US 658065

Search Results & Identification

Patent under review: US658065A (U.S. Patent No. 658,065) — Universal joint.

I searched the USPTO/Google Patents record and CAFC 2026 docket coverage. No CAFC 2026 docket entries reference patent 658,065 — the searches surfaced only unrelated matters (e.g., the CAFC's Dynapass case concerns U.S. Patent No. 6,993,658; a Bosch/Westport CAFC case concerns 6,298,829 and 6,575,138 — none of these is patent 658,065). This is unsurprising: patent 658,065 expired in 1917 and is not a plausible subject of a 2026 appellate case. I found no evidence of any current litigation or post-grant proceeding involving it.

Careful ID note (literal reading): The number "658,065" also appears coincidentally as an application serial number in unrelated, much later patents (e.g., US2461627, an operating table filed with Serial No. 658,065 in 1946; and US2889869A, whose Google Patents application-number string is also displayed as "US658065A" but is a 1957 sheep-shearing table). Do not conflate these with the 1900 patent 658,065.

Patent Summary — US 658,065 A

Abstract: The original 1900 specification has no formal abstract. Its stated object is "to provide a universal joint capable of transmitting a greater amount of power at a greater angle and at a greater speed than has heretofore been accomplished." The invention is directed "particularly to the construction of the pivots and the block and the means whereby these pivots act as ties, thereby preventing the forked members of the coupling-heads of the universal joints from spreading, and thereby maintaining the axial alinement of the cooperating parts."

Structure (as described): Two coupling-heads (10, 11) receive shaft ends through holes (10', 11'), each head carrying forked members (10¹⁰, 11¹¹) with counterbored holes. A preferably square, centrally interposed block (12) has two circular openings (12', 12²) in the same plane at 90° to each other. Bushings (13, 14) are rigidly driven into two adjacent sides of the block; bolts (15, 16) pass through the forked members and block and are riveted (or optionally nutted) over the bushings. Bolt 15 has a transverse hole (15') through which the stem of bolt 16 passes, so the bolts act as ties holding the fork pairs together and preventing spreading. Clearances of about one-thousandth of an inch are preferred between the bushings/bolt heads and the fork bores to minimize friction. The specification explicitly disclaims Bocorselski's broader invention (two concentric members, etc.) from his own application Serial No. 20,703, filed June 18, 1900.

Plain-Language Overview of Each Claim

Caveat: The claims in the Google Patents full-text rendering are OCR-garbled (especially claims 3–5). I have reconstructed their substance below from the visible text; treat the precise wording as uncertain for claims 3–5.

Claim 1 (independent combination claim): A universal joint combining two coupling-heads each having forked members; a block interposed between the forked members of the two heads; two bushings rigidly supported in openings on two adjacent sides of the block with their axes intersecting at right angles; and bolts passing through the forked members, the block, and the bushings. Broadly covers the four-pivot, block-and-bushing geometry.

Claim 2 (combination claim, adds riveting): The same combination as claim 1, with the added limitation that the ends of the bolts are riveted over upon the bushing — i.e., mechanically upset to retain the assembly.

Claim 3 (combination claim with interlocking bolts): Coupling-heads with forked members integral with the heads; a block interposed and fitting between the forked members; bushings rigidly supported in the block; a first bolt (15) provided with an opening (hole 15'); a second bolt (16) passing through the opening of bolt 15; and means (riveting or nuts) for securing the ends of the bolts. Captures the distinctive nested-bolt tie arrangement.

Claim 4 (combination claim, 90° bushings + pivotal bolts): Coupling-heads with integral forked members; interposed block; bushings rigidly supported in the block with axes intersecting at ninety degrees; bolts passing through the openings of one forked member of each coupling-head and the block, forming pivotal connections, while the bushings form the pivotal connection to the other forked members.

Claim 5 (combination claim, anti-spread riveted tie): Coupling-heads with integral forked members, interposed block, and bushings as above, with the bolts forming pivotal connections to one set of forked members — the axes of the bolts coinciding with the axes of the bushings — and the bolt ends riveted over to prevent the forks from spreading.

Uncertainty Notes

1. CAFC 2026 docket: No entry found for patent 658,065. My search tool returned no CAFC docket results tied to this number; I cannot affirmatively rule out a docket entry not indexed by the search engine, but given the patent's 1917 expiration, any such entry is extremely unlikely.
2. Claim text: Claims 1–5 as shown on Google Patents are corrupted by OCR. The overviews above are faithful in substance but not certified word-for-word; the USPTO's official TIFF/image record is the authoritative source for the exact claim language.
3. Assignee spelling: The original patent names "Frank E. Bocorselski" (also rendered "Bocorselski"/"BOOORSELSKI" in OCR); Google Patents lists "FRANK E BOCORSELSKI." I have used the Google Patents spelling.

Based on my research, I have no record of any litigation involving US Patent 658,065 (the 1900 "Universal joint" patent).

Summary of the patent in question

• Patent No.: US658065A
• Title: Universal joint
• Inventor: Julius Jetter, assigned to Frank E. Bocorselski (same place — Hartford, Connecticut)
• Filed: May 16, 1900 (application no. 16,876)
• Granted: September 18, 1900
• Status: Expired — Lifetime (anticipated expiration September 18, 1917, i.e., the full 17-year term)
• Technology: A universal joint having coupling-heads with forked members, a (preferably square) central block, bushings rigidly driven into openings in the block at 90° axes, and bolts (15 and 16) serving both as pivot connections and as ties to prevent the forked members from spreading, with riveted (or alternatively nutted) ends.

Litigation search results

I searched multiple sources and queries specifically for the number 658,065 / US658065 (including litigation-focused databases and phrase searches combining the patent number with the inventor/assignee names). No litigation was found involving this patent.

Important caveats on what I did not find, to avoid confusion:

1. The searches surfaced only unrelated "658" patents. Results matching fragments of "658" were all modern, unrelated matters, e.g.:

   • U.S. Patent 5,966,658 (Iron Oak Technologies; PTAB IPR and ~23 district-court cases) — unrelated technology (mobile communication path selection).
   • U.S. Patent 8,762,658 (Unification Technologies LLC v. Micron, Dell, HP, W.D. Tex., e.g., 6:20-cv-00499/500/501-ADA; IPR2021-00940/00941, etc.) — unrelated SSD/data-storage technology.
   • U.S. Application 15/658,065 (issued as US10969785B2, automated vehicle sensor operation) — unrelated modern application number, not the 1900 patent.
   • References to a "Dynapass" '658 patent in PTAB petitions — again a different patent (Dynapass IP Holdings, E.D. Tex. 2022 cases), not US658065A.

2. Practical database coverage. PACER and modern litigation aggregators (Unified Patents, RPX, Docket Alarm, etc.) generally cover cases from the late 20th century onward. US658065A expired in 1917 — more than a century before the earliest records in those systems. Early-20th-century infringement suits (if any) would appear only in historical federal court records or old Federal Reporter volumes, which are not comprehensively indexed in the searchable databases I consulted.

Conclusion

No litigation is known involving US patent 658,065. Given that the patent expired by 1917, it is highly unlikely that any actionable modern litigation exists, and I found no historical case records tying Julius Jetter's or Frank E. Bocorselski's "Universal joint" patent to any infringement suit in the sources available to me. If you need a definitive historical answer, the next step would be a manual search of early federal court records (National Archives regional branches for the District of Connecticut / Circuit Courts of the era) or the bound volumes of the Federal Reporter from circa 1900–1920, which are not reliably searchable online.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. Breakdown: 0 active · 0 with claims invalidated · 0 with claims sustained · 0 settled · 0 institution denied. The USPTO Open Data Portal API reports no AIA trial proceedings for US 658065 as of the most recent ingest, and web searching surfaced no older or recently-filed IPR/PGR/CBM petitions, no PTAB Final Written Decisions, and no Federal Circuit appeals naming this patent. The bottom line for a defendant is not "hardened by IPR" — it is far stronger: US 658065 (granted 1900-09-18) expired by law on 1917-09-18 and has been in the public domain for over a century. No AIA proceeding exists because none is needed; the patent is unenforceable on its face.

No per-proceeding sections follow, because there are no proceedings to report. I will not invent proceeding numbers, judge panels, or decisions.

Strategic summary

Why there is no PTAB record. US 658,065 is a Universal joint patent issued to Julius Jetter (assignor to Frank E. Bocorselski) on 1900-09-18, from an application filed 1900-05-16 (Serial No. 16,876). Pre-1952-era U.S. patents ran 17 years from grant, putting this patent's expiration at 1917-09-18 — the date Google Patents and the USPTO record list as "Anticipated expiration," with legal status "Expired - Lifetime." The America Invents Act's IPR/PGR/CBM regimes did not even exist until 2012-09-16, decades after this patent entered the public domain. The USPTO ODP data confirms no AIA trial was ever filed, and targeted searches for "658065" IPR/PTAB activity returned only unrelated hits (e.g., serial/application numbers that coincidentally contain "658065" in later filings, and the unrelated modern MemoryWeb/Samsung IPR litigation over U.S. Patent 10,423,658 — a different patent entirely).

Claim status. All claims (the patent's specification shows claims 1–5, directed to a universal joint with coupling-heads, a square block, two right-angle bushings, and riveted bolts 15 and 16 serving as spreading-ties) are neither "canceled" nor "sustained" by any PTAB tribunal — they are unenforceable by operation of law because the patent's term expired in 1917. There are no surviving claims that can be asserted, and there is no estoppel bar under § 315(e)(2) running against any potential petitioner because no IPR was ever instituted. Every prior-art ground remains "available," but none is necessary.

Pattern signals. None exist in the PTAB context: there is no repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) in any chain, and no patent-owner appeal history, because there was never a proceeding. The only meaningful "signal" is the patent's age and expiry, which is dispositive and makes any assertion of this patent today per se baseless regardless of PTAB history.

Recommended next steps

• Do not file an IPR — it is the wrong tool and would be sanctionable strategy. A petition against a patent that expired in 1917 would be pointless; the patent cannot be enforced, and there is no justiciable controversy an IPR would resolve. The USPTO PTAB portal (PTAB E2E / the Board's proceeding search) confirms no proceeding number exists to cite.
• If you are a defendant receiving a demand letter citing US 658,065, treat it as a bad-faith assertion. Respond by pointing to the patent's own face: granted 1900-09-18, expired 1917-09-18, status "Expired - Lifetime" on the USPTO/Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US658065/en). The statutory 17-year term (pre-1995 law, running from grant) ended over 100 years ago; the claimed subject matter is in the public domain and anyone may practice it.
• Consider an immediate declaratory-judgment action or Rule 11 / fee-shifting exposure for the demander if the letter is accompanied by infringement allegations — there is no viable infringement theory for an expired patent, and no PTAB estoppel shields the demander because no IPR was ever brought.
• If the demander claims a "new" patent or continuation, demand the exact patent number. Watch for confusion with later filings bearing similar numbers (e.g., design application 29/658065 or unrelated modern patents containing "658" in their numbers). Verify any asserted patent's number, grant date, and maintenance/expiration status on USPTO Patent Center before responding substantively.

Sources: USPTO Open Data Portal AIA trial data (no proceedings on file); USPTO/Google Patents record for US658065A showing grant 1900-09-18 and anticipated expiration 1917-09-18; web searches of PTAB/CAFC databases surfaced no IPR, PGR, CBM, or appeal referencing this patent.

Inventors

• Julius Jetter — sole named inventor. Resident of Hartford, Hartford County, Connecticut at filing (per the patent's preamble). His employer at the time of filing is not determinable from the record: the application was filed in his own name and he assigned to an individual (Frank E. Bocorselski), not to a corporate employer. There is no evidence of any inventor-departure pattern or portfolio fire-sale — this is a single-inventor, single-patent filing, and Jetter's post-filing activity is not documented in the sources available to me.

Original assignee

• Frank E. Bocorselski, an individual of Hartford, Connecticut, is the assignee named on the issued patent. The patent imprint reads: "JULIUS JETTER, OF HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, ASSIGNOR TO FRANK BOCORSELSKI, OF SAME PLACE." Google Patents confirms the "Current Assignee" / "Original Assignee" as FRANK E BOCORSELSKI.
• Line of business / products: Not a company — a natural person. No evidence exists that Bocorselski himself shipped a product embodying these claims. Context worth noting: Bocorselski was himself an inventor in the same art. By 1904–1905 he was assigning later universal-joint patents to a manufacturing firm — e.g., US779,903 (granted Jan. 10, 1905; Bocorselski as inventor, "ASSIGNOR TO BAUSH MACHINE AND TOOL COMPANY, OF SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS") — indicating the commercial home of this technology line was the machine-tool / automotive-transmission component industry. That is a different patent, however, and says nothing about assignments of US658,065.
• Current status: The patent expired by operation of law on September 18, 1917 (17-year term; status "Expired - Lifetime" per Google Patents). Bocorselski was a 19th-century individual; no operating entity exists to be "acquired" or "in bankruptcy."

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no recorded assignments for US658065A. Searches of the searchable assignment indexes and Google Patents legal events surfaced zero reel/frame records — no Assignment, Merger, Security Agreement, License, or Change of Name — at any date. Direct verification note: the Assignment Center UI (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) cannot be machine-queried from this environment; my finding is based on (a) the absence of any assignment record in every searchable source consulted, and (b) database-coverage reality — the USPTO's searchable assignment database reliably begins ~1980, and 1900-era records exist only in the partially digitized "old assignment" collection, which is not indexed in the sources I could query. A manual lookup at the Assignment Center by patent number "658065" is the only way to fully close that gap.

The only conveyance evidenced anywhere is the pre-issuance assignment from Jetter to Bocorselski, memorialized on the face of the patent itself (the "ASSIGNOR TO" imprint, executed in Hartford on or about May 14, 1900 — the date Jetter signed the specification). That 1900-era record predates the modern searchable database and does not appear as a reel/frame in any accessible index.

Per the no-records branch of the task, I stop the enumerated timeline here. This absence is itself a finding: the original assignee — an individual, Frank E. Bocorselski — evidently retained the patent for its entire life, and it expired on September 18, 1917, roughly eight decades before the organized patent-secondary-market / NPE era began. Consequently, there is no ownership chain to diagram, no correspondent to track, and no NPE / troll-pattern analysis that can honestly be performed: every one of the eight signals (shell-entity transfer, known asserter, repeat correspondent, cascading transfers, pre-litigation transfer, bankruptcy fire-sale, privateering, defensive aggregation) would require a recorded post-issuance assignment or a modern litigant, and none exist. The only verdict supported by the record is the "no records, or only the original assignment" branch — insufficient data, with the strong contextual inference that the patent simply lived and died in the hands of its original individual assignee.

I could not complete all planned live database lookups (the search tool cut off some queries), so I'll give you a precise, evidence-based answer and flag exactly where certainty ends.

1. USPTO database search for the specific patent number 658065

I searched for 658065 / US658065 / US658065A as a patent number. Direct USPTO database hits were not returned in the searches available to me. Two searches did surface unrelated items that I am excluding per your instruction because they are not this patent:

• US2461627A ("Operating table") and US2889869A ("Sheep shearing table") — these carry application serial numbers 658,065 from 1946 and 1957, respectively, decades after the 1900 patent and in unrelated fields. These are not the patent 658,065, and I am not returning them as results.

The authoritative record I worked from is the Google Patents page for the 1900 patent itself (https://patents.google.com/patent/US658065/en):

• Patent No.: US658065A — "Universal joint"
• Inventor: Julius Jetter (Hartford, CT), assigned to Frank E. Bocorselski
• Filed: May 16, 1900 (App. No. 16,876) — Granted: Sept. 18, 1900

2. The citations for 658065 — what actually exists

Critical finding: US658065 lists no prior-art ("References Cited") on its face. This is consistent with practice in 1900 — the USPTO did not print citations of prior-art references on patents of that era. The Google Patents record confirms there is no backward-citation section for this patent.

The only citation relationship shown on the record is a forward citation:

• US4410311A — "Self-cooling universal joint," Lovejoy, Inc., filed Nov. 3, 1980, published Oct. 18, 1983. This is a later patent that cites US658065 as prior art against itself — it is not prior art to 658065 and cannot anticipate it.

3. Anticipation analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 102

Because no prior-art references are cited on the face of US658065, there is no citation-based § 102 anticipation map to the five claims. I will not fabricate one.

Two items from the patent's own text bear directly on the "closest art" question:

1. Co-pending Bocorselski application (disclaimed in the specification). Jetter's specification expressly states he does not claim the invention of Frank E. Bocorselski's application filed June 18, 1900, Serial No. 20,703. Notably, the Google Patents "similar documents" list includes US658057A, "Universal joint," published the same day (Sept. 18, 1900) — very likely that Bocorselski application. However, because Serial No. 20,703 was filed after US658065's May 16, 1900 filing date, it is a co-pending application, not § 102 prior art to US658065 (and it cannot anticipate under the pre-AIA first-to-invent / § 102(g) framework either, absent derivation, which is not shown here).

2. "Similar documents" are not citations. Google Patents clusters early universal-joint patents (e.g., US272339A 1883, US260467A 1882, US292978A 1884, US364503A 1887, US384012A 1888, US425324A 1890, and contemporaries like US658057A, US724068A, US719411A, US699904A) under the same CPC classes (F16D3/16, F16D3/26, F16D3/38, F16D3/40). These are classification neighbors, not examiner-cited references. Some would qualify as true § 102 prior art in fact (they pre-date May 16, 1900), and a validity analysis would need to compare them against claims 1–5 — but that would be my own prior-art reconstruction, not a reading of the patent's citations, and I have not obtained the full text of those 1880s–1890s documents to make a defensible element-by-element anticipation call.

4. Bottom line and honest caveats

• Every claim of US658065 (claims 1–5) is directed to the combination of coupling-heads with forked members, the interposed block, bushings rigidly set at 90° intersecting axes, and the tie-bolts (15/16) with riveted/nutted ends.
• No cited prior art exists against those claims; the only associated citation (US4410311A) is a forward citation from 1980.
• A genuine § 102 analysis would require a manual prior-art search in CPC F16D3/40 (and F16D3/16–/38) covering the 1880s–1900 window — early Hooke's-joint patents with center blocks and crossed pivot pins — plus a check of the Bocorselski Serial No. 20,703 file history. Those documents are not examiner-cited references on this patent and I did not retrieve their full texts, so I will not assert specific anticipation findings I cannot support.

If you want, I can next pull full texts of the pre-1900 universal-joint patents in F16D3/40 and run a claim-element comparison against claims 1–5 — but that requires additional searches that were cut short in this session.

Obviousness Analysis of US 658,065 Under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Threshold caveats

1. Which listed references actually qualify as prior art. The "Similar Documents" list on the Google Patents page for US658065A mixes references that predate and postdate the effective filing date of May 16, 1900. Under a proper § 103 analysis only the former are available:

The post-1900 entries are nevertheless useful circumstantial evidence: they show the field was crowded and that development of block-and-yoke universal joints continued incrementally immediately after 1900.

2. Legal-framework caveat. 35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted in 1952 and the Graham v. John Deere (1966) framework postdates this patent, which expired in 1917. A true contemporaneous validity challenge would have applied the common-law "invention" standard (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 1850). The analysis below applies the modern § 103 / Graham framework as the task requests, as a hypothetical ex post exercise. I note at the outset that the claimed combination is of individually ancient elements — the Hooke's/Cardan joint (two yokes pivoting about two perpendicular, intersecting axes through a central member) was centuries old by 1900 — so the real question is whether the specific mechanical details (bored block + rigidly driven bushings + through-bolts acting as ties with riveted ends, per Claims 1–5) rise above the level of ordinary mechanical design.

3. Evidence-limitation caveat. I was able to retrieve full disclosure text for only some of the pre-1900 references (e.g., US260467A is a Micajah Read Davis "Shaft Coupling," Aug. 1882; bibliographic data for US364503A confirms George P. Fenner, Universal Joint, applied Mar. 31, 1887, granted Jun. 7, 1887, USPTO class 464/134; US272339A is a Shuman universal-joint coupling of Feb. 1883). I do not have verified full text for each pre-1900 reference's figures. Where I map claim elements to specific references below, the mapping is grounded in the references' titles/dates, the well-documented state of the 19th-century universal-joint art, and the patent's own description of the prior art — not in figure-level detail I cannot verify. A PTO-style rejection would require full-text confirmation of each cited reference.

Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

A machinist or mechanical draftsman, circa 1900, skilled in power-transmission shafting and couplings: familiar with Hooke's/Cardan universal joints, yoked ("forked") coupling heads, central cross or block members, plain bearing fits (including ~0.001-inch clearance fits between rotating and fixed parts), pressed-in bushings, and clevis-type bolted/riveted fastenings. Such a person would routinely select among cross-pins, bushings, bolts, and riveted or nutted ends based on load, speed, angle, and manufacturing cost.

The claimed invention in brief

All five claims share a core combination: two coupling-heads with integral forked members; a central block (preferably square in cross-section) interposed between the forks, with two circular openings in the same plane at 90°; bushings rigidly driven into those openings (forming the pivot bearing for one fork of each head); and bolts (15, 16) passing through the other fork members and the block, forming the second set of pivots. The specification stresses two points of asserted novelty:

1. The bushings and bolts together provide the two perpendicular pivot axes with minimal friction (the ~0.001-inch clearance, p. 1, lines ~90–100); and
2. The bolts "also serve the purpose of holding the forked members … together" — i.e., they act as ties whose heads seat in counterbored recesses and whose shouldered stems are riveted over onto the bushings, "preventing the forked members … from spreading" (spec., and Claim 5's "ends of the bolts riveted over to prevent the forks from spreading").

Claims 1–2 and 4–5 are variations on that theme. Claim 3 adds a distinctive structural detail: bolt 15 has a transverse opening (hole 15), and bolt 16 passes through that opening in bolt 15 — i.e., the two pivot bolts physically interpenetrate at the center of the block, so their axes intersect in the same plane.

The specification itself disclaims the broader "two concentric members, one of which extends through the other … connected at its ends to the prongs of one fork" joint as the invention of Frank E. Bocorselski (application Serial No. 20,703, filed Jun. 18, 1900, issuing as US658057A). Jetter's claims are deliberately drawn narrower — to the bushings-in-block plus tie-bolts combination.

Element mapping against the closest prior art

Claim 1 (and the shared core of Claims 2, 4, 5)

Differences over the closest art are therefore not structural in kind but in detail: (i) a bored square block with two intersecting through-bores, rather than a four-trunnion cross or spherical center; (ii) rigidly driven bushings occupying part of each bore; and (iii) counterbored fork recesses with the bolt heads seated in them. These are conventional engineering expedients, each with a well-understood reason.

Claims 2 and 5 — riveted bolt ends as anti-spread ties

The patent's own emphasized feature — a through-bolt whose head seats in one prong and whose opposite end is riveted over, thereby clenching the two prongs of a fork together — is the textbook clevis-and-pin fastening, ubiquitous in 19th-century machine design for exactly the stated purpose: preventing the legs of a yoke from spreading under side load. A PHOSITA seeking to keep a universal joint's fork prongs from spreading under power would reach for a headed and upset/riveted (or nutted) through-bolt as a matter of routine mechanical choice. The specification itself concedes "a nut threaded to the ends of the stems … would answer equally well, or other methods can be used as well" — an admission that the end-securing means is not critical. The "bolt acts as a tie" function is the expected behavior of any through-bolt clenching a yoke, not a new principle.

Claim 3 — the interpenetrating bolts

The one arguably distinctive element is bolt 16 passing through a transverse hole (15) bored in bolt 15, so that the two pivot bolts cross within the block. A PHOSITA designing a compact joint whose two pivot axes must lie in the same plane (as Jetter's block requires) and whose center member is a solid block would face the elementary geometric problem of making two perpendicular pins coexist at the intersection point. Notching or boring one pin to pass the other is the most direct mechanical answer to that design constraint, and interpenetrating/crossed pivot members were already present in the art in the concentric-members form Jetter expressly acknowledges as Bocorselski's (US658057A). The step from "concentric members, one extending through the other" (admitted prior design) to "two bolts crossing at right angles, one through a hole in the other" is a modest design choice addressing the same constraint (intersecting axes within a compact block). Note, however, that Bocorselski's disclosure postdates Jetter's filing and is not legally available prior art; the point is only that the concept of interpenetrating pivot members at the center of such joints was not foreign to the art.

Proposed combinations and motivation to combine

Primary reference: Fenner US364503A (1887) and/or Shuman US272339A (1883) — pre-1900 universal joints with forked heads and a central member carrying two perpendicular pivot axes (the Cardan layout that Claim 1's preamble concedes).

Secondary references / general knowledge:

• US260467A (1882, Davis, shaft coupling), US384012A (1888), US292978A (1884), US627203A (1899), US45476A (1864) — for conventional pivot-pin, bushing, and yoke-coupling construction details.
• Ordinary clevis/yoke fastening practice — headed through-bolts with upset/riveted or nutted ends clenching fork prongs.

Motivations to combine (articulated reasons, not hindsight):

1. Anti-spread tie function. The known failure mode of forked universal joints — prongs spreading under torque, throwing the pivot axes out of alignment — is explicitly the problem Jetter sets out to solve ("thereby preventing the forked members … from spreading, and thereby maintaining the axial alinement of the cooperating parts"). Replacing the two separate pivot pins of a Fenner/Shuman-type joint with through-bolts that both journal the second fork and clench the first fork's prongs (head in a counterbore on one side, riveted/upset end on the other) is the standard clevis solution to precisely that problem. Motivation: direct, predictable, and documented in the mechanical arts generally.
2. Wear and friction control. Pressing renewable bushings into the block's pivot bores and fitting the fork holes ~0.001 inch oversize is a textbook bearing arrangement to minimize friction at high speed/angle — Jetter's stated objects ("greater amount of power at a greater angle and at a greater speed"). A PHOSITA concerned with speed and angle would routinely add bushings; the claimed clearance is simply a standard running fit.
3. Manufacturability. Boring two perpendicular holes in a square block and pressing in bushings is cheaper and more accurate than forging and machining a four-trunnion cross with precisely aligned integral journals — an obvious economic motivation to substitute the bored-block construction.
4. Compact intersecting axes. If the design constraint is two pivot axes intersecting in the same plane within a block, boring one bolt to receive the other (Claim 3) is the most direct solution, equivalent in function to the concentric-member arrangement already known in the art.
5. Combination predictability. Each element (bored block, bushings, through-bolts, counterbores, riveted ends) performs exactly its expected function; there is no synergy or unexpected result disclosed. The patent claims no new kinematic mode — it is still a two-axis Cardan joint.

Secondary considerations: None favoring patentability are in evidence. There is no record of long-felt need, copying, commercial success, or praise attributable to this patent, and the density of near-identical "Universal joint" patents issuing in 1900–1903 (US658057A, US686027A, US698159A, US699904A, US704321A, US705366A, US706403A, US719411A, US724068A) indicates a crowded field of incremental mechanical variation — the classic setting in which small rearrangements of known parts are held obvious.

Conclusion by claim

• Claims 1, 2, 4, and 5 recite a Cardan-type universal joint whose elements (forked heads, central block, two 90° pivot axes, bushings, through-bolts) were each old and whose only novelties — bushings rigidly pressed into block bores at ~0.001-inch clearance, and bolts that double as riveted anti-spread ties seated in counterbores — are conventional mechanical expedients with well-understood motivations. A PHOSITA combining Fenner US364503A or Shuman US272339A with standard bushing and clevis-bolt practice would have arrived at these claims with a reasonable expectation of success. Likely obvious under § 103.
• Claim 3 is the strongest claim because of the specific interpenetrating bolt-in-bolt detail. Even so, that detail is the natural mechanical answer to the design constraint of intersecting pivot axes in a compact bored block, and is functionally analogous to the concentric interpenetrating members the patent itself acknowledges as known. On balance, Claim 3 would also likely be held obvious, though with less confidence than Claims 1, 2, 4, and 5; it presents the closest question if a challenger cannot point to a pre-1900 disclosure of crossed, mutually-bored pivot pins.

Bottom line: Under the modern § 103 framework, all five claims of US658065A would likely be invalid as obvious over the pre-1900 universal-joint art (e.g., US364503A, US272339A, US260467A, US627203A) combined with conventional bushing and clevis-bolt/riveting practice, with Claim 3 presenting the only arguable — and ultimately weak — case for patentability. Definitive figure-level mapping would require full-text review of the pre-1900 references, which I could not fully retrieve in the searches above.

Sources: US658065A specification and claims, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US658065](/patent/US658065)/en; bibliographic record for Fenner US364503A, https://datamp.org/patents/search/advance.php?pn=[364503](/patent/364503)&id=60813&set=1; Davis US260467A abstract (ORKG/USPTO); Shuman US272339A dated Feb. 1883 (cited in Justia patent records).