string "370348" in live sources are not all this patent:

On the CAFC 2026 docket question: my searches returned no Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket, decision, or appeal involving US 370,348. I cannot rule this out with certainty — I did not retrieve the CAFC docket itself — but there is strong structural reason to expect nothing: this patent is a 19th-century "No Model" patent that expired in 1904 (Google Patents lists an anticipated expiration of 1904-09-20 and legal status "Expired – Lifetime"). It is not a candidate for 2026 infringement litigation, and any 2026 CAFC hit on the string "370348" should be presumed to be an unrelated docket or classification number until proven otherwise. I am flagging this as a gap rather than a confirmed negative.

US Patent 370,348 — Summary

Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US370348](/patent/US370348)/en (fetched 2026-09-24). All below is drawn from that authoritative full text.

⚠️ Name/spelling uncertainty (not auto-corrected)

The OCR'd specification header renders the surname as "PEROIVAL" ("HERBERT E. PEROIVAL"), and the signature block likewise reads "HERBERT E. PEROIVAL." The OCR of the same document elsewhere produces "PERCIVALL" in the running header ("H. E. PEROIVALL CLOTHES LINE"). "Percival" is the likely intended reading, but I am not asserting it as authoritative — per your instruction I am reporting the identifier as it appears. Similarly, "Fig. 4 is a section on the line a; w of Fig. 3" is almost certainly an OCR corruption of a section-line label (e.g., "x y"); I am not correcting it.

Abstract

There is no abstract. This is an 1887 patent issued long before statutory abstracts were required. The functional equivalent, from the specification, is the invention statement:

"The invention relates to a clothes-line having formed therewith or thereon nipping devices for receiving and holding garments or clothes, and said nipping devices, preferably, also forming a part of the line."

The patent expressly frames its disclosure as illustrative, not exhaustive: "There are a number of ways in which the line can be made and the same effect or result procured and by substantially the same means."

The claimed structure in one paragraph

A line A is formed with apertures or openings a at intervals, created by outwardly-extending portions a of the wire/metal. Communicating with each opening are nipping-spaces a' running lengthwise (longitudinally) of the line, bounded by nipping devices or jaws a² a³ that are continuations of the flaring sections of the outwardly-extended portions. The jaws are formed from wire/metal running lengthwise of the line. Preferred construction: two continuous wires (Fig. 1) twisted together to close the jaws at the far end of their straight nipping sections; alternatives include clips/clasps b (Fig. 3), independent joined sections (Figs. 2 and 5), and a punched flat plate/rod (Fig. 6). Jaws may extend from both sides of an aperture (Figs. 1, 3, 6) or one side only, and preferably are opposed, so that in use the wind tends to draw the garment corners deeper into the recesses and hold the article. Material should be galvanized metal or other non-rusting/non-corroding metal.

Independent Claims — Plain Language

The patent carries three claims, all independent (no dependent claims; normal for 1887 practice).

Claim 1 — The basic nip-jaw geometry.
A metal clothes-line that has, at intervals, portions bent or extended outward to form openings/apertures a into which clothing is inserted, plus nipping-jaws that run lengthwise along the line and are continuations of those outwardly-extended portions.
Plain version: A metal line with periodic outward bumps that create holes; the metal that makes the bumps continues on as lengthwise pincer jaws for gripping cloth.

Claim 2 — Jaws on both ends of each opening.
A metal clothes-line with longitudinally-extending nipping-jaws and a series of openings, from BOTH ends of which the jaws extend, the jaws forming nipping-spaces that communicate with the openings.
Plain version: Same idea as claim 1, but specifically requiring jaws to project from both ends of every opening, with the nip gap opening directly into the insertion hole. This is the claim that reads on the opposed/unidirectional-grip arrangement.

Claim 3 — Two-wire construction.
A metal clothes-line consisting of two wires or rods bent outward at intervals to form the openings a, and connected to each other between the openings, with longitudinally-extending nipping-jaws located between the connected portions and the openings.
Plain version: The specific two-strand build — two wires bowed apart to make the holes, joined back together (twisted, clipped, etc.) in the spans between holes, with the jaw segments residing between each joint and each hole. This is the "best mode" embodiment (Fig. 1, two single continuous wires, "the cheapest and probably the most efficient").

Uncertainty Flags

• Inventor name spelling: reported as OCR'd ("PEROIVAL"/"PERCIVALL"); "Percival" is probable but not confirmed by me against the USPTO original.
• "Assignee": there is no assignee in the corporate sense — only a recorded one-third conveyance to Myron O. Percival. Do not report a company as assignee for this patent.
• No abstract exists in the original; the summary above is the specification's own invention statement, not an official abstract.
• CAFC 2026 docket: I found no CAFC 2026 activity for US 370,348, and the expiration/age of the patent makes it very unlikely, but I am presenting that as an unverified negative rather than a confirmed fact.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 370348.

None of those results relate to the 1887 patent — they're about modern patents numbered e.g. 6,180,370 or similar. Let me run more targeted searches.

Still no hits on the 1887 patent itself. Let me try a few more targeted angles.

Bottom line

No litigation is known — and no litigation record exists — involving U.S. Patent No. 370,348 ("Clothes-Line," Herbert E. Percival, issued September 20, 1887). I found no case, in any forum, in which US 370,348 was asserted, challenged, or adjudicated.

Identifying the patent correctly (to avoid false positives)

Before reporting "none," it is worth pinning down exactly what US 370,348 is, because this number is a magnet for mismatches:

What I searched, and what came back

Searches for the patent number in connection with litigation returned only unrelated patents, none of which is US 370,348:

• '370 shorthand for different patents — e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,180,370 (PDL v. Alexion, D. Del., counterclaims filed 2007); U.S. Pat. No. 11,967,370 ("Vervain" NAND-flash family, PTAB proceedings). These are six- and eight-digit numbers whose last three digits are 370.
• '348 shorthand for different patents — e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 9,922,348 B2 (Publishing Technologies / RPX IPRs); U.S. Pat. No. 8,135,801; the Hologic v. Minerva surgical patent; the Intra-Cellular Therapies '348 patent (D.N.J. 2024). Again, none is US 370,348.
• US 3,346,513 and US 2,298,432 surfaced because "Serial No. 370,348" appears in them as a filing serial number, not a patent number. This is a classic false-positive trap and I deliberately did not treat it as relevant.

In other words, every candidate hit was either (a) a later patent whose number merely ends in 370 or 348, or (b) an application serial number that happens to be 370,348. Neither is the patent you asked about.

Why the record is (expectedly) empty

Three structural reasons mean that "no record found" here is the expected result rather than a search failure:

1. Age. The patent issued in 1887 and expired September 20, 1904. Any enforcement suit would be roughly 120–140 years old.
2. Docket coverage. PACER and modern litigation aggregators (Unified Patents' litigation caselist, RPX Insight, Docket Navigator, CourtListener/RECAP) are populated from electronic filings. CourtListener's RECAP hold is concentrated in roughly the last two decades, and even PACER's earliest electronic dockets generally begin in the late 1980s to mid-1990s depending on the district. A pre-1905 infringement action would not appear in any of them as a docket entry.
3. Reporting format. Nineteenth-century patent litigation is documented, when at all, in printed case reporters (e.g., Federal Reporter volumes of the era, Off. Gaz. litigation notices, Circuit Court opinion volumes) — not in searchable patent-litigation databases. I did not locate any reported decision naming this patent.

Caveats you should carry forward

• This is not proof that no suit was ever filed. It is accurate to say that no litigation record is discoverable in the databases and sources I searched, and that no such record surfaced for this specific patent number. It is not accurate to say with certainty that none ever existed. Circa-1887 enforcement would have been a Circuit Court action that would almost certainly never have been digitized.
• I could not directly query the sources you named. I was not able to browse https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist or PACER directly; my results come from general web searches. If you need a definitive negative for the modern era, a manual Unified Patents portal check and a PACER docket search on "370348" would confirm what I found, but note that neither source's coverage reaches back to this patent's enforceable life.
• A note on the patent's own text. The specification states the jaws "should be arranged in the line to oppose each other" so that "the action of the wind shall tend to draw the ends farther into the recesses and to hold the garment." That is the kind of functional limitation a late-19th-century competitor (makers of wire clothes-lines and clothes-pins) would have litigated over — the "Similar Documents" list on the Google Patents page is crowded with 1874–1916 clothes-pin and clothes-line patents from that very period, showing an active competitive field. Yet I found no action naming US 370,348 specifically.

Conclusion: no known litigation. Plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, and outcome/status cannot be supplied because no case involving US 370,348 was located.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before writing the analysis.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 370,348: zero (0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials). The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings for this patent, and independent web searches surface no Board proceeding, FWD, or Federal Circuit appeal involving it. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "the patent is hardened by surviving IPRs" — it is the far stronger position that the patent expired on 1904-09-20, more than 120 years ago, and no AIA trial has ever been filed against it. No PTAB proceeding has ever canceled or sustained any of claims 1–3, because none was ever instituted. For a defendant, the correct move is not an IPR; it is a Rule 12 motion and a statute-of-limitations argument.

No proceedings to itemize

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} block to write, because the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" list from the USPTO ODP is empty and nothing contradicts it. I will not manufacture a proceeding number, panel, or FWD. What I can do is explain why the absence is structural rather than coincidental, which is the analytically useful part.

Grounding facts from the patent's own record (source: US370348A, Google Patents):

• Title: Clothes-line. Inventor: Herbert E. Percival, of Spokane, Washington Territory; one-third assigned to Myron O. Percival of Lynn, Massachusetts.
• Granted: 1887-09-20. Application filed: 1886-08-16, Serial No. 210,965, expressly marked "(No model.)" — antebellum-style prosecution.
• Legal status in the ODP/Google record: "Expired - Lifetime," with a recorded "Anticipated expiration" of 1904-09-20 (17 years from grant under the pre-URAA term).
• Claims: exactly three, all drawn to a metal clothes-line:
  • Claim 1 — metal clothes-line with "at intervals outwardly-extended portions to form openings or apertures a for the insertion of the clothing, and nipping-jaws extending lengthwise of the line and forming continuations of the said outwardly-extended portions."
  • Claim 2 — metal clothes-line with "longitudinally-extending nipping-jaws and a series of openings, from both ends of which the said jaws extend, the latter forming nipping-spaces communicating with the said openings."
  • Claim 3 — a metal clothes-line "consisting of two wires or rods bent outward at intervals to form openings a, and connected together between the said openings."
• No family: the ODP family record (ID=2439362) lists a single application — US370348D/US370348A. There are no continuations, divisionals, reissues, or later-filed family members from which a live patent could be asserted. The classification is D06F53/02 (Clothes-lines) — a mechanical laundry line, not a telecommunications or software patent.

Why an AIA trial is effectively unavailable as a matter of law and practice:

1. CBM is categorically dead. Covered business method review was limited to patents claiming a "method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service," and the program sunset on 2020-09-16. A wire clothes-line with nipping jaws is not a financial-services patent, and the program no longer exists regardless.
2. PGR is categorically unavailable. Post-grant review reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. US 370,348's effective filing date is 1886-08-16.
3. IPR is technically available in theory, but pointless in fact. 35 U.S.C. § 311 does not exclude old or expired patents, and the Board has exercised jurisdiction over expired patents where a live controversy existed. But an IPR against a patent whose "anticipated expiration" is 1904-09-20 would cost a petitioner well over $100,000 in fees and expert time to cancel claims that cannot support a damages award. Under 35 U.S.C. § 286, a patentee may recover damages only for infringement committed within six years before suit — here, nothing later than roughly 1910. There is no live royalty base, no injunction available, and no commercial product at risk. The absence of PTAB activity is not a signal that the patent is strong; it is proof that the patent is worthless to challenge.
4. The patent is also not the "348 patent" anyone searching will find. This is the single biggest practitioner trap.

Search false-positive warning — do not confuse these patents

Every apparently relevant hit for "370348 PTAB" in public search resolves to a different patent. If you brief a court or a colleague on "the '348 PTAB proceedings," you will almost certainly cite one of these, none of which is US 370,348:

None of these is the 1887 clothes-line patent, and none of the outcomes (institution, settlement, invalidation, Federal Circuit affirmance) can be attributed to US 370,348. If a demand letter cites "US 370,348" and then points you to IPR2024-00250 or the RPX decisions as proof the patent is "litigated and validated," that is a misattribution you can dismantle in one paragraph.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all three claims are UNTESTED and all three are EXPIRED. No AIA tribunal has ever adjudicated claims 1, 2, or 3 of US 370,348 — not by institution, not by FWD, not by settlement, not by adverse judgment. There is no narrowed set of "surviving claims" to work around, because there was never any narrowing. The claims as issued on 1887-09-20 stand exactly as written in the printed patent, and they lapsed by operation of the pre-URAA 17-year term. Under 35 U.S.C. § 311 and the AIA's temporal reach, only IPR would even theoretically be open; PGR is foreclosed by the 2013-03-16 effective-filing cutoff, and CBM is foreclosed both by subject matter and by the 2020-09-16 sunset.

Estoppel landscape: there is none, and it is irrelevant. Because no petition was ever filed, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has attached to no one. Every prior-art ground that was ever available remains formally available — including the patent's own extraordinarily thin prosecution record (a two-page 1886 specification, no cited references, and a "(No model.)" filing) and the entire body of 1880s–1900s wire-and-clothes-pin art that Google Patents itself lists as "Similar Documents" (e.g., US 200,299, US 160,661, US 309,669, US 207,224). But note the asymmetry: estoppel is a shield against the petitioner, not a tool for a defendant. Here the defendant's real shield is § 286's six-year damages lookback and the patent's 1904 expiration — not an estoppel bar.

Pattern signals: there are none, and the silence is diagnostic, not ominous. No petitioner has filed once, let alone repeatedly; the patent owner (Herbert E. Percival, and Myron O. Percival as one-third assignee) obviously never appealed anything to the Federal Circuit, which did not exist in its current form until 1982; and no defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents has ever touched this patent. Contrast that with what a well-asserted patent looks like: the Publishing Technologies family cited above attracted both RPX (twice) and Meta (twice) because real products and real money were on the line. A 138-year-old expired clothes-line patent attracting zero PTAB filings tells you there is no assertion campaign worth defending against — or that any assertion is a demand-letter shakedown built on a number that misleads its recipient.

Recommended next steps

• If a demand letter cites US 370,348, treat it as a fraud/misrepresentation data point, not a merits dispute. Check the cited proceeding numbers against the table above; if the sender cites IPR2024-00250, IPR2018-01131, or IPR2016-00685 as "proceedings on this patent," the misattribution is documented.
• Do not file an IPR. Nothing to gain: the patent's "Anticipated expiration" per the ODP record is 1904-09-20, and § 286 caps recovery at six years pre-suit. An IPR would burn fees to invalidate claims that cannot yield a judgment.
• Anchor the defense in expiration and limitations. The patent's own record — filed 1886-08-16, granted 1887-09-20, expired 1904-09-20 — is the whole case. There is no patent term left to infringe.
• No trial-stage milestones to track. With zero proceedings on file, there is no § 316(a)(11) one-year FWD deadline, no oral hearing, and no Federal Circuit docket. Verify independently at PTAB E2E and USPTO PatentCenter if you need a fresh certificate, and check CourtListener for any docket naming "370,348" — with the caveat that those searches will return the unrelated patents above.
• Flag for the record: the structured ODP block is the canonical source here, and it is empty. I found no older or recently-filed proceeding that the ODP ingest had missed. My confidence in the "zero proceedings" conclusion is high for the AIA trial era (2012–present); I did not locate any pre-AIA interference, reissue, or ex parte reexamination history for this patent, and I cannot rule out that such a record exists in paper-only archives that are not web-indexed.

I'll verify the assignment record before writing anything, since this patent's age raises a real question about whether modern assignment data even exists for it.

Assignment Record — US Patent 370,348

Method note first, because it governs everything below. I queried live sources but could not load the Assignment Center itself (it is a client-side application that my search tooling does not render). So the findings below rest on (a) the authoritative full patent text, and (b) the USPTO's own stated coverage rules for the assignment database. Where that leaves a residual uncertainty, I say so rather than filling it in.

Inventors

• Sole named inventor. Application filed 1886-08-16, Serial No. 210,965, "(No model.)." Witnesses: H. E. Allen and J. S. Allen.
• Employer: the patent carries no corporate assignee, no "assigned to" employer legend, and no company name anywhere in the specification. Spokane in 1886 was a pre-statehood frontier town (Washington became a state in 1889); no employer of record can be derived from the document. My searches for "Herbert E. Percival" Spokane returned zero relevant hits.
• The "all inventors departed within 12 months" heuristic cannot be run. There is no employer to depart from and one inventor only. What does exist is a pre-issuance conveyance — the opposite of a departure signal (see next section). Per your instruction not to invent data, I am not characterizing it as a portfolio-stress tell.

Original assignee

There is no original assignee in the corporate sense, and none ever existed for this patent.

The ownership legend printed on the face of the issued patent reads:

"HERBERT E. PEROIVAL, OF SPOKANE, WASHINGTON TERRITORY, ASSIGNOR OF ONE-THIRD TO MYRON O. PEROIVAL, OF LYNN, MASSACHUSETTS."

So ownership as of issuance was a split of undivided interests between two private individuals:

• Herbert E. Percival (inventor) — retained two-thirds
• Myron O. Percival, of Lynn, Massachusetts — received one-third

This cross-checks against the earlier summary's flag: do not report a company as assignee. There isn't one. The only recorded ownership instrument is a personal one-third conveyance to a same-surname individual (relationship not established by any source I found).

Assignment timeline

There are no records in the USPTO Assignment Center for US 370,348 — and there cannot be.

This is not a retrieval failure. Three independent structural bars, each grounded in the USPTO's own rules:

1. Database coverage. The Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center contains "all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980." — USPTO, Assignment Database Webinar (2015-01-20), https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf (same statement in Finnegan, Prosecution Pointer 119, and in the Lexology guidance on assignment searching). US 370,348 expired 1904-09-20, 76 years before the database's coverage begins.
2. Pre-1957 records are not USDA-held at all. Under 37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2): "All records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957, are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)." Subsection (a)(1) confirms USPTO's own assignment records run to instruments "recorded on or after May 1, 1957." Any assignment for this patent would have been recorded between 1886 and 1904 — i.e., at NARA, in Patent Office record group materials, retrievable only by a NARA reference request.
3. Reel/frame does not exist here. The reel-and-frame numbering convention and the "correspondent of record" field that your brief treats as the key NPE tell are artifacts of the post-1957 regime. There is no reel number, no frame number, no correspondent attorney, no conveyance type, no execution date, and no recording date obtainable from the Assignment Center for this patent.

I therefore have no timeline entries to list, and I will not manufacture reel/frame numbers.

What is documented, and its source:

Residual uncertainty, flagged as a gap rather than a confirmed negative: I did not personally retrieve an Assignment Center result page for 370348. The absolute bar is that no pre-1957 record can appear; a modern recordation erroneously filed against patent number 370348 (e.g., an 1980+ filing citing the wrong patent number) could in principle surface in the backfile, and I cannot rule that out without loading the app. This is the same class of unverified negative the earlier summary flagged for the CAFC 2026 docket, and I am treating it consistently.

Timeline diagram

Rendered from patent-face facts only. There are no assignment events to plot, so the diagram shows the ownership facts that actually exist.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 370348
    1886 : Filed by Herbert E Percival
    1887 : Issued to Herbert E Percival
         : One third interest to Myron O Percival
    1904 : Patent expired for lapse of term
    2026 : Public domain and no recorded assignments

NPE / troll-pattern signals

You instructed me to stop after the Assignment timeline if the Assignment Center holds no records, and it holds none. I am continuing for two sections only because you separately required a Verdict and a per-signal disposition; everything below is a disposition, not new data. No signal is supported by any reel/frame, because no reel/frame exists.

Framework-level objection, stated plainly: every one of the eight signals presumes a live, assertable patent and a post-1980 recordation. US 370,348 has been expired and in the public domain for 121 years (since 1904-09-20). An expired patent cannot be infringed and cannot be asserted, so no chain can be "arranged to enable assertion." Secondary sources are likewise chronologically impossible: the SEC did not exist until 1934 (30 years post-expiry), RPX was founded 2008, Unified Patents 2012, AST 2003, LOT Network 2014, OIN 2005.

Cross-references you asked me to run, and why none produced results: SEC filings (inapposite — pre-1934 entity, no public company); RPX Insurance and Unified Patents asserter directories (neither indexes expired 19th-century patents, and neither organization existed then); USPTO PEDS/ODP (predates the electronic file-wrapper era entirely; Serial No. 210,965 has no digital prosecution record to query).

Verdict

Insufficient data

Justification (2–3 sentences, citing what actually drives it): The Assignment Center contains no records for US 370,348 and legally cannot — its coverage begins August 1980 (USPTO Assignment Database Webinar, 2015-01-20) while this patent expired 1904-09-20, and any pre-1957 assignment would be held by NARA under 37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2), not by USPTO. The only ownership fact of record anywhere in the chain is the one-third pre-issuance conveyance from Herbert E. Percival to Myron O. Percival of Lynn, Massachusetts, printed on the patent face; there is no reel, no frame, no correspondent, and no conveyance type to cite. With no evidence available and an express instruction not to speculate, "Insufficient data" is the only defensible selection from your menu — and the substantive characterization that is defensible is that this patent has been unassertable and in the public domain since 1904-09-20, which places it outside the reach of any NPE framework.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 370348) — expect no results, for the coverage reasons above. For the genuine 1886–1904 paper record, the correct channel is a NARA reference request for pre-May-1957 Patent Office assignment records, not the Assignment Center.

If you want one sentence for a diligence memo: No assignment chain exists to reconstruct — this is an 1887 "No Model" patent that expired in 1904, held as undivided two-thirds/one-third interests by Herbert E. and Myron O. Percival respectively, with zero post-issue transfers of record and no NPE relevance.

I'll search for the patent record and any cited prior art before answering.

Let me try the USPTO-specific and Google Patents citation angles.

I hit the step limit on live retrieval, so here is the answer built on everything I did retrieve — including one important negative finding that changes the shape of the question.

Prior art for US 370,348 — Threshold Finding

US 370,348 has no patent citations of record. Not a short list — none.

This is not a search failure. Three independent points support it:

1. The authoritative full text contains no citation section. The record fetched from https://patents.google.com/patent/[US370348](/patent/US370348)/en (2026-09-24) has a "Prior art keywords" block, a "Definitions" block, a "Similar Documents" block, and a "Publications (1)" block. It has no "Patent Citations," no "Cited By," no "References Cited." The specification body itself — which for an 1887 patent is where an examiner's references would appear if printed anywhere — names no prior patent, no prior publication, and no prior inventor. It cites nothing but its own figures and reference letters.
2. The law and the printing practice explain it. US 370,348 was prosecuted under the Patent Act of 1870 (R.S. §§4886, 4920), which contained no duty to cite prior art and no "References Cited" front page. The modern front-page References Cited field only became standard USPTO practice with the front-page reform roughly eight decades later. For an 1887 "No Model" patent, there is simply no citation field to retrieve.
3. A targeted USPTO-oriented search returned only a catalogue entry. The one live hit for the number was a CPC-index mirror (patenthub listing under .晾衣绳 / D06F 53/02) reading: "127 | Clothes-line | US370348D | US370348A | 1887-09-20." That is a bibliographic row confirming identity and date — no citation data attached.

False positive you should not let into the record

This is the same trap flagged in the litigation section (US 3,346,513, US 2,298,432), now surfacing again from the prior-art side. "Serial No. 370,348" ≠ "Patent No. 370,348."

The closest thing in the record to a citation set

Because there are no citations, the only reference list the record supplies is Google's machine-generated "Similar Documents" table (algorithmic CPC/text similarity — not examiner citations, not applicant disclosures, not evidence of anything). I reproduce it in full and then do the §102 work the task asks for, with the substitution labelled honestly.

Only six of the twenty-five predate the August 16, 1886 filing date. The other nineteen are legally incapable of being §102 prior art against US 370,348 — whatever their technical similarity. I am flagging that as the single most important cut in this analysis, because a naive "similar documents = prior art" reading would wrongly sweep in nineteen post-1886 references (including all the 1898–1906 clothes-pins).

§102 analysis, claim by claim

Statutory note (flagging the anachronism): 35 U.S.C. § 102 did not exist in 1886–87. The governing novelty provision was § 24 of the Patent Act of 1870 (R.S. § 4886), which barred a patent where the thing was "known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or any foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant," plus the two-year bar for the applicant's own public use/on-sale/patenting/publication (R.S. § 4886, proviso; invalidity pleading under R.S. § 4920). I map to §102 below because you asked for it, but the correct citation is R.S. § 4886.

Recall the three claims (as set out in the earlier section): Claim 1 = metal line + intervals of outwardly-extended portions forming apertures a + lengthwise nipping-jaws that are continuations of those portions. Claim 2 = the same, with jaws extending from both ends of each opening and forming nipping-spaces communicating with it. Claim 3 = two wires/rods bent outward at intervals, connected between the openings, jaws lying between the connected portions and the openings.

Every claim independently requires all of: (i) a clothes-line (a suspended strand), (ii) made of metal/wire, (iii) with integral outwardly-extended portions that themselves define apertures, and (iv) lengthwise jaw segments that are continuations of those portions. Element (iii)+(iv) together — the integrality — is the heart of the invention.

Bottom line on anticipation

On the record I could retrieve, none of the six date-eligible references anticipates any of claims 1, 2, or 3. The structural reason is uniform: a clothes-pin or clip is a separate clamping article, and every one of claims 1–3 is directed to the line itself having apertures formed by its own outward bends with jaws continuing from those bends. A pin reference can supply the gripping-jaw concept element-by-element, but it cannot supply the claimed combination — and anticipation requires every element, arranged as claimed, in a single reference.

If any of these references has relevance to US 370,348, it is not §102 anticipation. It would be under the judicially-developed requirement of "invention" (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851)) — i.e., the nineteenth-century analogue of §103 obviousness, available as a defense under R.S. § 4920 — on the theory that substituting an integral line-formed nip for a known separable clothes-pin jaw involved no invention. That argument, not anticipation, is the realistic attack route.

Explicit gaps — what I could not establish

• No "Cited By" data retrieved. I could not confirm whether any of the later references (notably US 1,139,908 A "Clothes-line clip," US 1,115,517 A "Clothes-line," US 1,119,116 A "Wire clothes-pin") cite US 370,348. Given their titles, one or more plausibly does, but I did not verify it and will not assert it.
• Contents of five of the six eligible references were not retrieved. I reasoned from their titles (and, for the pins, from the well-known nature of the article) that they disclose separable clamps rather than integral line jaws. That is an inference, not a text-verified finding. US 207,224 A ("clothes-line holders") and US 325,470 A are the two highest-priority items for manual full-text review — they are the only eligible references in the field of the patent itself rather than in the adjacent clothes-pin field.
• I could not query USPTO Patent Public Search (Patent Center) or Espacenet's "Cited documents" pane directly; the step limit interrupted that leg of the search, and Espacenet returned no result before cutoff. A manual Espacenet "Cited documents / Citing documents" check on US370348A and a Patent Center lookup would be the definitive confirmation of the zero-citation finding.
• Titles taken verbatim, including the truncated ones ("William c," "William d," "John w," "William a"). These appear to be OCR/spreadsheet truncations of inventor names in place of titles. I have not corrected them, per your rule; they should be re-pulled from the primary documents.
• Inventor name remains OCR-unresolved ("PEROIVAL" / "PERCIVALL"), consistent with the earlier section's flag. This matters for prior-art searching, because any 1874–1886 reference by the same inventor would be disqualified as the applicant's own work.

Net answer to your question: there is no set of "patent citations for 370348" to enumerate — the patent has none — and of the six date-eligible neighbouring references that can be substituted for the purpose, none is shown to anticipate claims 1, 2, or 3 under § 102 (R.S. § 4886).

I'll pull the actual content of the pre-1886 references listed in the page's prior-art (Similar Documents) section, since only those can be § 103 prior art against an August 1886 filing.

Obviousness Analysis — US 370,348 (Percival, "Clothes-Line," issued Sept. 20, 1887) under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note on one internal inconsistency: the previously-generated summary used a "today" of 2026-10-01; this task's header says April 26, 2026. Nothing below turns on the date, and I am not resolving it.

Note on tool limits: I exhausted my search budget retrieving the pre-1886 references. Where I could not read a reference's specification, I say so and do not supply a disclosure for it. This materially limits the claim chart below, and I flag exactly where.

1. Threshold problem: Google's "Similar Documents" is not a prior-art list

Before any § 103 analysis, the references in the page's prior-art section must be screened by date. Percival's application was filed August 16, 1886 (Serial No. 210,965) and the patent issued September 20, 1887. Under pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b) — the law that governs a patent of this vintage — a U.S. patent is prior art as of its issue date. Screening the Similar Documents list:

Point: roughly three-quarters of the "prior art" on that page cannot legally be combined against these claims. That is itself worth stating plainly, because a naive reading of the Similar Documents list would make US 370,348 look trivially obvious against 1904–1923 clothespin art.

Second point: the listing is an algorithmic similarity output, not a citation of what the examiner considered. There is no "Citations" or "Cited By" block in the fetched page, so I have no record of the actual references of record in the 1886 prosecution. Any § 103 conclusion here is therefore built on a substitute set, not the examiner's set.

2. The legal frame is anachronistic — flag it

Section 103 was not enacted until the Patent Act of 1952. This patent was examined in 1886 under the pre-1952 "invention" standard of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851): whether the variation required "more ingenuity and skill than were possessed by an ordinary mechanic acquainted with the business." A § 103 analysis is therefore a retrospective analogical exercise, not the standard actually applied. Modern § 103 with Graham/KSR factors is the lens requested, and I apply it, but the conclusion should be read as "would today's § 103 have invalidated this," not "was it properly granted."

3. Claim decomposition (element sets to be met)

4. What each screened reference actually discloses (with confidence levels)

Verified from full text — US 309,669 (Wheatley, Dec. 23, 1884). A wooden clothespin improved by an open tube driven through the body of the pin just above the prongs, whose projecting ends are "bent downward and outward and firmly against the sides of the pin." Wheatley states the opening is made "by any ordinary means," and that the tube ends are flared "by a single blow of a stamping-machine operating similarly to the machines by which eyelets are fastened." He expressly identifies the problem his tube solves as twofold: preventing splitting, and "facilities for taking care of the pin or a number of pins" — the pins are strung on a cord or open ring "and hung out of the way when not in use," so they "can quickly be slipped onto or removed from the ring."

This is the single most useful screened reference, and it is useful in two distinct ways: as a structural teaching (forming an aperture through a line-element and flaring the material outward against the sides) and as a motivational teaching (the recognized nuisance of pins becoming separated from the line).

Not verified — US 150,251 (1874, clothes-hangers), US 160,661 (1875, clothes-pins), US 200,299 (1878, clothes-pins), US 207,224 (1878, clothes-line holders), US 325,470 (1885). My searches returned the numbers and dates but not the specifications. I will not fabricate their disclosures.

One inference I will state as an inference: by the naming convention of the period, "clothes-line holder" patents (cf. US 110,802 of 1871, "Improvement in clothes-line holders"; US 104,419 of 1870, "clothes-line holder and stretcher"; US 216,008 of 1879, "Line-Holders," a pivoted-jaw fence clamp) are devices that hold the line itself to a post or fence — not devices that nip garments. If US 207,224 follows that convention, it is analogous art but does not disclose a garment-nipping function. Confidence: low-to-moderate; unverified.

Incidental art I retrieved but which is NOT in the page's prior-art section (flagging because it is materially more on-point than anything listed):

• US 335,299 (Nourse), filed Oct. 22, 1883, patented Feb. 2, 1886 — expressly pre-1887 and thus available. A single-wire clamp: middle portion bent into an elongated loop forming the limbs on one side; the free ends doubled and twisted together to form the opposing jaw; the convolutions of the twisted wire create "depressions … assisting in use in holding and retaining the articles." Adapted for clothes-pins. This discloses, for a laundry-gripping wire device, both opposed nipping jaws and twist-securing of wire as the closing means at the end of a jaw — i.e., the exact Fig. 1 expedient Percival describes.
• US 216,008 (Wilson, May 27, 1879) — pivoted jaws with sharpened points for a line-holder, "constructed of malleable cast-iron, galvanized to prevent rusting."

I am separating these from the § 103 combination below because the task directs me to the page's prior-art section, but the honest analyst's note is: the strongest obviousness case available to me is built on art the page did not list.

5. Combinations rendering the claims obvious

Combination A — Wheatley '669 + Nourse '299 + a clothes-line (admitted prior art)

Teaching: Wheatley supplies (i) apertures formed through a line-adjacent laundry member, with material flared outward around the aperture, and (ii) the explicit motivation of preventing pins from being lost/separated from the laundry line. Nourse supplies (i) a wire gripping device with two opposed nipping jaws, and (ii) twisting the wire ends together to close a jaw. The clothes-line is the admitted starting point (Percival's claim 1 presupposes a "metal clothes-line"; the specification treats the line itself as old).

Application:

• Claim 1: Wheatley = elements (a)-(b) (outwardly-flared material surrounding an aperture at intervals) + Nourse = element (c) (lengthwise wire nipping jaws) + the line = (a). Element (d), the "continuations of the said outwardly-extended portions," is the pinch point. Neither reference, as I read them, forms the jaw out of the same length of material that is bent outward to make the aperture. That integration is the only genuinely distinctive thing in the claim set.
• Claim 2: Weaker for the patentee than claim 1. Claim 2 drops the "continuations" structural hook and instead requires jaws extending from both ends of openings and forming nipping-spaces "communicating with" the openings. "Communicating with" is a functional/positional limitation. Any apertured line with jaws opening into the aperture meets it. If US 200,299 or US 160,661 (both "Improvements in clothes-pins" and therefore presumably directed at jaw geometry) disclose opposed jaws opening into a mouth, claim 2 becomes a straightforward substitution: known jaw pair, known aperture, moved onto the line. I cannot chart this because I could not read them.
• Claim 3: Strongest claim. It requires the specific two-strand build (bent outward at intervals, joined between openings, jaws between joint and opening). Nourse's twisted-wire construction gets close on the "two wires joined" concept but is a clamp, not a line. I have no screened reference teaching a two-wire line bowed outward into apertures.

KSR rationales available:

1. Combination of known elements yielding predictable results — wire bending, twisting, and eyelet-flaring were all mature 1880s metal-working techniques; nothing about putting a known clamp element on a known line was unpredictable.
2. Known technique to improve a similar device in the same way — Wheatley's flared-tube-through-a-member technique is directly transferable to a wire line.
3. Market/design incentive — Wheatley's own stated problem (keeping pins with the line) is a recognized need; eliminating separate pins by integrating the nipper is the obvious response. KSR recognizes market demand as a rationale.
4. Finite number of predictable solutions — Percival's own specification concedes exactly this: "There are a number of ways in which the line can be made and the same effect or result procured and by substantially the same means." That sentence is an admission that the claimed variants are an enumerable design space.

Combination B — Percival's specification as a self-inflicted admission

Two passages in the specification operate as applicant-admitted prior art / admissions against interest:

• "the line can be made of a flat rod or plate of metal and the nippers or jaws and holes or apertures made by punching out or removing portions of the rod, bar, or plate, as represented in Fig. 6." Punching apertures and forming tongues/loops from sheet metal was notoriously old. Wheatley independently confirms the era's ordinary skill: apertures formed "by any ordinary means" and ends flared "by a single blow of a stamping-machine." A flat-plate line with punched apertures and punched-out nipping tabs is therefore the routine application of a known technique. Fig. 6 does not appear in the claims, so this admission primarily narrows the specification rather than invalidating a claim — but it removes any argument that "punched apertures" is inventive subject matter.
• "it is not essential that the jaws be spring-jaws" — this surrenders the resilience argument. Any rigidity/springiness limitation a patentee might read into "nipping-jaws" to distinguish the art is disclaimed by the patentee. That is significant, because Nourse's and Wheatley's devices are elastic-metal devices; the disclaimer removes the patentee's best distinction.

Combination C — the "opposed jaws / wind" feature

The specification's most attractive functional story — jaws "arranged in the line to oppose each other" so "the action of the wind shall tend to draw the ends farther into the recesses" — is not in any claim. It cannot supply patentability. It is at most evidence of a result that the claimed structure achieves incidentally. (Wilson's US 216,008, incidentally, shows opposed pivoted jaws on a line-holding device, undercutting novelty of "opposed jaws" as such.)

6. The counter-case (grounds on which the claims likely survive)

I should not present this as one-sided:

1. The "continuation" limitation. Claims 1 and 3 require the nipping jaw to be a continuation of the same material that is bent outward to form the aperture. Every screened reference — and both incidentally-retrieved references — discloses either (i) a separate gripping device applied to a line, or (ii) a line-support that grips the line rather than the garment. None discloses the claimed integration of aperture and jaw into a single continuous strand of the line. For claim 1 and especially claim 3, that is a real gap that a combination of Wheatley + Nourse does not obviously close, because Nourse's twisted jaw is a clamp body, not an aperture-defining excursion of a line.
2. Failure of others / crowded field. The Similar Documents list is dense with 1874–1916 laundry-holding patents, and not one is an integrated line-and-nipper. Twelve years of active, patented effort in the same art without arriving at Percival's integration is a classic "failure of others" / long-felt-need argument. It is weakened by the fact that most of those are later than Percival, but the 1874–1885 entries are not.
3. The two-wire best mode (claim 3). The specific two-strand construction — bent outward into apertures, rejoined between apertures, jaws occupying the span between joint and aperture — is not disclosed in anything I could read.

Net assessment: Claim 1 is vulnerable in the Fig. 6 (punched-plate) and "any wire clamp on a line" readings but is saved by the continuation limitation if that limitation is given patentable weight. Claim 2 is the most vulnerable because it substitutes the functional "communicating with" language for the continuation requirement. Claim 3 is the most robust and is the claim a defendant would design around.

7. Confidence and gaps

• High confidence: the date screening of the Similar Documents list; the content of Wheatley US 309,669 and Nourse US 335,299 (both read from full text); the legal framework note (§ 103 did not exist in 1886; Hotchkiss governed); the observation that the "wind" feature is unclaimed.
• Low confidence / unverified: the disclosures of US 150,251, US 160,661, US 200,299, US 207,224, and US 325,470. My searches returned bibliographic hits only. Since US 200,299 and US 160,661 are the two screened references most likely to disclose jaw geometry, the weakest link in this analysis is precisely where a real § 103 rejection would be built. Anyone relying on this should pull those five specifications from patentimages before treating the conclusions above as settled.
• Discrepancy flagged: US 335,299 (Nourse) and US 216,008 (Wilson) are materially on-point pre-1887 references that do not appear in the page's prior-art section. I used them here only as corroboration and labeled them as outside the assigned set. If the task intends strict confinement to the listed references, Combination A loses its strongest secondary reference and the obviousness case weakens considerably — the remaining screened art (clothespins and line-holders, read by title alone) does not disclose a lengthwise nipping jaw on a line at all.
• Practical irrelevance caveat: the patent expired September 20, 1904. Invalidity under § 103 for US 370,348 is an academic question; the analysis is useful for construing claim scope and for understanding the 19th-century wire-goods art, not for any live dispute.