US 628058

I'll run the requested searches before summarizing.

Initial searches returned unrelated fire-extinguisher art. Let me tighten the queries.

Let me try two more targeted queries on the inventor and on the CAFC docket system.

Bottom line on the searches

The requested database searches did not return a clean hit for US 628058 from either USPTO or CAFC sources. Specific results:

• Queries on USPTO/patent databases for "US628058 / portable fire-extinguisher" returned only unrelated modern fire-suppression art (e.g., EP2441495A1 hand-held aerosol extinguisher; US8146675 Gross et al.; USD169641 Schroeder design), with no mention of 628058.
• A query aimed at CAFC 2026 dockets for patent 628058 returned no results (empty result set), and one attempt was cut off by a tool step limit. I therefore have no evidence of any CAFC proceeding involving this patent, and I am not asserting one exists.
• The only corroborating hits were on the inventor: US366909 (Wirt, hose-reel, 1887), US656759 (R. D. Wirt), and a popular history article on Wirt & Knox of Independence, Missouri (vista.today, 2019).

Accordingly, the summary below is grounded primarily in the authoritative full text of US 628058 supplied with this task, which takes precedence over the noisy search results.

Note on a plausible docket false-negative: a patent granted in 1899 and expired in 1916 (Google's "anticipated expiration 1916-07-04") pre-dates the Federal Circuit entirely (est. 1982), so a 2026 CAFC appeal on this patent is not plausible. The absence of CAFC results is expected, not merely a search gap. Separately, beware conflation with 7- or 8-digit numbers such as US 6,280,580 / US 6,280,958, which are different patents and not the subject here.

US 628,058 — bibliographic data

Abstract

US 628058 has no abstract. Formal US abstracts were not required until the 1947 revision/first publication of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure era (post-1947 practice); 1899 patents carry none. The closest equivalent is the stated object, quoted verbatim:

"The object of the invention is to provide a device of this character which shall be simple of construction, inexpensive of production, and by means of which the stopper closing the gas-containing vessel will be positively held in place, thus retaining said vessel in an upright position and preventing it emptying its contents into the water accidentally."

Field of use, verbatim: "a portable fire-extinguisher of that class in which carbonic-acid gas is combined with water or some other extinguishing fluid when it is desired to use the device." The reserved text on Google Patents labels this a "Definitions" section — it is a machine-extracted quotation from the specification, not an official abstract.

Disclosure in brief (context for the claims)

Numbered parts: 1 main receptacle/reservoir (alkaline solution) with hermetically sealed top, central apertured boss 3, screw-threaded bushing 4; 5 hanger depending from the cover; 6 the bottle/vessel (sulfuric acid); 7 yoke, with central loop 8 surrounding the bottle neck and bearing-eyes 9 engaging cross-bar 10 of the hanger; a a sliding sleeves on the yoke's parallel limbs; 11 stopper (cork); 12 stopper-extractor threaded through the bushing/boss with a screw end embedded in the stopper; 13 set-screw whose inner end seats in a socket in the extractor shank to prevent vertical movement. Operation: loosen set-screw 13, draw extractor 12 upward to pull the cork, allowing the bottle to invert and dump acid into the alkaline solution to generate CO₂.

The independent claims in plain language

All three claims are combination claims, and all three are independent — there is no dependent-claim structure (standard 1899 practice; the claims do not refer back to one another).

Claim 1 — cap + hanger + sleeved yoke. In a fire extinguisher: a removable cap; a rectangular wire hanger hanging from the cap; an endless-wire yoke hinged at its lower ends to the hanger and formed at its upper end with a central loop 8 sized to surround the acid vessel's neck; plus sliding sleeves a a on the yoke's parallel limbs. In plain terms: the sleeves slide up to the loop to clamp it tightly around the bottle neck, and slide away from the loop to let the limbs spring apart so the loop can be sprung over the flange on the bottle's mouth. The point is a spring-open, sleeve-locked wire collar that grips the bottle by its neck.

Claim 2 — hanger + contractible-loop yoke. The combination of a hanger and an endless-wire yoke hinged to it, formed with parallel arms and a central loop adapted to be contracted about the neck of the acid-receptacle. Plainly: the same neck-gripping wire yoke, claimed at a higher level of generality — it drops the cap, the sliding sleeves, and the rectangular-hanger specifics, reciting only "parallel arms" and a loop that can be contracted around the neck.

Claim 3 — hanger + twin-loop yoke with adjustment. The combination of a hanger, an endless-wire yoke hinged to it, formed at its free end with independent semicircular loops lying in the same plane, and means for adjusting the loops relative to each other. Plainly: a variant in which the bottle-engaging end is not a single central loop but two semicircular loops that can be adjusted toward/away from one another (i.e., a split-ring clamping concept), rather than the single loop 8 plus sliding sleeves of claims 1–2.

Substantive observations worth flagging:

• Scoping anomaly for modern eyes: claims 2 and 3 are broader than claim 1 (claim 1 requires more elements — cap, and sleeves, and rectangular hanger), and claim 3 recites structure ("independent semicircular loops… means for adjusting said loops") that is not clearly described in the written description, which discloses only one central loop 8 and sleeves a a. Claim 3 therefore has thin descriptive support in this specification. This would raise written-description/§112 concerns today; it was unremarkable drafting practice in 1899.
• The claims cover only the bottle-suspension yoke, not the stopper lock. The stated object stresses that the stopper will be "positively held in place," yet neither the stopper 11, the stopper-extractor 12, nor the set-screw 13 appears in any claim. The patented contribution, as claimed, is the neck-engaging yoke that loads the shoulders of the bottle rather than its bottom.
• The specification's stated advantage, verbatim: because the yoke engages "the neck of the bottle and the shoulders immediately below the neck," the strain from a binding stopper "comes entirely upon the shoulders of the bottle," avoiding detachment that would occur if bearings were secured to the bottle bottom and engaged the bracket cross-piece.
• The classification and "prior art keywords" lists on the Google Patents page ("bottle, extinguisher, portable fire, hanger, yoke" plus chemical compounds water/sulfuric acid/carbon dioxide) are machine-generated retrospective metadata, not part of the original grant.
• The OCR transcription contains artifacts that should not be treated as technical identifiers — e.g., "aremovable," "firesextinguisher," "endless-wire" used for "endless wire," the stray tokens "00 enc0m," and inconsistent rendering of the loop as "8" vs. "8'". Reference character 8 should be read as the loop; the sleeve characters are a a.

Uncertainty disclosure

• Assignee: I can state with high confidence that none is named on the face of the patent and Google lists "Individual." I could not verify an assignment record (e.g., to R. D. Wirt & Company or Wirt & Knox) because USPTO Assignment/PATFT searches did not return this patent in my available searches. The popular history source (vista.today, "From Missouri to Philadelphia to Exton") confirms a Dr. Reuben D. Wirt and the Wirt & Knox company in Independence, Missouri — founded 1881, relocated to Philadelphia in 1898 — and claims the company "failed to enter the booming fire extinguisher market," which sits in mild tension with this 1898–99 extinguisher patent. That source is secondary and not authoritative; treat it as context only.
• Legal status: "Expired – Lifetime" and the 1916-07-04 expiration date are Google Patents notations, which the page itself disclaims as assumptions and not legal conclusions.
• Prior art / citations: The OCR text shows no "References Cited" section (common for patents of this era). The "Similar Documents" list on the Google Patents page (e.g., US598955A Chemical fire-extinguisher, 1898-02-15; US600804A, 1898-03-15; US558529A, US578324A, US576415A, US649160A, US802208A, US804755A) is an algorithmic similarity listing, not a record of cited or considered art, and I do not assert that any of those documents was before the examiner.
• CAFC: No 2026 docket entry, and no litigation of any kind, was found or is plausible for this patent.

Sources

• Authoritative full text, US628058A: https://patents.google.com/patent/US628058/en (fetched 2026-09-24)
• Corroborating inventor history (secondary): https://vista.today/2019/03/from-missouri-to-philadelphia-to-exton-the-story-of-a-manufacturer-that-revolutionized-firefighting/ and https://hiddencityphila.org/2019/03/piecing-together-the-lost-history-of-wirt-knox/
• Other Wirt filings appearing in search: US366909 (hose-reel, 1887); US656759

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 628058, using the sources you identified.

Initial searches returned unrelated hits (Australian patent AU628058, NZ 628058, an Indian credit report). Let me search the litigation-specific sources you named.

Result: No litigation found

I found no litigation — none pending, none historical — involving U.S. Patent No. 628,058. To be precise about what I checked and what I found:

What the patent is

• U.S. Patent No. 628,058, "Portable Fire-Extinguisher," inventor Reuben D. Wirt, of Independence, Jackson County, Missouri.
• Application No. 671,987, filed February 28, 1898; granted July 4, 1899.
• Assignee: Individual (no corporate owner ever recorded).
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; the Google Patents record shows an anticipated expiration of July 4, 1916 (17 years from grant, under the law then in force).
• Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US628058](/patent/US628058)/en

Why no litigation exists

1. The patent has been expired for ~110 years. A cause of action for infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271 cannot arise from conduct occurring after expiration; there is also no live owner to sue, no damages period, and no possibility of injunctive relief.
2. The term "628058" is heavily overloaded. My searches returned only unrelated documents carrying that number in other systems, which I explicitly did not treat as this patent:
   • AU 628058 B2 / AU-B-36257/89 — a Kohler faucet valve patent (Australian). patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../AU628058B2.pdf
   • NZ 628058 A — a New Zealand patent.
   • MC-628058 — a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration docket number (Mario Escobar & Enrique Paredes, El Paso, TX). li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov/lihtml/rptspdf/LI_REGISTER20220503.PDF
   • JSW Steel Limited – 628058 — an Indian credit-report ID. mirainform.com/.../JSW%20STEEL%20LIMITED%20-%20628058.pdf
3. Results that superficially resemble patent litigation are different patents. For example, Wirtgen America, Inc. v. Caterpillar, Inc., C.A. No. 17-770-RGA (D. Del.) involves U.S. Patent No. 9,624,628 — a seven-digit modern patent, not the six-digit 628,058. Likewise the In re: Deepwater Horizon MDL 2179 filing by "Wirt & Wirt" concerns an unrelated party name, not this patent. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally, I have not conflated any of these.
4. Searches specifically targeting the litigation databases you named — the Unified Patents litigation caselist at https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist, Federal Circuit materials, and PACER-indexed sources — returned zero results for this patent number.

Negative-search caveat

As a general matter, pre-1900 U.S. patent infringement suits are poorly indexed in modern electronic litigation databases, and I cannot rule out that some unindexed 19th-century equity suit referencing this patent exists in a paper archive. However, I have no evidence of any such case, and I will not fabricate a plaintiff, defendant, case number, or docket to fill the gap. On the available record, the answer is: no known litigation.

(Since prior sections of this patent analysis were referenced as already generated: this litigation section adds nothing to the technical or prosecution-history record. The key takeaway for any freedom-to-operate or validity opinion is that US 628,058 has been in the public domain since July 4, 1916 and is usable as prior art — its Feb. 28, 1898 filing date makes it § 102 material against later chemical/double-chamber fire-extinguisher claims such as those in US 598,955, US 600,804, US 576,415, and US 142,340, all listed as similar documents.)

I'll verify the structured data with a quick check before writing up.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials). The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 628058, and independent web searching surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming Reuben D. Wirt or US 628058 as the challenged patent — the defensive posture this gives a defendant is unusual and categorical: there is no PTAB record to work from because there cannot be one. US 628058 issued 1899-07-04 on a 17-year term and reached its natural expiration on 1916-07-04 (the "Anticipated expiration" entry in the structured data). It was never eligible for any AIA proceeding: the Leahy-Smith AIA did not create the PTAB until 2012, IPR/PGR practitioners' 1-year and 9-month windows presuppose a live patent, and PGR and CBM by definition reach only far later-filed or financial-sector patents. A demand letter citing this patent is not a troll's opening move — it is a historical artifact.

No proceedings to report

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to populate. For completeness against the template:

• Type: N/A — no Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method review exists.
• Filed: N/A
• Status: No AIA trial proceedings on file (USPTO ODP ingest). Google Patents' legal-status line reads "Expired – Lifetime," with an anticipated expiration of 1916-07-04.
• Judge panel: N/A
• Petition grounds: N/A — no petition challenging claims 1–3 has ever been filed.
• Institution decision: N/A
• Final Written Decision: N/A
• Settlement / termination: N/A
• Appeal: No PTAB appeal to the Federal Circuit exists. No CAFC or CourtListener docket ties US 628058 to an AIA-trial appeal.
• Defensive value: Not applicable in the ordinary sense. There is nothing to distinguish around, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to inherit or avoid — the patent's 1916 expiration, not a PTAB panel, is what forecloses assertion.

⚠️ False-positive warning for your prior-art search

Web searching "628 patent" plus "IPR" returns a large volume of hits that have nothing to do with US 628058. I confirmed three distinct, unrelated patents that a keyword search will conflate with your target:

1. U.S. Patent No. 10,292,628 B1 (Masimo) — challenged in IPR2020-01521, Apple Inc. v. Masimo Corp., FWD 2022-04-11 determining claims 1–30 unpatentable; panel of APJs Cocks, Kinder, and Wieker; notice of appeal filed 2022-04-12. This is a pulse-oximetry patent, not a fire extinguisher.
2. U.S. Patent No. 8,490,628 (Fontem Holdings) — challenged in IPR2017-01118, R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co. v. Fontem Holdings 1 B.V. This is an e-cigarette atomizer patent.
3. The "Exhibit B ('628 patent)" references in Fenton Ventures B.V. v. R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co. also point at the e-cigarette family, not US 628058.

If any of these numbers appear in a demand letter or an invalidity chart handed to you, the citing party has mis-cited the patent. That is a quality-control point worth preserving.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Claims 1, 2, and 3 of US 628058 are UNTESTED by the PTAB — but only in the trivial sense that no PTAB existed during their enforceable life. They were never adjudicated unpatentable and never adjudicated patentable at the Board, because the Board's statutory predecessors and the modern AIA trial regimes all post-date the patent. The claims as issued are: claim 1 (removable cap + rectangular wire hanger + endless-wire yoke with central loop 8 + sliding sleeves a a), claim 2 (hanger + endless-wire yoke with parallel arms and a central loop contractible about the acid-receptacle neck), and claim 3 (hanger + endless-wire yoke with independent semicircular loops in the same plane + adjustment means). All three lapsed with the term in 1916. There is no surviving-claim list to work from and no narrow claim set the owner could pivot to.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is inapplicable — it attaches only to a petitioner who obtains an instituted IPR, and no such IPR exists. There is likewise no estoppel running against you from any third-party proceeding. Practically, this cuts against the patent owner rather than for them: there is no Board record to relitigate, and no possibility of a new trial proceeding being instituted now.

Pattern signals. None available. No repeat petitioner can be identified because there is no petitioner. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) has ever touched this patent. No PTAB-to-CAFC appellate chain exists. The single meaningful "pattern" is the patent's own prosecution-adjacent date: filed 1898-02-28, granted 1899-07-04, expired 1916-07-04 — a patent whose entire enforceable life ended before the Wright brothers' patents were litigated to any meaningful extent.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: There is nothing to defend against. US 628058 cannot support an infringement claim — an expired patent has no enforceable right, and damages cannot accrue after 1916-07-04. Confirm term status directly at https://patents.google.com/patent/US628058/en (filing 1898-02-28; granted 1899-07-04; anticipated expiration 1916-07-04).
• Do not spend budget on an invalidity search. The prior art cited on the face of the specification (sulfuric acid, water, carbon dioxide, cork, alkaline solution) is chemical, not structural; the only structural claims are to the wire yoke and hanger. That art is moot given expiration.
• Check the citation chain instead. If a demand or chart cites "US 628058" alongside any IPR number, verify whether the citing party actually means US 10,292,628 (IPR2020-01521, claims 1–30 held unpatentable 2022-04-11) or US 8,490,628 (IPR2017-01118). A mis-cited patent number in a demand letter is itself useful leverage — it suggests the sender's infringement analysis was not verified.
• If you want the negative confirmed independently: the PTAB's public docket is searchable at USPTO PTAB E2E / PTAB Center (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/), and any AIA-trial appeal would appear on the Federal Circuit docket and on CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/). Search by patent number, not by party name — Reuben D. Wirt, of Independence, Missouri, appears in no PTAB caption.
• Bottom line: the absence of PTAB activity here is not the "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" signal. It is the stronger signal: the patent expired 110 years ago and no AIA regime ever had jurisdiction over it.

Confidence note: I have high confidence in the zero-proceeding finding, based on both the structured ODP block and web searching. I did not locate any pre-AIA interference or Board of Appeals record involving this patent, and I want to be explicit that I cannot rule out a paper record in the 1899–1916 period that is not digitized — but no such record would have any AIA-trial significance, and the 1916 expiration forecloses assertion regardless.

Inventors

• Sole inventor. The specification's signature block identifies "REUBEN D. WIRT, a citizen of the United States, residing at Independence, in the county of Jackson and State of Missouri" as the inventor of "certain new and useful Improvements in Portable Fire-Extinguishers." Witnesses to the execution were D. M. Switsen and F. Mericle — witnesses only; neither is identified as an assignee, employer, or attorney of record.
• No employer can be established. The bibliographic record shows no corporate assignee and no assignment obligation (see below). In 1898 practice, a patent issued to a natural person in this posture is affirmatively inconsistent with the inventor having been under an employment agreement requiring assignment to a company. I found no evidence that Wirt was employed by a fire-extinguisher manufacturer, and I will not supply one by inference.
• Unusual-departure pattern (all inventors exiting the original assignee within 12 months): not applicable. The screen presupposes an original corporate assignee from which inventors depart. There is no original assignee entity here, so the pattern cannot be triggered.
• Note on the "similar documents" list in the Google Patents record (US 598,955; US 600,804; US 576,415; US 142,340; etc.): these are later or contemporaneous chemical/double-chamber extinguisher patents by other inventors. They are not co-inventors, co-owners, or family members of this patent. The family ID=2696655 contains exactly one application: US 67198798.

Original assignee

There is no original assignee. The patent issued to Reuben D. Wirt as an individual.

• Entity named on the issued patent: None. The Google Patents bibliographic fields read Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual. Critically — and this is a data-quality point worth flagging — "Current Assignee: Individual" on Google Patents is a derived placeholder, not a recorded assignment. It reflects the absence of any conveyed title, with ownership attributed back to the named inventor. It should not be cited as evidence of a transfer.
• Product embodying the claims: Unconfirmed. The specification discloses a working chemical extinguisher (alkaline solution in reservoir 1; sulfuric-acid bottle 6; stopper 11 extracted by screw-ended extractor 12 through bushing 4; CO₂ generated on mixing). Whether Wirt or a licensee commercially manufactured it is not established by anything in the record, and I have no evidence of a commercial embodiment.
• Primary line of business: Not applicable — natural person.
• Current status: Presumed long deceased. The patent itself is Expired – Lifetime, with an anticipated expiration of 1916-07-04 (17 years from the 1899-07-04 grant, under the then-applicable term). It has been in the public domain for roughly 110 years.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search shows no recorded assignments for US 628,058 (application 671,987).

I searched by patent number and by application serial number. There are zero recorded assignment entries — no reels, no frames, no conveyances of any type (Assignment, Security Agreement, Merger, Change of Name, License, Release, or Correction). No correspondent of record exists for this patent because no recording was ever filed by anyone.

This is corroborated by the Google Patents legal-events table, which for this patent contains only four events, none of them a conveyance:

Findings and caveats:

1. No post-issuance transfer was ever recorded. Under the interpretation rules in force at the time, absent a recorded assignment title remained with Wirt and, presumptively, with his heirs or estate thereafter. No chain of title beyond the inventor is documented.
2. Pre-1980 records caveat — stated honestly. USPTO's electronic Assignment Search indexes the historical reel/frame ("digits") records incompletely; 19th-century transfers were recorded in paper assignment Liber volumes, and not every one was captured in the machine-readable database. I therefore cannot certify a universal negative for the 1898–1916 window. However, this caveat is legally immaterial: any such unrecorded transfer would be a conveyance of a patent that expired 1916-07-04, and could not change the public-domain status or produce an assertable right today.
3. Identifier-overload warning (carried over from the litigation section). A search on the bare string "628058" in assignment-style databases returns unrelated records, notably AU 628058 B2 / AU-B-36257/89 — a Kohler Co. ceramic-disk faucet-valve application (inventor Muhammad Iqbal) in the Australian system, which is not a US patent and has no relationship to Wirt's extinguisher. I have not conflated it, and I flag it because it is the single most common false positive for this number. Likewise NZ 628058 and non-patent "628058" identifiers (an FMCSA docket, an Indian credit-report ID) are unrelated.

Per the output instruction for this case — "If the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, say so plainly and stop after this section" — the chain reconstruction terminates here. The three remaining sections are included below only because they are required deliverables and because, on an empty chain, every NPE signal resolves to a definite "not present" without any inference being drawn. No assignment is fabricated anywhere in this document.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 628058
    1898 : Application filed by Reuben D Wirt
         : No assignment recorded to date
    1899 : Patent granted to Wirt as individual
    1916 : Patent reached term expiration
         : Title never recorded as transferred

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — specifically, an empty chain: no recorded assignment exists for US 628,058.

This falls squarely within the "no records, or only the original assignment" branch of the rubric. The basis is precise and citable: (a) zero USPTO Assignment Center entries for patent 628058 / application 67198798 — no reels, no frames, no conveyances, and therefore no correspondent to analyze; and (b) the Google Patents legal-events record contains only filing (1898-02-28), grant (1899-07-04), and anticipated expiration (1916-07-04) with no transfer events. Because the only recorded owner is the named inventor, Reuben D. Wirt, no NPE signal can be evidenced — not by naming inference, and not by any document in the record. The one genuine limitation on this conclusion is the incomplete electronic indexing of pre-1900 paper assignment Liber volumes; I state it for accuracy, but it cannot alter the outcome, since any such transfer would concern a right that lapsed more than a century ago.

Verification links: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "628058"); Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US628058](/patent/US628058)/en

I'll verify the USPTO record for this exact patent number and check the cited/related references before analyzing prior art.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent No. 628,058

Analysis date: April 26, 2026

1. Record verification — the exact patent

Per the strict literal-interpretation rule, I confirmed the record for the six-digit number 628058 only, and did not substitute any other number.

Caveat on sourcing: within my tool budget I retrieved the Google Patents mirror of the granted specification (which is the full printed patent text) but could not complete a pull of the USPTO Patent Center / PatFT bibliographic record. Google Patents' US pre-1976 records are OCR of the printed patent, and for this patent the OCR includes the complete specification and claims. Nothing in the record indicates any post-grant certificate, disclaimer, reissue, or terminal disclaimer.

2. Finding: US 628,058 has no patent citations

This is the central answer, and it is a negative.

The Google Patents record for US 628,058 contains no "Patent Citations," "References Cited," or "Cited By" section. The only reference-like list on the page is headed "Similar Documents." That list is generated algorithmically by Google (text/classification similarity), not by the examiner and not by the applicant. It is not a citation list, and it must not be reported as one.

Why there are no citations:

1. Procedural. The front-page "References Cited" block did not exist on US printed patents in 1899. It was introduced in the 1940s–1950s. A patent granted July 4, 1899, therefore has no printed citation field at all.
2. Substantive. Under the law then in force, examination under Rev. Stat. § 4886 (as amended by the Act of March 3, 1897) did not generate the kind of citation record modern practice produces, and 19th-century examiners' rejections were not published with the patent.
3. Database. Google Patents does not synthesize citation data for 19th-century US grants.

Consequence for your request: I cannot supply "each patent citation for 628058," because there are none. What I can supply is (a) an analysis of the closest art surfaced by the record, and (b) claim-by-claim § 102 analysis against those references — which is what follows.

One number-collision warning, flagged under your strict rule. A search for "598,955" returned US 1,893,975 (Jackson, 1933), which uses "Serial No. 598,955" as its own application serial number. That is a serial number, not a patent number, and it tells us nothing about the content of US 598,955. I have not treated one as the other.

3. Statutory framework for reading these references

US 628,058 was filed February 28, 1898, so it is governed by the 1870 Act as amended (Rev. Stat. §§ 4886, 4887) — not the 1952 Act and not the AIA. Under R.S. § 4886, the invention had to be novel against things "known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country, before his invention thereof." For a modern reader, this is the functional ancestor of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)/(b). Analogies in this memo are drawn on that basis.

Two date gates matter, and they cut sharply:

4. Closest prior art — verified content vs. unverified listing

I verified the full text of the starred references directly. Unstarred entries are drawn only from Google's Similar Documents list; I did not verify their contents, and I will not characterize them.

Non-analogous "Similar Documents" that are not prior art for claims 1–3 but touch individual mechanical elements: US 562,134 and US 571,456 (mucilage bottles), US 243,547 (bottle), US 479,217 ("Hiesh Kaplan"), US 798,775 (dispensing-bottle), US 789,757 (non-refillable bottle), US 815,837 (bottle-cap), US 254,345 (bottle-stopper attachment), US 1,089,980 (hanger for embalming-bottles), US 123,236 (self-releasing hooks), US 174,866 (weather-vane attachment), US 310,574 (spinning-top). The hook/hanger and bottle-closure items are relevant only as evidence that spring-loop and hook-clamp expedients were old in 1898 — which bears on the obviousness/general-utility weight of claims 1–2, not on direct anticipation.

5. Claim-by-claim § 102 analysis

The claims are combination claims of old elements; the patentee's own specification concedes the elements were known and locates novelty in the combination ("One of the essential points of the invention is the yoke…").

Claim 1 — removable cap + rectangular wire hanger depending from the cap + endless-wire yoke hinged at its lower ends to the hanger + central loop 8 encompassing the acid-vessel neck + sliding sleeves a a on the parallel limbs

Conclusion: Claim 1 is NOT anticipated by any reference I could verify. The hanger element is fully met by US 576,415, but no reference discloses the hinged endless-wire yoke, the neck loop, or the sliding clamping sleeves. US 576,415 is, however, the strongest § 103-type combination reference (old law: lack of invention), especially when combined with a hook/clamp reference such as US 123,236.

Claim 2 — hanger + endless-wire yoke hinged to the hanger + parallel arms + central loop adapted to be contracted about the neck

Essentially claim 1 with the sleeves recited functionally ("adapted to be contracted"). Same result: not anticipated. US 576,415's rack is a rigid depending rack, not a hinged wire yoke with contractible arms; US 144,595's cap/seat is not a loop. Note that claim 2's functional language ("adapted to be contracted") is broader than claim 1, so US 576,415 + an old spring-clamp comes closer here — but "closer" is not anticipation.

Claim 3 — hanger + endless-wire yoke hinged to the hanger + independent semicircular loops lying in the same plane at the free end + means for adjusting said loops with reference to each other

Interpretive flag: the specification does not use the phrase "semicircular loops." The only structure it describes is the single loop 8 about the neck plus bearing-eyes 9 on the limbs engaging cross-bar 10. Claim 3 most plausibly reads on the loop halves that are drawn together by the sliding sleeves, but read literally it could also read on the two bearing-eyes 9. This ambiguity should be resolved before any validity opinion is given, because it changes the scope materially.

Conclusion: Claim 3 is NOT anticipated by any reference I could verify. No reference in the record discloses paired, relatively adjustable semicircular loops for gripping a bottle.

6. Bottom line

1. US 628,058 has no cited references. The record contains no "References Cited" section. Any list presented as "citations for 628058" (including the "Similar Documents" block) is not a citation list, and reporting it as one would be a factual error.
2. Prior art that must be pulled and read in full before any anticipation conclusion: US 598,955 (1898-02-15 — 13 days before filing) is the highest-priority unverified reference because of its date and title; then US 578,324 (1897-03-09), US 558,529 (1896-04-21), US 564,010 (1896-07-14), and the two 1873–74 "improvement in fire-extinguishers" grants (US 142,340; US 147,249).
3. On verified art, no reference anticipates claims 1, 2, or 3. US 576,415 (Schaefer) is the most relevant verified reference and anticipates the hanger-and-supported-bottle sub-combination; US 144,595 (Booth) establishes the flange-bearing acid bottle as very old. Neither reaches the hinged endless-wire yoke, the neck loop, or the sliding sleeves that constitute the asserted point of novelty.
4. Post-filing references (US 600,804; US 609,584; US 649,160; US 802,208; US 804,755) cannot be § 102 prior art against the 1898 filing, except that US 600,804 could qualify on a prior-invention / § 102(e) analogue theory if its own filing predates 1898-02-28 — a filing date I could not verify.
5. Corroboration of the earlier litigation section (no contradiction found): a contemporary published List of Adjudicated Patents enumerates July 4, 1899 grants 628,176, 628,253, 628,640, 628,886, and 628,982 as litigated — but not 628,058. That is consistent with, and strengthens, the earlier finding that this patent was never the subject of reported litigation. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/A_list_of_adjudicated_patents…pdf)

Limits on this opinion: I verified full text for four references (US 576,415; US 243,128; US 518,258; US 144,595). Eight entries in the table (§4, items 5–11) are listings only, with no verified disclosure, and one entry's number appears in a search only as another patent's application serial number. I have not inferred content for unverified references and have not converted provisional or algorithmic similarity data into prior-art conclusions.

I'll verify the disclosure content of the most likely prior-art candidates from the "Similar Documents" list before building the combination analysis.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 628,058 (Wirt, "Portable Fire-Extinguisher")

0. Threshold caveats you should read before the analysis

0.1 — § 103 did not exist during this patent's life. 35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952 (effective Jan. 1, 1953). US 628,058 issued 1899-07-04 and expired 1916-07-04 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US628058](/patent/US628058)/en). No court or examiner could have applied § 103 to these claims. The 1899-era analogue was the judicially created "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850), applied through R.S. § 4886. Everything below is therefore a retrospective § 103 (post-Graham/KSR) reconstruction of what an obviousness challenge would have looked like had the modern statute applied — useful for characterizing the art and for understanding why the claims were narrow, not for any live validity dispute.

0.2 — The "Prior Art" section of this page is not a prior-art list. Google Patents' "Similar Documents" block is machine-generated (text-similarity), not a citation list. The page's "Prior art keywords" field (bottle, extinguisher, portable fire, hanger, yoke) is likewise an automated keyword extraction. Neither field carries any legal significance. Critically, 8 of the 25 documents in the "Similar Documents" list post-date the 1898-02-28 filing date and are categorically unavailable as pre-AIA § 102 art.

Eligibility screen of the "Similar Documents" list

Critical date for pre-AIA § 102(b): 1897-02-28 (one year before filing).

Note also that for pre-1899 U.S. patents Google's "publication date" is the grant date, not the filing date. Because the 1899 statute had no § 102(e) equivalent, a document filed before 1898-02-28 but granted after that date is still not prior art — so US 600804, US 609584, US 649160, US 802208 and US 804755 cannot be rescued by their (likely earlier) filing dates.

0.3 — Verification honesty. My searching substantively confirmed the disclosure of only one document from the list (US 576,415), plus three supplementary references not on the list (US 91,304; US 144,595; US 596,844) and two period court decisions. Searches for US 254345 and US 598955 returned US 257,053 and US 596,844 respectively — i.e., the identifiers may be OCR/index artifacts, or those documents simply may not be digitized. I do not invent disclosures for references I could not open. Where I use a listed reference for its title only (e.g., "Mucilage-bottle," "Bottle-stopper attachment"), I say so.

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

Circa 1897–98: a mechanical engineer or foreman at a chemical fire-extinguisher works (the soda-acid "Extincteur" art was by then a half-century-old, mass-produced field — see the period history at https://ia-urbandale2.civicplus.com/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/368), familiar with (a) soda-acid extinguishers in which a stoppered sulfuric-acid bottle is suspended inside a bicarbonate tank; (b) wire- and sheet-metal forming, spring steel, bails, yokes and clamps; (c) screw-and-set-screw locking of a member against axial travel, and (d) the practice of protecting suspended glass acid bottles against "shocks and jars" on horse-drawn and truck-mounted apparatus.

The invention's own field statement matches: "carboniс-acid gas is combined with water… when it is desired to use the device."

2. Claim construction (element breakdown)

Per the specification, numerals, and drawings at https://patents.google.com/patent/US628058/en:

Two drafting observations: (i) Claim 2 is broader than claim 1 (it drops E1 and E5), so claim 2 rises or falls with the narrower showing — if claim 2 is obvious, claim 1 (a superset) cannot be non-obvious on the same record. (ii) Claim 3 describes structure the specification never describes. The written description discloses one "central loop 8" surrounding the neck; the only plural form, "the loop 8'," is a prime-reference, not a second loop. A claim to "independent semicircular loops… in the same plane" therefore has no antecedent support — under modern law a § 112(a) written-description defect; under 1899 law an R.S. § 4888 ¶ 2 defect. Flag this as my reading of the OCR'd text, not a verified finding.

3. The core structural problem — and who had already solved it

The patent's stated object is to "positively h[o]ld [the stopper] in place, thus retaining said vessel in an upright position and preventing it emptying its contents into the water accidentally," with the express ambient condition that the device is "subject to much jarring and jolting when it is mounted upon a truck." That is a problem statement, and the prior art had addressed both halves of it a generation earlier.

Primary reference — US 576,415 (Edward Schaefer, St. Louis, Mo.; filed 1896-10-12, Serial No. 608,641; granted 1897-02-02; § 102(b) art). https://patents.google.com/patent/US576415. Verified text:

• Field: "that class of chemical fire-extinguishers in which a bottle of sulfuric acid is suspended inside of the main tank" — identical field.
• E1/E2: "an interiorly-screw-threaded cap screw-seated upon said nipple and closing said tank, a rack depending downwardly from said cap into said tank."
• Holder: "an acid-bottle removably positioned in said rack and supported thereby."
• Anti-blowout stopper: "a sliding bolt operating vertically through said cap, a stopper carried by the lower end of said bolt and operating in the mouth of said bottle to open and close the same," plus "a lever pivotally connected to said cap and slidingly connected with the upper end of said bolt, and a spring operating to pull said stopper away from the mouth of said bottle," plus a "gasket upon said sliding bolt… in position to close the joint between said bolt and the bearing through which said bolt operates when the stopper is in its elevated position."

This is a § 102(b) reference disclosing the entire functional architecture of the '058 combination: an acid bottle hung from a support that depends from a removable tank cap, with a stopper mechanically captured by a member passing through the cap so it cannot blow out or be jarred out, and with a stored-energy (spring) release. Only the form of the support (rack vs. endless-wire yoke) and the form of the stopper lock (bolt/lever/spring vs. screw-extractor + set-screw 13) differ.

Supplementary reference — US 91,304 (John F. Boynton, 1869). https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/30/21/ed/2a7f1ead260389/US91304.pdf. A railroad fire-extinguisher in which an acid bottle sits in a tube D suspended from the filler collar C/plug C, with a screw-rod F through the plug and, expressly, "in order to insure the acid bottle or capsule against breakage from shocks and jars, I encircle it with rubber bands, or other equivalent elastic substance, and also arrange a spiral or other suitable spring in the bottom of the tube D." Boynton also claims alternative attachment of the bottle-holding tube "by means of a bayonet-joint… or by a screw-thread, or in any other suitable manner."

Supplementary reference — US 144,595 (George Booth, 1873). https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8d/ff/56/2c98ed5b1a45cf/[US144595](/patent/US144595).pdf. Acid pot A with a flange a, seated on C and held by cap D; a spindle H bearing a hook-shaped piercer G passes through the reservoir; "a stuffing-box J, and cap K are placed… the stuffing-box, besides serving its ordinary purpose, also furnishes **a long bearing for the spindle H, and acts as a stop against which the collar h on the spindle H is held by the cap K. This collar prevents the spindle H from slipping into or out of the reservoir. " That is exactly the function Wirt assigns to set-screw 13 — preventing vertical movement of the extractor relative to the bushing.

Supplementary reference — US 596,844 (content verified; date/eligibility NOT verified). https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b6/35/31/949fa7a818a476/[US596844](/patent/US596844).pdf. Acid vessels suspended inside a tank, each "connected by a ball-and-socket joint to a rigid hanger V, secured to the screw-cap," mounted on "a sliding sleeve C' on central rod C" locked in its upper position by a bayonet slot f and lug h². This is a cap-hung acid-bottle carrier with (i) pivotal/ball-and-socket mounting and (ii) a sliding sleeve as the locking element. I flag its date as unverified — do not cite it as § 102 art without checking the grant date.

4. Combinations that render the claims obvious

Combination A → Claim 1 (and, a fortiori, claim 2)

US 576,415 + US 144,595 + US 91,304, optionally with a wire-bail/loop reference from the list (US 243547 "Bottle," 1881; US 254345 "Bottle-stopper attachment," 1882; US 571456 or US 562134 "Mucilage-bottle," 1896) for E3/E4/E5.

• E1–E2: met by US 576,415 verbatim (cap + support depending from cap).
• E3–E4 (wire yoke with a neck loop): the substitution of a formed wire bail/loop for a rack or tube as the bottle-support member. The '058 specification itself treats the hanger as attachable "in any suitable manner," and the loop's only function is to bear on "the neck of the bottle and the shoulders immediately below the neck." Changing a bracket from sheet-metal rack to formed wire, and changing its engagement from bottle-body support to neck/shoulder support, is a change in shape and material of an old element with a predictable result — the classic § 103 case, and under Bean v. Smallwood (quoted below) not invention at all.
• E5 (sliding sleeves a a): a sleeve slid along a limb to contract a loop is the ordinary mechanical expedient for locking a spring loop — and is structurally the "sliding sleeve C'… held in its upper position" of US 596,844, and functionally the "collar h… held by the cap K" of US 144,595. Alternatively, the screw-threaded clamping ring of US 254345 (title only) is the same locking function in a bottle-stopper attachment.

Combination B → Claims 2 and 3

US 576,415 (or US 91,304) as the cap-hanger reference + a two-member wire clamp/hinge reference such as US 123236 ("self-releasing hooks," 1872) for hinging, and a clamping-ring reference such as US 254345 for the "independent… loops… and means for adjusting said loops with reference to each other."

• Claim 2 adds nothing over Combination A except the word "contractible"; a loop made contractible by a sliding sleeve (claim 1) is ipso facto contractible (claim 2).
• Claim 3's paired semicircular loops with mutual adjustment are the plain stuff of pipe/bottle clamps and two-part rings: two half-loops adjusted together about a neck.

Combination C → "Anticipation-flavored" attack on the stopper-retention sub-feature

US 576,415 alone discloses cap-mounted, mechanically captured stopper retention with spring release and a sealing gasket; US 144,595 alone discloses a transverse collar/spindle arrangement preventing axial travel of the extractor. Wirt's contribution — relocating the stop from a cap-and-collar to a socket in the extractor shank receiving the inner end of a set-screw 13 working through the bushing — is the substitution of one axial-stop mechanism for another in the same location and for the same purpose.

5. Motivation to combine (grounded, not assumed)

1. Same field of endeavor / same problem. US 576,415 and US 91,304 are chemical fire-extinguishers with an interior acid bottle; US 144,595 is an acid-pot extinguisher; US 254345 is a bottle closure. All are "portable fire extinguisher" art (class A62C13/00, A62C13/003 on the '058 record).
2. The '058 specification supplies the motivation itself. It states the stopper must be held "positively" because the unit is "subject to much jarring and jolting when it is mounted upon a truck." US 91,304 (1869) articulates the identical concern for railroad-car service and solves it with an elastic mounting and a spring seat. A PHOSITA reading Boynton and Schaefer is led directly to a captured stopper and a shock-tolerant bottle carrier.
3. Design incentive — strain path. Wirt's own stated "essential point" is that the yoke bears on the neck/shoulders so the bottle does not detach when the stopper binds. But a support that engages the neck and shoulders is exactly what a wire loop about a bottle neck does; the "inventive" insight is a description of the inherent property of neck-engagement, not a new structure.
4. Predictable result / no change in principle of operation. Substituting wire for rack, loop for tube, sleeve for collar, and set-screw for collar-and-cap leaves every element performing the same function it performed in the reference.
5. "Obvious to try." The universe of cap-hung bottle holders in 1897 was small (rack, tube, bail/loop, pivoted support), and the Improvement was an expected success; KSR rationale (c) applies squarely.
6. Contemporaneous common-sense doctrine. The era's own courts applied precisely this reasoning. In The Fire-Extinguisher Case, 21 F. 40 (https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0021/0021.f1.0040.pdf), the court quoted Story, J. in Bean v. Smallwood, 2 Story 408 (Fed. Cas. No. 1,173): *"a machine, or apparatus, or other mechanical contrivance, in order to give the party a claim to a patent therefor, must in itself be substantially new. If it is old and well known, and applied only to a new purpose, that does not make it patentable."* And: "The obvious addition of so simple an element to the devices which co-existed in the old machine and perform all the fundamental functions of the subsequent one, cannot constitute the combination of a new and patentable one." A wire yoke holding an acid bottle in a soda-acid extinguisher is the paradigm of that holding. But note the counterweight: in Steiner Fire Extinguisher Co. v. Holloway, 43 F. 306 (C.C.D. Md. 1890) (https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0306.pdf), claim 4 of US 147,442 — Feb. 10, 1874, to John H. Steiner — was held valid on infringement admitted. (Do not conflate Steiner's 147,442 with the "US 147249A / 1874-02-10 / fire-extinguishers" entry on the Similar Documents list. The numbers differ by one digit; I am treating them as different patents, per your literal-interpretation rule, notwithstanding the identical date.)

6. What Wirt could have argued, and why it probably fails

Bottom line: on the record available, claims 1 and 2 would very likely have been held invalid for want of invention/obviousness over US 576,415 in view of the ordinary wire-form and clamp art, and claim 3 would have been vulnerable on both obviousness and written-description grounds.

7. Weaknesses in this analysis — read before relying on it

1. Only US 576,415 was substantively verified. Everything I say about US 243547, US 254345, US 310574, US 479217, US 562134, US 571456, US 558529, US 564010, US 578324, US 598955, US 142340, US 147249, US 174866 and US 123236 is based on title, number, and date only. My searches for US 254345 and US 598955 returned other patents (US 257,053 and US 596,844). Do not treat the similarity list as verified art.
2. US 598,955 is the sharpest unexplored lead. Granted 1898-02-15 — 13 days before the '058 filing — it is § 102(a) art only (swear-behind available) and its disclosure is unverified. If it shows a suspended acid bottle with a neck-engaging support, it materially strengthens the attack.
3. US 596,844's eligibility is unresolved and it is not on the Similar Documents list at all. I used it only to show that a cap-suspended, pivotally-mounted, sliding-sleeve-locked acid-bottle carrier existed in the art.
4. US 174866 (weather-vane attachment for lightning-rods) raises an analogous-art question. Arguably non-analogous to fire extinguishers, though structurally it is a rod-clamping bracket. I would not lead with it.
5. Prior art cited on the face of US 628,058 is not visible in the fetched record. Google's page for this patent shows no digitized "References Cited" block, so I cannot report what the 1899 examiner actually relied on.
6. Pre-1900 art is poorly digitized. I cannot exclude that a stronger § 102(b) reference (e.g., a pre-1897 patent to a wire bottle-bail clamp) exists in paper archives.
7. Date discrepancy flagged: the analysis header in your system prompt reads 2026-09-30 while this task states April 26, 2026. Neither affects the analysis; the patent expired 1916-07-04 either way.

Confidence: high on the § 102 date-eligibility screen and on the US 576,415 disclosure mapping; high on the KSR-type combination rationales; moderate-to-low on the content of the unverified similar documents and on US 596,844's date eligibility; moderate on the claim-3 written-description observation, which rests on OCR'd text.