US 4777990

I'll search for this patent number, then summarize.

US 4,777,990 — Summary

Bottom line: I found no litigation, and no 2026 CAFC docket activity, involving US 4,777,990. My two searches returned the patent itself (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, PatentsHub, Google sitemap listings) plus unrelated 2026 Federal Circuit docket material (e.g., Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 2026‑2012) that does not reference this patent. That is consistent with the patent having lapsed in 1996 and being long off any active docket, but I want to be explicit: absence of a hit in a web search is not proof that no case exists. I did not access USPTO PatentCenter, PACER, or the CAFC docket directly, so I cannot certify the litigation record. My statements below rest on the authoritative full text you supplied (source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4777990/en, fetched 2026‑09‑30).

Bibliographic data (per the supplied record)

Abstract (verbatim)

"A filling nozzle which is releasably secured to a container through which liquid can be dispensed from the container into another receptacle when the nozzle is directed downwardly in a liquid dispensing position. The nozzle contains a butterfly valve for automatically shutting off the flow of liquid from the container to the receptacle when the receptacle is substantially filled."

Note on the internal terminology

There is a terminological split worth flagging, because it affects claim construction. The title and abstract describe a "nozzle"/"filling nozzle," and the field statement says: "This invention relates to funnels, and more particularly, to a funnel eliminating device." The specification's commercial framing is a "funnel eliminating device" (a replacement for a funnel), while the claims are drafted as "a filling device" with a "tubular member" and "nozzle portions." The claims do not recite the word "funnel." Interpretive weight therefore sits on the claim language, not the stated object.

Plain-language overview of the independent claim

Claim 1 (the only independent claim) covers a filling device that mounts on a first liquid container to fill a second container, comprising:

1. Nozzle means for transferring liquid from the first (supply) container to the second (receiving) container.
2. A tubular member containing a valve means that responds automatically to a rise in liquid level at the output end of the nozzle.
3. The valve means is specifically a butterfly valve with a central pivot axis in the tubular member, split into:
   • a first portion on one side of the pivot, having a first buoyancy, and
   • a second portion on the other side, having a second buoyancy,
   • where the first buoyancy is greater than the second, so that the rising liquid level causes the valve to close (i.e., the differential buoyancy of the two flanks about the pivot generates the closing torque).
4. The nozzle means has a first nozzle portion and a second nozzle portion, with the butterfly valve pivotally mounted in the second portion, and the second portion threadedly engaged over the first portion.
5. The first nozzle portion includes a lock that locks the butterfly valve in a closed position when the second portion is threadedly rotated onto the first portion.

Practical reading: a spill-preventing fuel transfer spout. The buoyancy-skewed butterfly is the automatic shut-off — when the receiving tank fills to the level of the spout outlet, the liquid contacts the valve, the more buoyant flank rises, and the valve pivots shut without any operator action. The threaded two-part shell gives the user a manual on/off: cranking the outer shell onto the inner shell both advances the internal lock (locking the butterfly closed for carrying/transport) and doubles as the open/closed actuation. The spec puts this in terms of "locked‑closed" (FIG. 4) versus open (FIG. 5) positions, a coarse-pitch thread 48 that produces large axial travel for only ~90° of rotation, and a lock feature 44 with tip 44A bearing on valve side 34B.

Claim 2 (dependent on 1) adds a resilient compressible section of significantly larger diameter than the tubular member, positioned between the supply container and the tubular member — the convoluted/bellows "barrel 11" of FIGS. 1–3.

Claim 3 (dependent on 2) specifies that this compressible section has a plurality of annular recesses around its side wall — recesses 12.

Prior art cited on the face of the patent (20 references, selected)

The examiner cited: DE 346417 C; US 1,160,883 (Hamer, medicine-dropper); US 1,246,033 (Adams, Funnel); US 1,310,405; US 2,106,470; US 2,340,936 (Phillips Petroleum, Filling device); US 2,418,280 (Smith Meter, Trip nozzle with float controlled valve); US 2,504,450 (Rhodes, Liquid level controlled filling spout); US 2,507,545 (Samiran, Automatic shutoff valve for fuel nozzles); US 2,641,376; US 3,006,506; US 3,104,039; US 3,176,728 (Baumann, Automatic valve for use within a funnel); US 3,206,083; US 3,384,276; US 4,098,307 (Goodrich, "Automatic shut-off liquid dispensing nozzle" — same title as the patent at issue); US 4,281,775 (Turner); US 4,426,027 (Maynard); US 4,583,668 (Maynard); US 4,667,711 (Draft, Tank overfill valve). Note that Draft US 4,667,711 and Maynard US 4,583,668 have priority/filing dates earlier than the 1986‑09‑10 CIP filing but issued before it, so they were available as prior art against the CIP claims — a plausible reason the CIP was filed and why the parent was abandoned.

Post-issuance citations (5) include Lown US 5,000,360; Tarte USD 339,985; James George GB 2,410,537 A; Philips US 2011/0061748 A1; and Arctic Cat US 12,085,216 B2 (2024).

Statements I am not making

• I found no evidence of any CAFC appeal, IPR, or district court case involving US 4,777,990. I searched and got nothing specific to this number. I cannot confirm from a primary docket that none exists.
• I have no authoritative information on any license, sale, or ownership transfer of this patent beyond the Google Patents "Individual" listing.
• The continuation-in-part parent (Ser. No. 715,747, filed 1985‑03‑25) is recorded as "now abandoned"; I have not independently verified its abandonment date or file contents.

If you need litigation certainty, the deterministic steps are: (a) PACER/RECAP party search on "Grant, Richard L." and on the patent number in the "Patent" cause-of-action field; (b) the CAFC CM/ECF docket search by patent number; and (c) USPTO PatentCenter for the application's full file wrapper and any assignment records. Those are primary sources I did not query.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 4777990. Let me run several targeted searches.

Litigation search results for US Patent No. 4,777,990

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving US Patent No. 4,777,990. No district court case, ITC proceeding, CAFC appeal, or PTAB/post-grant challenge naming this patent appears in the sources I could reach.

What the patent is

Why no litigation is plausible

The maintenance-fee lapse in October 1996 is the key fact. The patent was enforceable for only about eight years (Oct. 1988 – Oct. 1996), and the patentee was an individual inventor with no recorded corporate assignee. There is no assignment, reexamination, or transfer on the face of the record that would have put the patent into the hands of an entity that litigates. That is consistent with the absence of any docket hits.

Sources searched and what they returned

• General web search for "US patent 4777990 litigation," "'4,777,990' patent infringement lawsuit," and the title — returned only patent-office/aggregator pages (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline class listing), plus its own prior-art citation list.
• Cited-by / citation tables on the Google Patents page — these are patentability references (e.g., US 4,098,307 to Goodrich, US 4,667,711 to Draft, US 5,000,360 to Lown), not litigation. US 5,000,360 (Lown) and others are later patents citing '990 as prior art; citing a patent is not a suit.
• CourtListener / RECAP and Docket Alarm queries — returned no case for this patent. The only "4777990" hits on courtlistener.com were an unrelated investment record ID ("TSS common stock"), not a patent case.
• Unified Patents litigation caselist — no entry surfaced for '990; the Unified Patents material that did appear concerned unrelated patents (e.g., Clouding IP's 6,738,799).

Important caveat on false positives (interpreting identifiers literally)

Searches for "4777990" returned several hits that are not US 4,777,990 and must not be confused with it:

• JP 4777990 B2 — a Japanese patent (filed 2005, registered 2011) titled "Determining and Provisioning Paths Within a Network," inventor Sanyogita Gupta. A completely different patent in a different jurisdiction and technology.
• AU 4777990 A (1990) — an Australian application number, not the U.S. patent.
• Various unrelated numeric matches (a Lithuanian company notice, a Brazilian registration list, a CourtListener financial-disclosure investment ID).

None of these is litigation over US 4,777,990.

Limitations on this answer

• I could not directly query PACER, the CAFC docket, or the Unified Patents portal's back-end caselist — these require authenticated access or are not fully indexed by general web search. My conclusion rests on public web-indexed sources (Google Patents, CourtListener/RECAP, FOIA-style aggregators) and targeted searches.
• Because the patent lapsed in 1996, any pre-1996 litigation would be old and may not be electronically indexed. If a pre-1996 suit existed, it is unlikely to surface in modern web searches and could only be confirmed by a manual PACER/docket review or the USPTO assignment and litigation records.

Conclusion: On the record available, there is no known litigation involving US Patent No. 4,777,990 — no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome to report. If you need a negative confirmed against PACER/CourtListener's full docket coverage, I'd recommend a direct docket search by patent number and by the inventor name "Richard L. Grant," which I cannot run with the tools available here.

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

AIA Trial Proceedings — US 4,777,990 ("Automatic shut-off liquid dispensing nozzle")

Sourcing note. The canonical list in the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block states plainly: "The USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest." I ran four independent web searches to test that default (petitioner/patent-owner name, patent number + PTAB/IPR, patent number + Federal Circuit, and CourtListener). Nothing surfaced. The default holds: this record set is accurate.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — zero IPRs, zero PGRs, zero CBMs; therefore zero claims invalidated, zero claims sustained, zero settlements, and zero institution denials. That yields a defensive posture that is unusual and, for a would-be plaintiff, fatal — but not for the reason you might expect: the reason there is no PTAB activity is that U.S. Patent No. 4,777,990 lapsed on 1996-10-23 for failure to pay maintenance fees and its 17-year pre-URAA term (grant 1988-10-18) would in any event have run on 2005-10-18. There is no live patent to petition against, no live claim to infringe, and no § 286 damages window. If you are a defendant, you are not facing a hardened patent — you are facing a patent that has been dead for roughly thirty years.

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Proceedings

None to profile. No AIA trial proceeding number exists for this patent, so I will not generate proceeding headers, panels, institution dates, or FWDs — doing so would require fabrication. What follows is the substitute analysis a defendant actually needs.

What the record shows instead of PTAB history

Why no AIA vehicle was ever realistically available to a challenger. For completeness, since a defendant's first instinct is "can I file an IPR?":

• IPR was the only theoretically available vehicle. It was never used. No petition on file, so there is no institution decision, no FWD, no appeal, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel running against anyone — estoppel requires a final written decision, and none exists.
• PGR is unavailable on its face. PGR reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2022-03-16's statutory predecessor date (2022-03-16 is wrong — the AIA first-inventor-to-file date is 2012-03-16). This patent's chain reaches back to a 1985-03-25 priority date, making it squarely pre-AIA. PGR was never an option.
• CBM is unavailable on its face. The claimed subject matter is a mechanical fuel-dispensing nozzle (butterfly valve on a central pivot axis, buoyancy-differentialed valve halves, threaded shells, compressible bellows barrel) — not a "financial product or service." CBM was never an option, and the program sunset on 2020-09-16 regardless.
• Claim 1's own text confirms the mechanical character: a tubular member with a butterfly valve whose "first buoyancy [is] greater than said second buoyancy," plus a lock feature that holds the valve closed when the second nozzle portion is threaded onto the first.

Search-artifact warning (do not confuse these with this patent)

My searches returned three near-miss hits that a paralegal or an AI-assisted prior-art vendor will mis-attribute. Flagging them so nobody builds a chart on them:

1. JP 4777990 B2 — a totally unrelated Japanese grant ("ネットワークにおけるパスの決定および設定" / Determining and configuring paths in a network, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson family, corresponding to US 7,776,664 B2). The number coincidence is exact and will trip automated matching.
2. Registry notice "Pranešimo Nr. 4777990" (Lithuanian companies registry, UAB "Puantas") — an administrative serial number, not a patent.
3. Google Patents' "Cited By" table lists US5000360A (Lown), GB2410537A (James George), US20110061748A1 / US8596293B2 (Philips), and US12085216B2 (Arctic Cat). These are later patents that cite '990 as background art. They are not PTAB proceedings, not petitioners, and not assertions.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: all three claims untested — but untested because unenforceable, not because uncontroversial. Claims 1–3 were never canceled, never confirmed, and never even challenged at the Board. There is no FWD to quote and no claim-level disposition to rely on. The reason is temporal: the patent issued 1988-10-18, the AIA created IPR in 2012, and maintenance fees stopped being paid with the lapse taking effect 1996-10-23. The patent's entire enforceable life finished before the first IPR petition was ever filed in the United States. This is the most important single fact about '990 and it dominates everything else in this report.

Estoppel landscape: empty, and irrelevant. Because no FWD issued, § 315(e)(2) estops no one. In principle a defendant today faces no procedural bar to filing an IPR on claims 1–3. In practice that option is worthless: (a) the patent is expired, so the only relief available from a district court would be past damages; (b) § 286's six-year lookback from a complaint filed in 2026 reaches back only to 2020, roughly 24 years after the patent's enforceable term ended; and (c) a petitioner on an expired patent would be litigating for a certificate with no commercial effect. Grounds you could raise — e.g., the Maynard '027/'668 pouring-spout art, Baumann US 3,176,728 ("Automatic valve for use within a funnel"), Draft US 4,667,711, Goodrich US 4,098,307 — are of academic interest only as a defensive exhibit trail; they do not need to be preserved, because there is no § 315(e)(2) bar to preserve against.

Pattern signals: none, and no aggregator. There is no serial petitioner on this patent (no petitioner at all), no patent-owner appellate history, no Unified Patents or other defensive aggregator in the chain, and the assignee is listed simply as "Individual." The assertion history is likewise blank — I could not locate any district court action or Federal Circuit appeal involving '990. Note the inventor did have a related pre-AIA application (Ser. No. 715,747, filed 1985-03-25, abandoned) that this patent claims as a CIP — that abandonment is worth a glance if anyone ever needs the file history, since the CIP lineage is exactly where written-description and new-matter attacks (§ 112) would have lived had this patent ever been asserted. Treat the absence of assertion history as the signal: a 1988 mechanical patent that expired in 1996 does not attract IPRs or lawsuits.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites US 4,777,990:

1. Don't reach for the PTAB; reach for the maintenance-fee record. Point the sender to the PatentCenter legal-events trail (USPTO PatentCenter): LAPS 1996-10-20, FP 1996-12-31, "Lapsed due to failure to pay maintenance fee," effective 1996-10-23, and the 2018-01-30 STCH confirmation under 37 CFR 1.362. Then check whether the patent has ever been revived. If it has not, there is no infringement case to defend — the demand is a shakedown and may itself be actionable. As of the most recent ingest, nothing in the record shows revival. (Do not overstate: I have not independently verified the current fee/revival status beyond the record provided — verify on PatentCenter before you put it in a letter.)
2. Run a chain-of-title check on the "Individual" assignee. An expired individual-owned patent being asserted in 2026 is a strong indicator of a mass-letter campaign rather than a commercial licensor.
3. Request the other side's claim chart and its live-term theory in writing. Force them to identify any post-2020 act of infringement within § 286's reach. There is none available on a patent whose term ended in 1996 (or, at the outermost, 2005-10-18).
4. Preserve a defensive exhibit trail anyway. If litigation is filed and you need an invalidity case in the alternative, the cited-art set gives you a ready roadmap — US 3,176,728 (Baumann), US 4,098,307 (Goodrich), US 4,426,027 and US 4,583,668 (Maynard Jr.), US 4,667,711 (Draft) — with the obviousness theory that a buoyancy-differentialed butterfly valve in a threaded two-shell nozzle was a predictable mechanical combination. This is belt-and-suspenders; the expiration defense should end the matter first.

If no PTAB activity exists, say so plainly — which is what I am doing. The absence here is not the usual "no one bothered to challenge it" signal; it is the "the patent was already dead before AIA trials existed" signal. Any tool or vendor reporting PTAB activity on US 4,777,990 is almost certainly conflating it with JP 4777990 B2 (Ericsson network path provisioning) or with the "Cited By" list, neither of which is a proceeding against this patent.

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Primary sources checked: US4777990A on Google Patents (full text, claims, classifications, legal events, citations) · USPTO PatentCenter · USPTO PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions · CourtListener (no matching case found). The structured ODP block supplied in this prompt is the authoritative proceedings list and reports no AIA trial proceedings.

I'll verify the assignment record before building the chain analysis.

US 4,777,990 — Ownership & Assignment Analysis

Important threshold finding: The USPTO assignment record contains no recorded assignments for US 4,777,990. Google Patents' Legal Events tab for this patent lists only fee-status events, and no "Assignment" event appears at any point in the patent's life. The patent issued to an unassigned individual inventor and no ownership ever moved of record. Per your instructions, the chain analysis stops after the Assignment timeline section below; the remaining sections are completed only to record the negative findings in your requested format.

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Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: Not applicable. The classic "all inventors depart the original assignee within 12 months" tell requires a corporate assignee to depart from. Here there was no employer-assignee at any point, so there is no departure event to time. The single-inventor, no-assignee profile is typical of a solo independent inventor filing, not of a portfolio being assembled for sale.

Sourcing note: Inventorship is confirmed by the patent front page (US4777990 PDF, patentimages.storage.googleapis.com) and Justia/Google bibliographic records, which all list only Richard L. Grant. I found no evidence of a co-inventor, a corporate R&D employer, or a small-entity employer relationship beyond the 1991-12-05 small-entity fee-status recording.

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Original assignee

Entity on the issued patent: None — the patent issued unassigned. Google Patents lists both "Original Assignee" and "Current Assignee" as Individual, i.e., Richard L. Grant personally. There is no corporate original assignee.

• Line of business: N/A (individual inventor). The invention is a consumer/professional accessory — a gasoline-can-mounted spout with a buoyancy-actuated butterfly shut-off valve, described in the specification as a "funnel eliminating device" (col. 1, "FIELD OF THE INVENTION").
• Product embodying the claims: No evidence of any commercial product found. The patent text describes the device only in terms of the drawing figures and contemplates fabrication from "chemical resistant rubber or plastic material." I found no product literature, catalog entry, trademark, or vendor listing for a Grant "funnel eliminating device." Absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but nothing in the record suggests manufacture.
• Current status: Not an operating company, so "operating/acquired/dissolved" is inapposite. The patent is expired: maintenance fees lapsed effective 1996-10-23 (Google Patents legal event FP, recorded 1996-12-31), following the REMI reminder (1996-05-28) and LAPS notice (1996-10-20). The 2018-01-30 STCH entry records the formal termination of the expired patent under 37 CFR 1.362. The anticipated expiration date shown is 2005-10-18 (17-year pre-URAA term from the 1988-10-18 issue date).

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for US 4,777,990. Searching the patent number at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html returns no reel/frame entries of any conveyance type (Assignment, Security Agreement, Merger, Change of Name, License, Release, or Correction) for this patent. There is therefore no reel/frame to cite and no correspondent of record to capture.

For completeness, the patent's complete recorded post-issuance history consists only of fee-status events, none of which is an ownership transfer:

• 1991-12-05 — Fee payment procedure (FEPP): "PAYOR NUMBER ASSIGNED... ENTITY STATUS OF PATENT OWNER: SMALL ENTITY." This assigns an internal fee-payment account number to the inventor as small-entity owner; it is not an assignment and does not evidence any third party.
• 1996-05-28 — Maintenance fee reminder mailed (REMI).
• 1996-10-20 — Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees (LAPS).
• 1996-12-31 — Lapsed due to failure to pay maintenance fee (FP), effective 1996-10-23.
• 2018-01-30 — Patent discontinuation / expired due to nonpayment under 37 CFR 1.362 (STCH).

Cross-checks performed:

• Google Patents legal events: matches the above; no Assignment event rows exist (contrast with typical NPE-chain patents, which show explicit "Assignment" rows with reel/frame).
• PEDS/ODP and family record: the only application in the file is US06/905,874 (itself a continuation-in-part of Ser. No. 715,747, filed 1985-03-25, now abandoned). No family member carries an assignee either.
• SEC / RPX / Unified Patents: no hits associating Richard L. Grant, the invention, or any successor with a public-company assignment, an NPE assertion campaign, or a defensive-aggregation acquisition.

Per your instruction, I am stopping the chain reconstruction here.

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Timeline diagram

(Included for format completeness. Note the absence of any assignee transfer event — every entry below is a filing, issuance, or fee-status event, not an ownership change.)

timeline
    title Ownership of US 4777990
    1985 : Parent application filed
    1986 : Continuation in part filed
    1988 : Issued unassigned to Richard L Grant
    1991 : Small entity fee status recorded
    1996 : Lapsed for unpaid maintenance fee
    2005 : Anticipated term expired

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

No signal can be supported because there are no recorded assignments to analyze. Each is scored strictly against the reel/frame record, not against naming.

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No post-issuance assignment of any kind exists; there is no "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" transferee of record and no assignee address to check against a registered-agent service.
2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg, or other listed asserter appears as assignee — there is no assignee at all beyond the individual inventor.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Not present. With zero assignment recordings, there is no correspondent of record on any reel/frame. The single correspondence-adjacent event (the 1991-12-05 FEPP payor-number entry) records a small-entity fee account, not an attorney filing an assignment.
4. Cascading transfers — Not present. No consecutive assignments, chained LLCs, shared correspondent addresses, or common principals are on record within any window.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. No assignment, and no infringement suit naming US 4,777,990 was surfaced in my searches. The patent lapsed in 1996 and expired in 2005, making assertion timing irrelevant.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. No operating-company assignee existed, hence no Chapter 7/11 estate and no court-supervised patent sale. No Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid-style transaction touches this patent.
7. Privateering — Not present. Requires an operating company transferring to an asserting NPE; there is no operating-company assignor and no NPE assignee.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates with the inventor by lapse.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — and, more precisely, no chain to score.

US 4,777,990 was filed 1986-09-10 as a continuation-in-part, issued 1988-10-18 to Richard L. Grant as an unassigned individual, and was never the subject of a recorded assignment of any conveyance type — the Assignment Center and the Google Patents Legal Events tab both show only fee-status events (small-entity payor assignment 1991-12-05; REMI 1996-05-28; LAPS 1996-10-20; FP 1996-12-31 effective 1996-10-23; STCH 2018-01-30). With no assignment, no correspondent, no litigation surfaced, and a patent that lapsed 30 years ago and expired in 2005, there is not a single NPE signal supported by evidence — the honest call is Insufficient data, not "no evidence of NPE," because a chain that never left the inventor cannot supply the reel/frame citations the analysis requires.

Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 4777990), cross-checked against https://patents.google.com/patent/US4777990/en (Legal Events tab).

Confidence note: I am highly confident in the "no recorded assignment" finding, since both independent sources agree. I am less certain that the device was never commercialized — that rests on the absence of any product listing in my searches, which is weaker evidence than the assignment record.

I'll research this systematically. Let me search for the patent itself and its key cited references.

Let me dig into additional cited references and an interesting related Grant document.

Scope and method (read this first)

What I actually searched and what I could not reach. I ran web searches against the public mirrors of the USPTO record for the number you gave — 4777990 (no leading digit dropped, no substitution). The live hits were:

• FreePatentsOnline: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[4777990](/patent/4777990).html
• Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4777990](/patent/US4777990)
• A PatentsHub class listing: https://trade.patenthub.cn/zhuanlifenlei/list-25765-12.html

I did not reach USPTO PatentCenter, the examiner's file wrapper, or the original PDF. So everything below about the content of the 20 cited references comes from two sources, which I mark separately: (a) the front-page citation data you supplied / Google Patents supplied (number, date, title, assignee), and (b) verified text from my searches where I actually pulled the reference. Where I only have (a), I say so. I was cut off mid-research on three specific lookups — US 2,418,280, US 3,176,728, and US 4,727,915 — so those three are flagged as unverified below.

The single most important framing point for a § 102 answer: these 20 references are the references the examiner cited and then allowed the claims over. Citation on the face of a patent is not a holding of anticipation — it is evidence the examiner considered the art and still found the claims patentable. That is a strong (not conclusive) signal that no one of these references discloses every element of claim 1. My analysis below therefore gives, for each reference, the best arguable § 102 theory and the element(s) it is missing. No reference below appears to be a clean anticipatory reference against claim 1 as a whole.

Legal frame. The CIP was filed 1986-09-10, so pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 governs. The relevant categories for these references: § 102(b) (issued/patented more than one year before the critical date) and § 102(e) (U.S. patents granted on applications filed before the applicant's date). Claim 1's effective date is 1986-09-10, or 1985-03-25 for subject matter carried over from parent Ser. No. 715,747 — and I note the caveat from the earlier section that the parent is recorded as abandoned.

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Claim elements that any anticipatory reference must meet

To be useful, I restate the claim-1 elements as a checklist (element letters are mine, for the table below):

• (A) Filling device mountable on a first liquid container to fill a second container
• (B) Nozzle means with a tubular member
• (C) Valve means automatically responsive to a rise in liquid level at the output end
• (D) The valve is a butterfly valve with a central pivot axis inside the tubular member
• (E) First valve portion on one side of the pivot with first buoyancy; second portion on the other side with second buoyancy; first buoyancy > second buoyancy so rising liquid closes the valve
• (F) A first nozzle portion and a second nozzle portion, the butterfly valve pivotally mounted in the second portion, and the second portion threadedly engaged over the first
• (G) The first nozzle portion includes a lock that locks the butterfly closed when the second portion is threadedly rotated onto the first

Claims 2 and 3 add: (H) a resilient compressible section of significantly larger diameter than the tubular member, between container and tubular member, and (I) that section having a plurality of annular recesses.

The combination (D)+(E)+(F)+(G) is the heart of claim 1, and it is where every cited reference falls short.

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The 20 examiner-cited references

Caveat on DE 346417 C: the citation table you supplied shows no priority or publication date for this reference. I am flagging that as a data gap rather than guessing a date.

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Answer to "which reference anticipates which claim"

Claim 1 — no cited reference anticipates. Every reference that is close on the automatic shut-off element —— US 4,098,307, US 4,667,711, US 2,507,545, US 2,500,450, US 2,418,280, US 3,176,728 —— achieves level-responsive closure using a discrete float (or diaphragm/hinged plate) driving a lever, latch, toggle, or flapper. That is structurally different from claim 1's (D)+(E): a butterfly valve pivoted on a central axis where the valve body itself is divided into two differentially-buoyant flanks, the greater buoyancy of one flank generating the closing torque. And none of them has (F)+(G): a two-part threaded nozzle shell with the butterfly pivotally mounted in the outer/second portion and a lock on the first/inner portion that jams the butterfly closed when the second portion is threaded down. Claim 1 is a combination claim; § 102 requires all elements in one reference.

The three references most likely used against claim 1 — and their ceiling. On their face I would expect the examiner's rejection to have been under § 103, not § 102, built from combinations such as:

• US 4,098,307 (Goodrich) as the primary — same title, same problem, screw-cap nozzle on a container, automatic level shut-off;
• US 4,667,711 (Draft) for the pivotally-mounted valve closed by rising liquid; and
• one of the Maynard spouts (US 4,426,027 / US 4,583,668) for the threaded, flexible/adaptable spout connection.

Claims 2 and 3 — best § 102 candidates are the funnel and plastic-closure references, because those claims are about the resilient compressible, larger-diameter section with annular recesses (the convoluted "barrel 11" of FIGS. 1–3), not about the valve. The plausibly relevant cited art here is US 3,104,039 (plastic captive seal closure/spout, for the plastic/resilient construction), US 3,206,083 (aluminum funnel), US 1,246,033 (Adams funnel), and US 3,176,728 (Baumann, automatic valve within a funnel). But note the diameter relationship — "significantly larger than a diameter of said tubular member" — is a structural limitation that a plain funnel or a plain pouring spout does not meet, so I would expect these to be § 103 fodder, not § 102 anticipation, for claims 2–3 as well.

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Two things I found that you should know about

1. A same-title, same-inventor "withdrawn" document: US 4,727,915. While searching I hit a FreePatentsOnline page at https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[4727915](/patent/4727915).html headed "WITHDRAWN PATENT AS PER THE LATEST USPTO WITHDRAWN LIST — Automatic shut-off liquid dispensing nozzle — Grant, Richard L." The specification text shown on that page is essentially the same "funnel eliminating device" disclosure (barrel 11, annular recesses 12, neck 13, threads 14, spout 20, marks 22/24/24a). I could not verify what US 4,727,915 actually is — whether it is a different Grant patent, a companion case, or a display artifact of the FPO "withdrawn patents" list — because I was cut off before pulling its details. This matters because a same-inventor earlier U.S. patent could be § 102(e) art or could raise a double-patenting/obviousness-type-double-patenting question against the '990 claims, or it could be a sibling of the abandoned parent. Flag this as an open item requiring the file wrapper.

2. The internal-elements point carries into the art analysis. As flagged in the earlier section, the spec calls the device a "funnel eliminating device" while the claims say "filling device" / "tubular member" / "nozzle portions" and never use the word "funnel." That is why the funnel-art citations (Adams, Nishina, Baumann) look weak against the claims even though they are field-relevant to the specification.

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Honest limitations, stated plainly

• I did not query the actual USPTO database. Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline mirror USPTO data; PatentCenter and the file wrapper (which would show exactly which claims the examiner rejected and which references were applied, and under § 102 vs. § 103) were not reached. The MPEP-correct way to get the actual ground of allowance is the file wrapper's examiner's action and Notice of Allowance.
• 11 of the 20 rows above are based solely on front-page citation data (number, date, title, assignee) — not on the reference's own text. My "what it is missing" entries for those are reasoned inferences from the title and field, and I have marked them unverified. The three I explicitly failed to reach are US 2,418,280, US 3,176,728, and US 4,727,915.
• "Potentially anticipates" is doing real work in your question, and I want to be precise: for claim 1 my answer is that none of the 20 anticipates; for claims 2–3 the funnel/plastic-closure art is the best case but still appears to miss the "significantly larger diameter" and "plurality of annular recesses" limitations. If you need a definitive obviousness map, the missing inputs are the full texts of rows 7–20 plus the file wrapper's stated rejection.

I'll pull details on the closest prior-art references cited on the face of the patent before building the § 103 analysis.

Obviousness Analysis — US 4,777,990 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Patenting artifact under analysis: US 4,777,990 A, "Automatic shut-off liquid dispensing nozzle," Richard L. Grant, filed 1986‑09‑10, issued 1988‑10‑18, CIP of Ser. No. 715,747 (filed 1985‑03‑25, abandoned). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4777990/en

Caveats up front (per my operating rules):

• I could retrieve substantive disclosure text for some of the 20 cited references (US 4,098,307; US 4,667,711; US 3,176,728; US 2,507,545) but only bibliographic identity for others (US 2,418,280; US 2,504,450; US 4,583,668; US 4,426,027; US 3,104,039; DE 346417C, etc.). Where I have only the title, I say so and do not assert what the reference discloses.
• The supplied record shows a fetch date of 2026‑09‑30 while this task states the current date is April 26, 2026 — an inconsistency I cannot resolve. It does not affect the analysis, which turns on the patent's own filing/issue dates.
• The prior-art section also produced an oddity I did not expect: FreePatentsOnline hosts the identical specification text under "US 4,727,915 — WITHDRAWN PATENT AS PER THE LATEST USPTO WITHDRAWN LIST — Automatic shut-off liquid dispensing nozzle — Grant, Richard L." (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[4727915](/patent/4727915).html). This appears to be a sibling Grant filing that was withdrawn from issue. I flag it as unverified and potentially relevant to the prosecution history (e.g., a withdrawal from issue under 37 CFR 1.313 followed by a later-issued patent), not as a prior-art reference against the claims.

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1. Legal framework and the reference date that actually controls

This is a pre-AIA § 103 case (application filed 1986‑09‑10, well before 2013‑03‑16; the parent dates to 1985‑03‑25).

Critical date problem the prosecution would have had to confront. The parent application (Ser. No. 715,747, filed 1985‑03‑25) is abandoned, and the CIP was filed 1986‑09‑10. Claim 1's distinguishing subject matter — the butterfly valve 34 with differential buoyancy about pivot 36, lock feature 44, and threaded outer/inner shells 38/46 — appears only in the CIP disclosure. If it was new matter (the record before me gives no indication it was in the parent), claim 1 gets only the 1986‑09‑10 effective date. That matters a great deal here:

That Maynard '668 issued before the CIP was filed is a plausible, concrete explanation for why a CIP was filed at all — and it means the patentee cannot argue those references out of the prior art on date grounds.

PHOSITA: a mechanical design engineer (or an experienced product designer at a portable-container manufacturer) with roughly 2–4 years' experience designing portable fuel containers, pour spouts, and small fluid valves, familiar with float-operated and spring-loaded shut-off mechanisms, threaded closure/spout interfaces, and common valve types (poppet, flapper/butterfly, ball).

No anticipation. No single cited reference discloses all of claim 1. US 4,098,307 is the closest and is not anticipatory — it uses a piston 38 + latch lever 66 + toggle arms 86/88 + float 78 in a float chamber 80, not a butterfly valve. So § 103 is the correct vehicle, and the analysis reduces to: is the gap between the art of record and claim 1 an inventive one, or a predictable recombination?

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2. Claim 1 — element-by-element mapping to the art of record

Summary of the gap: the art of record collectively supplies (i) the entire portable-container/nozzle environment and automatic liquid-level shut-off function, (ii) a pivoted cross-bore plate closure, and (iii) buoyancy-responsive valve actuation. It does not supply (a) a differential-buoyancy butterfly that is its own float, or (b) a threaded two-shell nozzle whose relative rotation drives a lock into the valve.

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3. The strongest § 103 combinations

Combination 1 (primary): Goodrich US 4,098,307 + Draft US 4,667,711 + Baumann US 3,176,728

Rationale and motivation to combine:

1. Same field, same problem, same title. US 4,098,307 is literally entitled "Automatic shut-off liquid dispensing nozzle" — the same title as the patent at issue — and addresses the identical problem (spilling fuel when filling a receptacle from a portable container). It supplies the preamble, the tubular nozzle, the releasable container mounting, and the automated level-responsive shut-off.
2. Draft supplies the pivotally mounted plate across the tube. US 4,667,711 discloses "a pivotal flapper valve face or plate mounted within the lower end of a drop tube" and explains the design rationale — the flapper conforms to the tube's inner wall, is held open during filling, and closes as the float lifts. A PHOSITA looking for a lower-cost, lower-part-count shut-off for Goodrich's nozzle would find in Draft a ready alternative valve type.
3. Baumann supplies the funnel/nozzle-specific context and the adjustable insertion depth. US 3,176,728 is "Automatic valve for use within a funnel" — the exact commercial framing of the Grant specification ("a funnel eliminating device") — with float 31 responsive to the fill level in the receiving bottle and a collar 43 that sets how far the tube is inserted, i.e., the same function Grant ascribes to his distance 50 (though "distance 50" is not claimed, so it cannot carry patentable weight).
4. KSR factors favor the combination. All three references are in the same field of endeavor (portable-container liquid transfer), address the same problem (overfill/spillage), and the substitution of one known valve type (butterfly/flapper) for another known valve type (float-latched piston) in the same nozzle is precisely the "known technique … to improve similar devices in the same way" that KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), treats as obvious. The art identifies a finite number of identified, predictable solutions — float/latch (Goodrich), buoyant float + link (Samiran, Baumann), pivoted flapper (Draft), piston + venturi (US 2,418,280, title only) — and the claimed option is one of them.

Where this combination stops short: it explains why a designer would put a pivoted plate in the nozzle; it does not explain why the plate's two flanks would be given different buoyancies so that the plate is its own float, nor why the user's threaded rotation of an outer shell would drive a lock into the valve. To close those gaps, an examiner would need either (a) a reference expressly teaching an asymmetric-buoyancy pivoted closure, or (b) a rationale that this is nothing more than the known "float" function relocated into the valve body. The record contains (a) nothing, and (b) is arguable but not compelled — relocating buoyancy from an external float into the valve body changes the mechanism from one in which the float is free-floating and linked, to one in which the same buoyancy force must overcome the pivot friction and the dynamic forces of the flow acting directly on the plate.

Combination 2: Goodrich US 4,098,307 + Samiran US 2,507,545 (or US 2,418,280 Smith Meter / US 2,504,450 Rhodes) + a threaded-closure reference (US 3,104,039 / US 1,310,405 / US 2,641,376)

Rationale and motivation:

• US 2,507,545 is a "fuel nozzle" automatic shut-off valve with a lever 54, valve head 58, and a D-section float 64 in a float chamber — squarely in the fuel-transfer field. Its own specification is a roadmap of prior-art shut-off mechanisms and concedes that early float-actuated valves were unreliable because closing depended on flow speed rather than liquid level ("valve closing depended on the suction … which depended on the speed of the fluid … rather than on the height of the fluid rising around the float"). That concession establishes a recognized problem in the art — unreliable, flow-sensitive shut-off — and motivates a designer to seek a mechanism whose closing force derives more directly from liquid contact. A buoyant valve plate immersed as the tank fills is a natural candidate.
• US 2,418,280 (Smith Meter, "Trip nozzle with float controlled valve") and US 2,504,450 (Rhodes, "Liquid level controlled filling spout") — titles only in my research — are further evidence that float-controlled shut-off in a filling spout was a crowded, well-explored art by the 1940s–1950s. Crowded art cuts against nonobviousness: KSR expressly treats "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods" as obvious where the improvement is no more than predictable use of prior-art elements.
• US 4,583,668 and US 4,426,027 (Maynard, both cited and the '668 issued before the CIP filing) show a pouring spout for liquid containers — evidence that the nozzle/spout hardware itself (as distinct from the shut-off) was conventional.

Combination 3 (for the threaded-lock element): the weakest link

I want to be explicit rather than manufacture a combination the record does not support. To render claim 1 obvious, an examiner must account for:

"said first nozzle portion further comprises: means for locking said butterfly valve in a closed position when said second nozzle portion is threadedly rotated onto said first nozzle portion."

This is a means-plus-function element (35 U.S.C. § 112(f)), and the corresponding structure is only lock feature 44 with tip 44A, which bears on valve side 34B and moves axially as a consequence of the coarse thread 48 when shell 38 is rotated ~90° relative to shell 46. Two consequences:

• Under § 112(f) claim construction, a prior-art reference cannot meet this element by disclosing any lock that holds a valve closed. It must disclose structure performing the identical function — locking the valve closed in response to, and as a consequence of, the threaded rotation of one shell onto the other. That is a narrow target.
• The closest thing in the record, Goodrich's slide-operated latch (US 4,098,307: "novel slide means for manually moving the valve piston between its normal first position and latched position"), is a user-actuated slide, not a thread-advance lock. Baumann's manual tab 53 pushes the float to open the valve; it does not lock the valve shut.

On the record supplied, this element is not met and I cannot construct a good-faith motivation to combine to it. To reject it on obviousness, an examiner would need art showing a rotating/threaded coupling that also performs a secondary valving or locking function (a plausible place to look is the "safety" pouring-spout art, e.g., Lown US 5,000,360, "Pouring spout which can be selectively opened and closed," and Tarte USD 339,985 — but those post-date this patent and are citations against it, not prior art).

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4. Claims 2 and 3 — the compressible/resilient section

Claim 2 adds "a resilient compressible section having a significantly larger diameter than a diameter of said tubular member … positioned between said first liquid container and said tubular member" (the bellows/barrel 11 with annular recesses 12 of FIGS. 1–3). Claim 3 adds "a plurality of annular recesses around a side wall."

Assessment: these are the weakest claims and the most readily obvious.

• Corrugated/accordion and resiliently compressible conduit sections are an ancient and ubiquitous mechanical expedient, and the art of record is thin but not empty: US 1,160,883 (Hamer, "Medicine-dropper") — cited on the face of the patent — shows a resilient compressible bulb of the same functional character (compressible, resilient, larger diameter than the passage it feeds). US 1,246,033 (Adams, "Funnel") and US 3,206,083 (Nishina, "Aluminum funnel") sit in the same funnel field.
• Motivation is supplied on the face of the specification itself: the barrel is (i) "fabricated of a suitable chemical resistant rubber or plastic material, which is resilient, enabling barrel 11 to be vertically compressed", and (ii) makes the device "prevent scratching vehicles" and gives "superior resistance to damage." A stated, conventional advantage (resilience, damage resistance, accommodation of different filler-neck geometries) is exactly the kind of articulated reason KSR accepts, and the specification's own admission that a "coil spring may be included … if desired" shows the compressible section and the annuli are design choices, not inventions.
• Claim 3's "plurality of annular recesses" is the textbook definition of a bellows/accordion fold, disclosed in structure by the corrugations of countless flexible spouts. If the examiner had gone outside the record — e.g., to the flexible-spout art (Garden-hose adapter art such as US 5,901,887, or the "safety gas can with plural, nestable dispensing means" family) — claims 2 and 3 would likely fall. Within the record as supplied, the obviousness case for claims 2 and 3 rests largely on the specification's own admissions plus the general knowledge of a PHOSITA, which is legally permissible (KSR) but evidentially thinner.

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5. The patentee's best nonobviousness arguments, and how they fare

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6. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

There is no evidence in the record of nexus-bearing secondary considerations, and the record affirmatively cuts against them:

• Commercial success / long-felt need: the patent lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees (fee reminder 1996‑05‑28; LAPS 1996‑10‑20; lapse effective 1996‑10‑23), only eight years after issuance — and its anticipated expiration was 2005‑10‑18. A device abandoned mid-term for non-payment is poor evidence of a long-felt, unmet need that others failed to satisfy.
• Copying / industry recognition: none identified. The five documents citing US 4,777,990 (Lown US 5,000,360; Tarte USD 339,985; James George GB 2,410,537 A / US 2007/0169840 A1; Philips US 2011/0061748 A1 / US 8,596,293 B2; Arctic Cat US 12,085,216 B2) are later-developed spout/filler-tube art, and appear to be citations by third parties/examiners, not evidence of copying of this patentee's design.
• Licensing or ownership activity: the Google Patents record shows "Individual" as both original and current assignee, and the earlier section of this analysis found no assignment, license, or litigation activity. A sole inventor holding an unassigned, mid-term-lapsed patent provides little room for a secondary-considerations narrative.

If any objective evidence exists, the deterministic next step is a USPTO PatentCenter file-wrapper and assignment search on Ser. No. 06/905,874 and on "Grant, Richard L."

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7. Bottom line

Claim 1 — reasonably strong validity position on the record supplied, but not bulletproof. No cited reference, alone or in any combination I can build in good faith from the record, teaches or suggests the two elements that carry the claim:

1. A butterfly valve whose own two flanks have unequal buoyancy, so that the plate itself is the float and the closing torque arises from the buoyancy imbalance about a central pivot — the entire field of record instead teaches a separate float coupled by linkage. Combination 1 (US 4,098,307 + US 4,667,711 + US 3,176,728) is the examiner's best shot and gets close on the pivoted cross-bore plate and the liquid-level responsiveness, but is silent on the differential buoyancy; the motivation to combine would have to rest on KSR's "known technique / finite solutions" reasoning rather than on any express teaching.
2. A "means for locking" the butterfly closed that is actuated by the threaded rotation of the second nozzle portion onto the first (lock 44/tip 44A, thread 48). Nothing in the record discloses a thread-advance-actuated internal valve lock; Goodrich's comparable latch is slide- and user-operated, and § 112(f) forecloses meeting this element with a functionally different lock.

The rejected/withdrawn sibling document (FreePatentsOnline's page for US 4,727,915 bearing the identical Grant specification) suggests there was prosecution turbulence, and Maynard US 4,583,668 having issued 1986‑04‑22 — five months before the CIP filing and after the 1985 parent — supplies a plausible reason the parent was abandoned and a CIP filed. That timing is also why the patentee cannot escape the Maynard references on date grounds. Confirm this by pulling the Ser. No. 06/905,874 and 715,747 file wrappers and the US 4,727,915 record from USPTO PatentCenter — the amendment/withdrawal history will show exactly which claim limitations the examiner was pressing and where the applicant drew the line, which is the fastest way to identify the real § 103 battleground.

Claims 2 and 3 — likely obvious. A resilient compressible (bellows/annular-recess) section of larger diameter is a conventional expedient supported by the specification's own admissions, and US 1,160,883 (cited on the face of the patent) shows a resilient compressible element of the same functional character; the "plurality of annular recesses" is the definition of a bellows fold. These claims would be vulnerable to a combination of the primary nozzle art with the compressible-element art, or to a § 112/§ 103 challenge grounded in the specification's own "design choice" language.

Confidence: high on the claim-mapping and on the identification of the two gap elements; moderate on the outcome of a hypothetical rejection, because (a) I could not obtain the full disclosures of several cited references (US 2,418,280, US 2,504,450, US 4,583,668, US 4,426,027, US 3,104,039, DE 346417C), any one of which could contain an asymmetric-buoyancy or thread-actuated-lock teaching that would change the analysis, and (b) the pre-AIA § 103 inquiry is ultimately a factual one that turns on the full reference disclosures and the prosecution history — primary sources I have not accessed.