US 703706

US 703,706 — Search Results and Patent Summary

1. Search scope and what I actually found

I ran targeted searches against Google Patents (which mirrors USPTO full-text/OCR data), general web, and patent-litigation/CourtListener-indexed material, and found no litigation, PTAB, or CAFC 2026 docket activity of any kind for US 703,706. Specifically:

• No CAFC docket entry, appeal number, or opinion referencing US 703,706 (or "703,706") appears in any indexed federal-court or Federal Circuit material for 2026. The only 2026 CAFC/petition results returned were unrelated patents (e.g., TrackTime v. Amazon, an IPR involving Samsung/Omni MedSci) — none involve 703,706.
• Nothing in the USPTO "Cited By" or litigation data for this patent. Google Patents lists the legal status as "Expired – Lifetime," anticipated expiration 1919-07-01, and there is no assignment record (current and original assignee both shown as "Individual").
• Uncertainty flag: I cannot certify that no 2026 filing exists. I am relying on public search indexes and the Google Patents record; sealed filings, filings not yet indexed, and matters docketed only under a party name (without the patent number in the caption) would not surface in these searches. A direct query of USPTO Patent Center / PACER / CourtListener's Docket Alarm by patent number would be required to state this categorically.
• Also flagged as a likely database artifact: the Google Patents "Cited By" table for this patent lists two documents — US 2,479,166 A (Oil burner with steam cleaning means, 1949) and US 11,833,952 B2 (Hoist for vehicle with interchangeable body, Deist Industries, 2023). The second is facially unrelated to an oil burner and appears to be a mis-linked/erroneous citation entry in the database rather than a genuine citation.
• Strictly literal identifier note: I have not substituted any similar number. The results you asked for are for 703,706 (six digits, US grant numbering), not for the modern-format number 7,037,706 or any other near-match. Several search hits for "703706" were foreign/unrelated documents (e.g., AU 703706 B2, a Belgian reimbursement code 703695–703706, a Brazilian case number 703706-08.2000) — none of these are the US patent.

2. Bibliographic data for US 703,706

On the abstract: there is no abstract. Abstracts were not part of US patent specifications in 1902. The functional equivalent is the specification's stated object plus the single claim. The "Definitions" block on Google Patents is an OCR-derived near-verbatim rendering of the claim, not a true abstract.

3. Specification summary (the "abstract" substitute)

The patent is directed to improvements in crude-oil burners of the class in which oil is ejected by steam pressure. The specification states that this class had "hitherto been subject to the disadvantage of" — the sentence is truncated in the surviving OCR and the precise recited disadvantage is not recoverable from the text I have.

Structure, in the inventor's own reference characters:

• A — a T-member: a solid cast metal block with an internal bore A′.
• B — steam-supply pipe, screwed into the rear of bore A′, with a control valve B′.
• C — oil-supply pipe, screwed into an annular extension A² at the bottom, with a control valve C′. Both B and C lead into the barrel A⁵.
• A³ — pipe screwed into the forward opening of bore A′, forming a continuation of the bore, terminating in the discharge tip A⁴.
• D — perforated steam pipe, screwed into bushing D′ (itself screwed into bore A′ and abutting steam pipe B), running axially inside the barrel. It is closed at its far end by plug D³.
• D² — perforated annular collars rigidly secured at intervals on pipe D, spanning the annular space between pipe D and the barrel wall. Steam holes in pipe D are D⁴; holes in the collars are D⁵.
• Materials: the whole burner is preferably brass or bronze, "as best calculated to withstand corrosion and heating."

Disclosed operation: Oil is fed under pressure (the patent expressly says gravitation "is unreliable" and suggests, among well-known methods, a water-lift). Steam blows through perforations D⁴ into the body of oil surrounding pipe D, forming an intimate admixture and dividing the oil into atomic particles. The mixture is kept violently agitated as it passes through the collar perforations D⁵, issuing through the last collar into tip A⁴ as an atomized spray that "burns without soot," with clear and transparent combustion. Because mixing occurs before ignition, the flame can be cut to any desired volume by adjusting valves B′ and C′, from a flame long enough to pass under a boiler and back through the tubes down to a pilot light. The specification asserts this is not possible in burners that mix steam and oil only after liberation.

4. Plain-language overview of the independent claim

There is exactly one claim, and it is the sole claim of the patent (independent, no dependents). Its elements, in plain language:

An oil burner comprising:

1. a barrel that ends in a discharge tip;
2. a pipe with numerous perforations, appreciably smaller in size than the barrel, located inside the barrel;
3. perforated collars placed at intervals along that perforated pipe, each collar extending across the space between the pipe and the barrel;
4. means for supplying oil to the interior of the barrel, i.e., into the space around the perforated pipe; and
5. means for supplying steam to the interior of the perforated pipe.

Why that combination mattered: the claim captures a two-stage, in-line mixing architecture — steam is injected radially outward through the small pipe's perforations into a surrounding annular oil body, and the resulting mixture is then forced through a series of perforated baffle collars (a staged shearing/agitation path) before it reaches the tip. The collars both center the perforated pipe and act as repeated mixing/atomizing stages. Claim element 5 ("means for supplying steam") and element 4 ("means for supplying oil") are drafted in means-plus-function style, but predate 35 U.S.C. § 112(f) by more than a half-century; the corresponding disclosed structure is the pipes B and C with valves B′ and C′.

Claim-drafting caveats worth noting:

• The claim is a single, unrestrictedly broad composition claim with no recitation of pressures, proportions, hole sizes, hole patterns, number of collars, spacing, or materials. The brass/bronze preference and the "oil fed under pressure" limitation appear only in the specification, not in the claim.
• The "appreciably smaller size than said barrel" limitation is relative and undefined in the claim — a potential indefiniteness/scope issue by modern standards, though not an issue under 1902 practice.
• OCR fidelity flag: the claim text as reproduced in the Google Patents "Definitions" block and the specification body contains obvious scanning corruptions (e.g., "Anoil burner," "partsto wit: a, barrel," "locatedl," "to the interior of the barrel and-around"). I have reconstructed the intended reading from context, but I am not working from a clean image of the original typeset claim, so exact orthography of the printed claim is not something I can certify.

5. Bottom line

US 703,706 is a 1902, single-claim, unassigned, long-expired US patent to John August Meyer of San Francisco for a steam-atomizing crude-oil burner in which steam is injected through a perforated inner pipe into a surrounding annular oil stream and the mixture is staged through perforated collars before discharge. It has recited no abstract (the format did not exist in 1902). My searches found no USPTO, PTAB, district court, or CAFC 2026 docket activity for this patent number, and no assignment history. I cannot independently verify the absence of a 2026 filing beyond what public indexes show, and I have deliberately returned results for 703706 only, per your instruction not to substitute similar numbers.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 703706.

Let me run additional targeted searches on litigation-specific sources.

Conclusion: No litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 703,706

I searched for litigation records for the specific identifier 703706 across patent-litigation resources (including PACER-derived dockets via CourtListener/Justia/UniCourt, the Unified Patents litigation portal index, and general web sources covering CAFC and district court patent cases). I found no case — in any jurisdiction, at any time — in which U.S. Patent No. 703,706 was asserted as a patent-in-suit, challenged, or otherwise the subject of litigation.

Therefore, I cannot provide a case-by-case list of plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, and outcome, because there are no cases to list.

Why this result is expected

• The patent is a 1902 patent and long expired. Per the authoritative patent text and Google Patents bibliographic record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US703706](/patent/US703706)/en):
  • Title: "Crude-oil burner"
  • Inventor: John August Meyer, of San Francisco, California
  • Application No. 83,468, filed November 23, 1901 (No model)
  • Granted and published July 1, 1902
  • Legal status listed as "Expired – Lifetime," with anticipated expiration July 1, 1919
• The single claim is directed to a steam-atomizing oil burner (a barrel terminating in a discharge tip, a perforated inner pipe of smaller size, perforated collars between the pipe and barrel, plus oil-supply and steam-supply means).
• The record shows only two "Cited By" references (US2479166A and US11833952B2), neither of which involves litigation over the '706 patent itself.
• There is no reported Federal Circuit or district court opinion, and no PTAB, ITC, or ITC-style proceeding, concerning this patent. An 1880s–1900s burner patent would in any event have had a short commercial litigation life and would be far outside any modern litigation database's tail.

Important caution about false positives

My searches returned numerous hits for the numeric string "703706," but none of them relate to U.S. Patent No. 703,706. In particular, note the following look-alikes, which are not the same identifier and should not be mistaken for litigation over this patent:

I flag these because the rule against auto-correcting identifiers cuts both ways: it also means I should not treat a matching number string as if it were the patent number when the context shows it is an application serial number, a foreign patent, or an unrelated docket/case number.

Caveats on confidence

• High confidence: No modern (post-2000) litigation asserts U.S. Patent No. 703,706. Such a suit is legally impossible in practice given the patent issued in 1902 and expired in 1919.
• Moderate confidence / limitation: I could not directly query PACER, Docket Alarm, or the Unified Patents portal case-list with full-text search for the 1901–1919 window. Federal district court records from that era are not comprehensively digitized, and any early-1900s infringement suit over an oil-burner patent would be unlikely to appear in any online litigation database. If you need absolute certainty on the 1902–1919 period, a manual historical search would be required (e.g., the USPTO's annual reports of patent litigation, indexed federal digests, or the Decennial/ Federal Reporter print volumes for that era). I have not performed such a manual historical archive search and am not asserting that no suit could ever have been filed during the patent's live term.

Bottom line for your litigation chart

If you want, I can next: (a) run a search keyed to the assignee/inventor name "John August Meyer" plus burner manufacturers of the era to see whether any historical suit is mentioned in secondary literature; or (b) check whether the '706 patent appears as prior art in any modern case or IPR (the opposite of being litigated, but often relevant to a freedom-to-operate or validity review). Just tell me which direction is more useful.

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

No PTAB hits so far. Let me probe possible misreads of the number and search PTAB dockets directly.

PTAB / AIA Trial Landscape — US Patent 703,706

Patent: US 703,706 — "Crude-oil burner"
Inventor / original assignee: John August Meyer (San Francisco, CA) — individual
Application: Serial No. 83,468, filed 1901-11-23 (no model)
Granted / published: 1902-07-01
Claim count: 1 (a single independent claim; no dependent claims)
Legal status (structured data): "Expired - Lifetime"; USPTO-recorded "Anticipated expiration" 1919-07-01
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US703706](/patent/US703706)/en (fetched 2026-09-21)

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 703,706: zero. Breakdown: active — 0; claims invalidated — 0; claims sustained — 0; settled — 0; institution denied — 0. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block from the USPTO Open Data Portal is the canonical list and it is empty, which I independently corroborated with web searches (see "Verification trail" below). Defensive posture for a would-be defendant: this is not a "hardened" patent — it is a dead one. The 17-year term from the 1902-07-01 grant ran out on 1919-07-01, so there are no live claims to challenge, no live claims to assert, and no IPR/PGR/CBM to bring (the statutory frameworks have structural bars here — see below). If a demand letter cites "the '706 patent" for a crude-oil burner, the most likely explanations are a transcription error (a different '706 patent) or a bad-faith notice; either way the correct first move is to confirm the patent number on the face of the document.

Why the count is structurally zero (not just empirically zero)

I'd flag three independent reasons, because they matter to how much weight you put on the "no activity" finding:

1. The AIA trial regimes did not exist during this patent's life. IPR, PGR, and CBM were created by the America Invents Act, with the trial provisions effective 2012-09-16. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board itself is a 2012 creation; its predecessor, the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, handled pre-AIA interferences, which are not AIA trials and do not appear in the ODP AIA-trial dataset.
2. PGR is unavailable as a matter of statute. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329 reaches only patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16 (AIA § 3(n)(1)). A 1901 application cannot qualify.
3. CBM is unavailable twice over. The covered-business-method transitional program was limited to certain financial/business-method patents (AIA § 18(d)(1)); a mechanical crude-oil burner is not a "covered business method" patent, and the program itself sunset on 2020-09-16 under AIA § 18(a)(3)(A).
4. IPR is technically the only vehicle that is even conceptually open, and it isn't usable in practice. 35 U.S.C. § 311(a) permits a petition against "a claim of a patent," and the Board has historically allowed IPRs against expired patents where the petitioner shows the challenge has utility (e.g., because live district-court litigation over past damages remains, as in Sony Corp. v. Yissum Research Development Co., IPR2013-00219, Paper 15 (PTAB 2013-08-26)). But any infringement recovery here would have to come from acts within the six-year lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286 — i.e., no earlier than 2020 — and this patent lapsed in 1919. There is no damages theory, therefore no litigation, therefore no petitioner with standing-style utility, and the Board has no live claim to cancel (and a patent owner could not meaningfully amend). No IPR was filed; none will be.

Verification trail (what I checked, and its limits)

• Structured ODP block (canonical): states the ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest. Result: no proceedings. I relied on this as the controlling list and did not substitute search results for it.
• Web searches run 2026-09-21 for US703706 IPR PTAB, "703706" crude-oil burner ... PTAB inter partes review, "US 7,037,706" ... IPR, and ptacts.uspto.gov IPR "703706". No hit identifying any AIA trial involving US 703,706. Every "706" hit was a different patent or a non-patent item (details in the near-miss table below).
• Limitation I want to be explicit about: I could not execute a live docket query inside PTAB E2E / PTAB Center or the FDA-style PTAB data sets from this session; the file-level docket search (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) and the PTAB decisions library (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions) should be re-run with the exact case number before any filing that depends on it. My conclusion is "no proceedings on file," and the residual risk is a very recently filed, not-yet-indexed petition — which for a patent that expired in 1919 is not a risk I would price at anything above zero.
• Federal Circuit: no appeal found. I searched for any CAFC opinion referencing this patent on the Federal Circuit's opinions page (https://cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders) and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/); nothing came back tying a docket to US 703,706. I state this as "nothing found," not as "nothing exists."

Proceeding-by-proceeding enumeration

(None — the list is empty)

There is no IPR20XX-#####, no PGR20XX-#####, and no CBM20XX-##### naming US 703,706 as the challenged patent, so there is no petitioner, no panel, no institution decision, no Final Written Decision to quote, no settlement, and no appeal to report. I am deliberately not filling this section with a reconstructed hypothetical — fabricating a proceeding number, panel, or FWD disposition would be worse than the empty section.

Near-miss identifiers I checked and rejected (because the single most useful thing a defendant can do with a "no activity" answer is rule out a number mix-up):

Strategic summary

Claim status: CANCELED — none. SUSTAINED — none. UNTESTED — all of it. US 703,706 has exactly one claim. That claim was never before the Board, was never construed, and was never canceled. But "untested" here carries none of the usual upside for a patent owner, because the claim's enforceability ended with the term on 1919-07-01. There is no surviving claim to work around, no narrowed-but-alive claim set, and no claim whose scope a defendant needs to map. Contrast the normal framing — "the patent has been narrowed through IPR; here are the surviving claims" — which has no application to a patent with a single claim that lapsed 107 years before today's date.

Estoppel landscape: empty, and it runs in the defendant's favor, not the patent owner's. Because no IPR/PGR/CBM was ever instituted, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel never attached to anyone — there is no petitioner, no privy, and no real party in interest that is barred from raising anything. In the abstract, every pre-1901 reference and every § 102/§ 103/§ 112 theory remains "available." That availability is academic: invalidity is not the defendant's problem, enforceability over time is, and 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year damages lookback closes that door. (If, separately, someone is asserting a different '706 patent against you, § 315(e)(2) estoppel from that patent's own proceedings would have to be analyzed on that patent's docket — not this one.)

Pattern signals: none detectable. No repeat petitioner, because there is no petitioner. No PTAB appeal activity by the patent owner, because there was never a trial to appeal. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or otherwise) in the chain — and one never would have appeared, since defensive aggregators target live patents being asserted in litigation and a 1919-expired patent offers nothing to clear. The only "citation" traffic around this document is Google Patents' automated Cited-By field, which appears to be contaminated (see US 11833952B2 above). My recommendation is to treat the "Cited By" and "Similar Documents" fields on the Google Patents page for US 703,706 as bibliographic noise rather than as evidence of prosecution, licensing, or litigation activity.

Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant and a demand letter or complaint cites US 703,706. There is no FWD to link, because none exists — the honest answer is that the patent has no live rights. Verify the number on the face of the document first (see the near-miss table; "the '706 patent" is genuinely ambiguous). If the letter really does cite US 703,706, the patent expired 1919-07-01 per the "Anticipated expiration" entry in the structured data and the statutory 17-year term from the 1902-07-01 grant. Any recovery would require infringement within the six years preceding suit under 35 U.S.C. § 286 — impossible here — so the assertion is time-barred on its face. Consider 35 U.S.C. § 285 and Rule 11 exposure against the sender, and preserve the letter as evidence.

2. If the letter cites a different '706. Re-run this entire analysis on the correct number. IPR2022-01137 (US 8,581,706) and IPR2015-01440 (US 7,706,778) are real proceedings, but neither concerns the patent in this memo; treating their outcomes as this patent's outcomes would be a serious error, in either direction.

3. Active proceedings: none to monitor. There is no institution decision deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD deadline running against US 703,706, because no petition was ever filed.

4. On the meaning of the silence. In an ordinary patent-practice memo I would treat "no PTAB activity" as a signal — well-asserted patents attract IPRs, and a blank docket often means the patent simply hasn't been asserted yet. Do not draw that inference here. The empty docket on US 703,706 is structural, not circumstantial: the patent died in 1919, PGR and CBM are barred by statute, and IPR offers no petitioner any utility. The absence of PTAB activity is a fact about the calendar, not about the patent's strength.

I'll start by verifying the assignment record and inventor details against the primary sources.

Let me check the Assignment Center records directly and look into any commercial exploitation of the patent.

Let me make a final check for any USPTO assignment recording and any litigation asserting this patent.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US Patent 703,706

Patent: US 703,706 — "Crude-oil burner"
Inventor of record: John August Meyer, San Francisco, California
Filed: 1901-11-23 (Serial No. 83,468, "No Model")
Granted: 1902-07-01
Status: Expired — Lifetime (anticipated expiration 1919-07-01)

Methodological caveat up front, because it drives the whole report: the framework you've specified — Assignment Center reel/frame numbers, recorded conveyances, and a correspondent attorney of record — describes the USPTO's modern centralized assignment-recording system. The reel/frame indexing convention dates from the mid-20th century (I'm moderately but not fully confident in the exact start year, so treat that as indicative rather than authoritative), and electronic recording from the 1990s. A patent filed in 1901 predates that apparatus entirely. Any 1902-era transfer would have been recorded in the Patent Office's liber/letter-book registers, which are not surfaced as reel/frame entries. I therefore cannot produce reel/frame citations for this patent, and I will not manufacture them.

Inventors

• Sole inventor. The specification recites "I, JOHN AUGUST MEYER, a citizen of the United States... have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Crude-Oil Burners." The grant is in his individual name with no "assignor to" language in the heading — i.e., no assignee named on the face of the patent.
• Execution/attestation: signed 1901-10-22; witnesses Baldwin Vale and Geo. F. Hatton. On 1900s-era patents witnesses were frequently the prosecuting attorney or a firm clerk. I do not have high confidence that either witness was Meyer's attorney of record, so I am flagging this as a lead, not a finding, and it does not constitute a "correspondent of record" within the meaning of your NPE framework.
• Unusual-pattern check: Not applicable. With a sole inventor and no corporate assignee, the "all inventors departed the assignee within 12 months" fire-sale precursor cannot be evaluated. There is no evidence of any employer relationship, employment agreement, or pre-filing assignment.

Trap to avoid — do not conflate two different Meyers. Search results surface a Frank B. Meyers of Fort Plain, N.Y., whose "Hydro Carbon Burner" was sold by the Oil Fuel Burner Co. of Fort Plain, N.Y., and was publicized in the French technical press as "meyer's patent" (cnum.cnam.fr, 8XAE399.2). That is a different person, different patent, different fuel (air-atomized, not steam-atomized). I verified no link to John August Meyer of San Francisco. Any downstream database keying on "Meyer + oil burner" will merge these incorrectly.

Original assignee

None — the patent issued to the inventor individually. Google Patents records both Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual.

• Line of business: N/A. No corporate entity appears anywhere in the chain.
• Product embodying the claims: Not established. The burner is described as a working steam-atomizing crude-oil burner for boiler/furnace service, and the specification reports demonstrated turn-down from a boiler-scale flame to a pilot light, with brass/bronze construction specified to resist corrosion and heat. But no assignee or manufacturer is named, and I found no documentary evidence that the claimed structure was commercialized by Meyer or by any licensee.
• Current status: The inventor is necessarily deceased (patent issued 124 years ago). No successor entity is identifiable, and none is needed — the patent expired 1919-07-01, seventeen years after grant, under the then-applicable term.

Historical footnote worth recording: US 703,706 did surface in litigation — but as prior art, not as an asserted patent. In the Ninth Circuit appeal briefs in the Stafford crude-petroleum-process litigation, "Letters Patent No. 703,706, Issued to J. A. Meyer for Crude Oil Burner" appears as Defendant's Exhibit "D-7" (p. 241 of the transcript), cited alongside Hogan 823,866, Fisher 715,044 and others to anticipate the plaintiff's process claims. Meyer's burner was used as a defensive invalidity reference. It was never the plaintiff's asserted right.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Center has no recorded assignment records for US 703,706. This is a finding, not a gap.

• Google Patents' legal-events table for US 703,706 contains only: Application filed (1901-11-23), Priority to US8346801A, Application granted (1902-07-01), Publication of US703706A, and Anticipated expiration (1919-07-01). No assignment, security agreement, merger, change of name, license, or release event appears at any point.
• No reel/frame entries, no assignor/assignee pairings, and no correspondent attorney exist to report — for either the modern recording system or any digitized pre-1955 register.
• Family size is 1 (US 8346801A only). There is no continuation, divisional, or foreign family that could have carried a separate ownership chain.
• No SEC filing, bankruptcy docket, or defensive-aggregator acquisition could touch this patent, because it entered the public domain in 1919, decades before the earliest entity on your NPE watchlist existed.

Per the constraint that governs this section, I am stating plainly that there are no recorded assignments, and the chain analysis below is therefore necessarily empty rather than inferred. I've completed the remaining sections anyway, because the "Insufficient data" verdict in your rubric is defined precisely for this situation and you need the negative findings on record.

Verification links

• USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Assignment Search (legacy index): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US703706](/patent/US703706)/en

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 703706
    1901 : Application filed by John A Meyer
         : No assignment recorded
    1902 : Patent granted July 1
    1919 : Patent term expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — applying your rubric's definition, "no records, or only the original assignment."

US 703,706 was granted to John August Meyer as an individual on 1902-07-01, the Google Patents legal-events record shows no assignment, security, merger, or change-of-name event at any point, and the family consists of a single application (US 8346801A) that expired 1919-07-01. The patent's only appearance in adversarial proceedings was as Defendant's Exhibit D-7 in the Ninth Circuit Stafford appeal, deployed to invalidate a third party's process claims — a defensive use, not an assertion.

There is no ownership chain to analyze. Every NPE signal above resolves to not present because the rights holder was a natural person and the patent was in the public domain roughly 90 years before the modern NPE ecosystem existed. A verdict of "NPE" or "operating-company assertion" here would be an artifact of database keyword collision, not evidence — and I'd caution specifically against the Frank B. Meyers / Oil Fuel Burner Co. of Fort Plain, N.Y. conflation noted above, which is the single most likely source of a false positive on this patent number.

Analyst note on number collisions (data hygiene, not ownership): searching "703706" returns at least four unrelated records — a MIRA Inform credit report No. 703706 on PicoQuant GmbH; a Swedish auction lot 703706; Australian patent AU 703706 B2; and a Belgian reimbursement code. None relate to US 703,706.

Confidence statement: I could not execute a live query against Assignment Center — it is a JavaScript application that does not render to text retrieval — so my finding rests on the absence of assignment events in the Google Patents legal-events record, the single-application family, and the absence of any assignment citation anywhere in the indexed literature. If you need a belt-and-braces confirmation, a manual search by patent number at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and a written request to the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch for pre-1955 liber entries would close the residual gap.

I'll search for this specific patent and its citation records.

The searches returned mostly false positives (other patents containing "706" in different numbers). Let me run targeted searches on the actual record.

Good — I found a key data point. Let me verify the citation records and the two citing patents.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 703,706

1. Search result: the number resolves to exactly one US patent

A targeted search on the literal identifier 703706 (and US703706A) returns a single US patent matching that number:

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US703706](/patent/US703706)/en

⚠️ Number-collision warning (do not auto-correct)

Several unrelated documents contain the digit-string "703706" and must not be conflated with US 703,706:

• AU 703706 B2 (1999) — an Australian grant, unrelated.
• US Reissue 7,706 (Fischer vapor-burner reissue; Watkins v. City of Cincinnati, 8 F. 325) — a different number entirely.
• CN 1184676 A / US 08/703,706 → US 5,800,399 A — a 1996 catheter cannula-holder application whose serial number is 08/703,706. Not a patent number.
• US 6,440,706 ("the '706 patent" in later USPTO/PTO proceedings) and US 5,603,531-lineage references — different patents.

Only US 703,706 (Meyer) is responsive to the query.

2. Critical finding: the patent of record cites no prior art

This is the single most important point for your request, and it is easy to miss.

US 703,706 carries no "References Cited" / examiner-citation list. The Google Patents record for the patent contains an images/description/claims block, a "Cited By" block, and a "Similar Documents" block — but no backward-citation (prior-art) section at all. This is consistent with the era: USPTO "References Cited" data for 1902 grants was not systematically captured and does not appear in the digitized front-page record.

Consequently:

There are zero patent citations in US 703,706 from which to derive § 102 anticipation. The only citations on the record run the other direction (forward citations, i.e., later patents that cite Meyer).

The two entries under "Cited By (2)" are therefore not prior art to 703,706. Both post-date it. I analyze them anyway, because you asked for each citation on 703706.

3. Forward citations — full analysis

3.1 US 2,479,166 A — "Oil burner with steam cleaning means"

The full "References Cited" list of US 2,479,166 is: 703,706 (Meyer, July 1, 1902); 1,003,700 (Busch, Sept. 19, 1911); 1,118,278 (Greathead, Nov. 24, 1914); 1,685,108 (Tuffley, Sept. 25, 1928); 1,721,477 (Spafford, July 16, 1929); 2,276,131 (Wiant, Mar. 10, 1942).

Brief description: A steam-atomizing oil burner comprising an outer housing with a discharge end, a steam atomizer disk with spaced steam passageways, a hollow tubular oil conductor mounted inside the housing and longitudinally movable, apertures in the conductor wall for atomizing oil into the housing, and a piston/set-screw/spring arrangement allowing steam to be diverted back through the atomizing apertures to blow them clean. Claims 1–6 are directed to the housing + movable oil conductor + piston/spring cleaning combination.

§ 102 analysis — NEGATIVE (not prior art):

• Filed 1946-05-27, granted 1949-08-16. Both dates are 44+ years after 703,706's 1901-11-23 filing and 1902-07-01 grant.
• Under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)/(b), a reference cannot anticipate unless it pre-dates the applicant's invention or the filing date (or, for § 102(b), the one/two-year statutory bar before it). A 1946/1949 reference fails on its face.
• Conclusion: US 2,479,166 cannot anticipate or render obvious any claim of US 703,706 under § 102. It is prospective only — it is evidence that the 1902 Meyer patent remained citable art in the steam-atomizing burner field into the late 1940s.
• Caveat on record-keeping: the Google Patents assignee field (Gertrude F La Velle) and the printed front page (Jenkins Jr. + La Velle as executrix) do not match cleanly. I report both literally rather than reconciling them.

3.2 US 11,833,952 B2 — "Hoist for vehicle with interchangeable body"

Brief description: A vehicle-mounted hoist system for lifting and swapping interchangeable truck bodies. Field: materials handling / vehicle accessories (roughly B60P / B66C).

§ 102 analysis — NEGATIVE (not prior art):

• Post-dates 703,706 by ~118 years (2020 priority, 2023 grant vs. 1901 filing).
• No § 102 relationship is possible; the technology is entirely unrelated (vehicle hoists vs. steam-atomized crude-oil burners).
• Assessment: this entry is almost certainly a citation-graph artifact — a spurious or erroneous "Cited By" association in the digitized citation data for a 1902 patent. Google Patents' forward-citation data for 19th/early-20th-century US patents is known to contain noise. I could not verify the underlying citation basis, and I flag that explicitly rather than asserting a substantive link.
• Conclusion: US 11,833,952 B2 is not prior art to US 703,706 and should be disregarded as a § 102 reference.

4. Same-field documents surfaced by proximity search (candidate art — not confirmed citations)

Because 703,706 has no citation record, the only way to build a § 102 case is by independent searching. The Google Patents "Similar Documents" panel and classification F23D 11/10 surface the following. I present them with an explicit confidence caveat: these are algorithmic near-neighbors, not examiner citations, and I have not verified their claim scope. They are leads, not conclusions.

Pre-dating 703,706 (potentially available as § 102(a)/(b) art)

Post-dating 703,706 — cannot be § 102 art (listed for completeness / obviousness context only)

US 955,946 A (1910), US 943,567 A (1909), US 906,541 A (1908, Milburn), US 762,129 A (1904), US 727,414 A (1903), US 697,093 A (1902-04-08), US 989,745 A (1911), US 1,003,079 A (1912), US 1,005,965 A (1911), US 1,052,126 A (1913), US 1,073,830 A (1913), US 1,135,072 A (1915), US 1,217,538 A (1917), US 1,242,359 A (1917), US 1,306,458 A (1919), US 1,394,188 A (1921), US 1,430,428 A (1922).

The claim language that any § 102 reference must meet

703,706 has one claim, and it is highly specific. To anticipate under § 102, a reference must disclose all of:

1. a barrel terminating in a discharge-tip;
2. a pipe having numerous perforations, of appreciably smaller size than the barrel, located inside the barrel;
3. perforated collars located at intervals on the perforated pipe, extending between the pipe and the barrel;
4. means for supplying oil to the interior of the barrel and around the perforated pipe; and
5. means for supplying steam to the interior of the perforated pipe.

Elements (2) + (3) together — a small perforated steam pipe bearing axially spaced perforated annular collars that span the full annulus to the barrel wall — are the point of novelty and the most likely ground for distinguishing any of the above references. None of the references I was able to inspect discloses that combination.

5. Independent corroboration that 703,706 functioned as prior art in litigation

Separately from the citation graph, Meyer's patent appears in early-20th-century infringement records. In the trial record associated with Stafford v. Albers Bros. Milling Co. (D. Or., 1919), it is listed as a defendant's exhibit:

"D 7, John A. Meyer, No. 703,706, p. 241. — Oil and steam mingle under pressure (see lines 59–67) in a mixing chamber at a point 'at a distance' from the point of combustion."

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/*/archive.org/download/govuscourtsca9briefs1231/ (9th Cir. briefs collection)

This is not a § 102 citation in 703,706 — it is evidence that the patent was being used as prior art against later crude-oil-burner process claims (cf. Stafford's US 860,418 and US 860,419). It is useful corroboration of the 703,706 disclosure's scope, but it does not supply an anticipatory reference against 703,706 itself.

6. Bottom line

1. A USPTO/live-web search on the literal number 703706 returns exactly one US patent: US 703,706 A, "Crude-oil burner," John August Meyer, filed 1901-11-23, granted 1902-07-01. No similar-number results are substituted.
2. US 703,706 has no prior-art citation record of its own. Any § 102 analysis must be built from independently located art, not from the patent's face.
3. Neither of the two "Cited By" references is prior art:
   • US 2,479,166 A (Jenkins Jr./La Velle; filed 1946-05-27; granted 1949-08-16) — post-dates 703,706 by 44 years; § 102 unavailable. It cites 703,706, not the reverse.
   • US 11,833,952 B2 (Deist Industries; priority 2020-03-04; granted 2023-12-05) — post-dates by ~118 years, unrelated field, likely a citation-graph artifact; § 102 unavailable.
4. Therefore no reference in 703,706's citation record anticipates its sole claim. Candidates worth independent verification against claim element (2)+(3) are US 614,194 A (1898), US 477,872 A (1892), and US 426,040 A (1890) — flagged as leads only, with claim scope unverified.

Stated limitation: I was unable to reach USPTO PatentCenter/PAIR directly within this session to confirm the absence of a front-page "References Cited" list from the primary source. The conclusion in § 2 rests on the authoritative patent text supplied (https://patents.google.com/patent/US703706/en), which contains no backward-citation block. I have not fabricated any citation to fill that gap.

I'll analyze the prior art listed on this page. Let me first verify the actual content of the pre-1901 references, since most of the "Similar Documents" postdate the patent.

Let me get the content of the remaining pre-1901 references, especially US614194 (1898).

Preliminary note on scope

No previously-generated sections were included in your message, so this § 103 analysis is written self-contained (avoiding the prior-art restatement that presumably appears elsewhere). All identifiers are transcribed literally from the page, including its OCR corruptions.

Threshold legal caveat — state it up front, because it materially affects the analysis. US703706 issued July 1, 1902. 35 U.S.C. § 103 was not enacted until the Patent Act of 1952. In 1901–02 the governing test was the pre-1952 "invention" standard (R.S. §§ 4886–4893, plus the later Cuno Engineering v. Automatic Devices, 314 U.S. 84 (1941) "flash of genius" gloss, since abrogated by Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966)). A § 103 analysis of a 1902 patent is therefore anachronistic and is properly framed as a hypothetical: if this claim were evaluated today on this record, would it have been obvious? I answer that question. A secondary caveat: under the pre-1952 regime the critical date is the date of invention, not the filing date, so usable art may extend slightly past the nominal 1901-11-23 date. I use 1901-11-23 conservatively.

1. What the page actually supplies as prior art

The page presents three blocks of documents. Only one contains true prior art, and it is easy to misread:

The usable prior-art pool is therefore:
US190529A (1877, vapor-burners) · US263198A (1882) · US325376A (1885) · US379291A (1888, hydrocarbon-burner) · US409556A (1889, Bragg, oil-burner) · US426040A (1890, Moore, injector oil-burner) · US477872A (1892, Roberts, hydrocarbon-oil vaporizer and burner) · US614194A (1898, oil-burner).

Two of the "Similar Documents" titles are OCR-garbled on the page — US263198A renders as "Hydkooarboi ftjbnaoe" and US325376A as "Elbeidge baker." Per your instruction I treat the numbers literally and do not repair the titles; I also cannot rely on those two references substantively. US697093A (1902-04-08, Vaporizer, mixer, and regulator for oil-burners) is indeterminate: its publication date postdates the filing, but the page gives no filing date, so I cannot rule it in or out as art.

2. The claim, construed

There is exactly one claim, and it is a combination claim:

1. a barrel terminating in a discharge-tip;
2. a pipe having numerous perforations, of appreciably smaller size than said barrel, located therein;
3. perforated collars located at intervals on the perforated pipe and extending between the pipe and the barrel;
4. means for supplying oil to the interior of the barrel and around the perforated pipe; and
5. means for supplying steam to the interior of said perforated pipe.

Per the specification, D (perforated steam pipe) sits inside barrel A⁵; perforated collars D² span the annulus at intervals; steam exits perforations D⁴ into the oil body, and the mixture is "kept violently agitated in [its] passage through the perforations D⁵ in the various collars." So element 3 defines series-connected annular mixing cells — the mixture cannot bypass a collar; it must traverse D⁵.

Two construction points matter for obviousness:

• The brass/bronze corrosion-resistance teaching is unclaimed. The page's concept list separately tags "Brass," "Bronze," "copper tin," and "corrosion" — but the claim is silent on material, so that teaching cannot support patentability.
• Elements 4 and 5 are functional ("means for"). Under the pre-1952 practice and even under modern § 112(f) treatment, they are confined to the disclosed structures (T-member A with bore A′, steam pipe B screwed into the rear, oil pipe C screwed into annular extension A² at the bottom, valves B′/C′). This cuts both ways below.

3. Element-by-element mapping of the two strongest references

US409556A — John Bragg, Oil-Burner (Aug. 20, 1889) — verified full text

Bragg is directed to "the class of burners in which crude oil or heavy oil is used as a fuel" — the identical field and identical stated problem space. Its disclosure:

• Shell/body A cast in one piece with a nozzle E threaded into a cross-arm, "straight or curved and widened or contracted at its outlet" → reads on elements 1 ("barrel terminating in a discharge-tip") subject to a shell-vs-barrel argument;
• perforated pipe b, threaded into bushing c, "perforated along its whole length with small holes b²";
• steam-supply pipe D → injector pipe d, which "extend[s] within and across the shell" and is itself "perforated on each side … so as to throw jets of steam into each arm of the shell A and convert into spray the oil trickling from the holes in the inlet-pipe b" → a perforated steam-carrying pipe inside the barrel, "appreciably smaller than" it, fed steam through a dedicated supply (elements 2 and 5);
• oil supplied into the interior of the shell so that it surrounds the injector pipe and is jetted into spray inside the barrel, the mingled spray being carried to nozzle E by injector suction (element 4).

Bragg thus discloses every element except the perforated annular collars of element 3. That is the entire delta.

US426040A — Joseph B. Moore, Injector Oil-Burner (Apr. 22, 1890) — verified full text

Moore discloses concentric-tube architecture in the same field: inner oil-tube L, outer steam/air tube K "in closing the oil-tube L throughout its length," a main casting E with separate oil and steam passages, separate oil and steam supply pipes with valves, superheated steam, and a tapered valve for adjusting oil supply "whereby a uniform fire of any desired intensity may be maintained." Its nozzle k "loosely surrounds the nozzle l, leaving an annular steam-outlet around the point of the latter" — i.e., mixing at/at the point of discharge. Moore is most useful as secondary art for (i) the concentric central-tube/annular-barrel geometry, (ii) independent valved regulation of steam and oil to vary flame intensity, and (iii) tapered cooperative nozzles.

US477872A — Henry P. Roberts, Hydrocarbon-Oil Vaporizer and Burner (Jun. 28, 1892)

Roberts discloses a cylindrical mixing chamber 8 with an open discharge end 9 and, near that end, "an annular ring or diaphragm 10," plus air inlet openings 11 and an annular air draft 18 that "commingle[s] with the vapor after the same has left the burner," the whole aimed at combining vapor with air for increased heat while avoiding carbon formation. Roberts is the best page-based evidence that an internal annular baffle/diaphragm in a burner mixing chamber, positioned along the flow path to promote and stage commingling, was a known expedient — the functional equivalent of element 3. I must flag one verification gap: the OCR I retrieved does not state that diaphragm 10 is perforated, so Roberts supports "annular internal baffle in a mixing chamber," not, on this record, "perforated annular collar."

US614194A (Nov. 15, 1898, Oil-burner)

This is the closest-in-time prior art and therefore the most important unexamined reference — and I could not retrieve its text (searches returned only a cross-citation from US1066161). Treat my conclusions as provisional pending its review. Its 1898 date and title place it squarely in the field.

4. The § 103 combinations

Combination A — Bragg alone (§ 102(a)/§ 103 hybrid). Bragg discloses elements 1, 2, 4 and 5. If the "collars" limitation is given its broadest reasonable reading (any perforated transverse flow-restricting member in the annulus), the distinction collapses to a single structural feature. Even if element 3 is preserved as the point of novelty, a prima facie case exists that the claim as a whole is obvious over Bragg alone, because the claim's only asserted advance — "mixing the steam … with the oil before ignition" (specification) — is already performed by Bragg inside shell A. Meyer's own characterization of the prior art ("burners depending upon the mixture of the steam and oil after liberation") is factually inaccurate as applied to Bragg, and that mischaracterization is the load-bearing premise of the patent's asserted contribution.

Combination B — Bragg + Roberts. If element 3 is the distinguishing feature, Bragg + Roberts supplies it. Rationale: Roberts teaches that a coaxial annular baffle positioned along the mixing path in a burner's mixing chamber promotes commingling with the gaseous medium. A POSITA seeking to improve Bragg's spraying — Bragg's injection is a single-point, single-event jet, and Bragg's own field was fully alive to soot and incomplete-combustion complaints — would add one or more such internal annular baffles along Bragg's injector pipe to multiply steam/oil contact and lengthen effective mixing residence time. The improvement is mechanical, the structure is a drop-in modification (the baffle spans structures already present: injector pipe d and shell A), and the result (better atomization) is the predictable consequence of more intimate mixing. This is the classic KSR rationale of "using a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way."

Combination C — Moore + Bragg (role reversal). Moore supplies the concentric-tube/annular-passage architecture with independently valved steam and oil and a cooperative tapered nozzle; Bragg supplies placement of the perforated steam-carrying pipe inside the barrel. Because the two references place the steam conduit (outer in Moore) and the oil conduit (inner in Moore) in opposite relative positions compared with the claim, this pairing requires an additional "swap the annulus and the core" step. It is a weaker combination than B and needs the further rationale that reversing inner/outer fluid paths was a recognized design option in this art (both arrangements appear among the page's own "Similar Documents"). I would not lead with it.

Combination D — Bragg + US614194. If US614194 discloses a perforated internal baffle, collar, or diaphragm in a steam-atomizing burner, then Bragg + US614194 states a complete, tighter prima facie case than B (closer in time, same specific sub-class, likely same problem statement). This is the combination most likely to change the outcome, and it is unverified.

Weak/secondary: US379291A, US263198A, US190529A, US325376A — all pre-date the patent and fall in the burner/furnace space, but I have no verified text (and two have garbled titles on the page), so they can only be characterized as corroborating a crowded, fast-moving art.

5. Motivation to combine — the rationales

1. Same field, same problem, same solution space. Bragg expressly addresses "crude oil or heavy oil" burned as fuel beneath boilers; Moore and Roberts likewise. All target incomplete atomization and soot.
2. Finite, predictable solutions. Once a burner mixes oil and steam in an annular space, the available ways to increase mixing are few and well-known: add baffles, add stages, elongate the path, superheat, or re-route the fluids. The claim selects the most obvious of these (baffling/staging) and claims nothing about geometry beyond "at intervals."
3. The primary reference is "ready for improvement." Bragg's injector performs one mixing event at a single axial location; the natural design step is to replicate it along the barrel. That is literally what collars D² "at intervals" do.
4. Reasonable expectation of success. Staged commingling yielding finer atomization is a predictable mechanical result, not a new mode of operation; the patent itself justifies the collars only by "violent agitation" through perforations D⁵.
5. Regulation is not a point of novelty. Moore already teaches valved independent regulation of steam and oil "of any desired intensity" — undercutting any argument that flame turndown to pilot-light scale is a result uniquely enabled by the collars.
6. Unclaimed features cannot save the claim. Corrosion-resistant brass/bronze construction and the water-lift/gravitation feeding discussion appear only in the specification.

6. The best counter-arguments (why the claim might survive)

• Teaching away / reversal of roles. Bragg's perforated in-barrel pipe carries oil (b, b²), while steam arrives via a separate injector d. The claim requires the inverse: oil in the annulus, steam inside the perforated pipe. A POSITA combining Bragg + Roberts must still reverse the fluid assignment, which the record does not expressly suggest.
• Bragg is an injector, not a percolator. Bragg relies on suction at nozzle E; the claim relies on forced traverse of D⁵ by an oil body under feed pressure. Different modes of operation can support a nonobviousness argument (though the specification's "best results … by feeding the oil under pressure" cuts against it).
• Unverified closest art. My strongest combination (D) rests on a reference I could not read. If US614194 lacks perforated internal collars, my prima facie cases rest on A, B, and C only.
• Structural specificity of element 3. "Collars … extending between the pipe and the barrel" defines closed annular cells — not merely a baffle or a clearance. If the prior art shows only partial baffling or non-occluding diaphragms (Roberts's diaphragm 10 may be exactly that), a genuine structural gap may remain.
• Objective indicia. The specification asserts a flame that "can throw a flame reaching under a boiler and back through the tubes or can be shut down to a mere pilot-light," i.e., a turndown capability the patentee says is "not possible in burners depending upon the mixture of the steam and oil after liberation." That is an assertion of an unexpected result. Nothing on this page supplies commercial-success, long-felt-need, or failure-of-others evidence, so this argument is presently unproven and, on the Bragg record, factually vulnerable.

7. Bottom line

On the record available on this page, US703706's single claim is vulnerable to a § 103 challenge, most plausibly as:

• Bragg (US409556A) alone, if the perforated collars are read broadly as an internal transverse perforated flow-restrictor; or
• Bragg (US409556A) in view of Roberts (US477872A) — and, if verified, US614194A — for the "perforated collars located at intervals on the perforated pipe and extending between the pipe and the barrel" limitation, with Moore (US426040A) corroborating concentric-tube geometry and valved flame regulation.

The combination rationale is strong: identical field, identical problem, a primary reference already containing a perforated steam-carrying pipe inside the barrel, a known internal-baffle expedient in burner mixing chambers, and a predictable mechanical benefit. The residual nonobviousness case rests on (i) the oil/steam role reversal relative to Bragg, (ii) the "closed annular cell" specificity of element 3, and (iii) the unproven turndown claim — none of which is presently evidenced.

Verification required before relying on this: (a) the full text of US614194A — highest priority; (b) whether Roberts's diaphragm 10 is perforated; (c) the filing date of US697093A to settle its art status; and (d) the actual disclosures of US379291A, US263198A, US190529A, US325376A. My content-level confidence is high for US409556A, US426040A, and US477872A (verified full texts), and low/none for the other five. Note also that the page's prior-art exercise is not an examiner's citation list — the "Cited By" items and sixteen of the "Similar Documents" postdate the patent and are legally irrelevant to obviousness.