US 100390

I'll start by searching for this specific patent number and checking for any litigation references.

Let me check the authoritative patent page and search for any court/litigation references.

Let me verify the title and check for any USPTO record or litigation history.

US Patent 100,390 — Analyst Summary

Bottom line: US 100,390 is an 1870 mechanical patent (a lever-type jack for shifting locomotive cross-heads), long expired. There is no 2026 CAFC docket activity involving it — see the litigation section below, which also flags a number confusability risk.

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1. Identifiers and what each one is

Do not auto-correct caveat: the OCR of the specification's own header reads "Laim Parent No. 100,300, dated March 1, 1370" — a garbled rendering of the letters patent number and date. The cataloged document number is 100,390; the "100,300" and "1370" strings are OCR artifacts, not a different patent or date. I am flagging this rather than silently fixing it.

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2. Abstract

There is no abstract. Abstracts were not part of U.S. patent practice in 1870. The Google Patents page's "Definitions" field simply reproduces a snippet of the specification (the ratchet-bar / clamping-socket / hook / lever / pawl description).

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3. Plain-language overview of the disclosure

The device is a portable, ratchet-driven pulling jack used to inch a locomotive's cross-head along its guideways (e.g., for timing, adjustment, or repair), instead of forcing it by hand or with improvised bars.

• A — ratchet-bar. At each end a clamping-socket (a) is fixed at right angles. The sockets enclose/straddle the guideways in which the cross-head slides and are fastened to them, e.g., by keys. This anchors the whole tool to the guideway structure so the reaction force has somewhere to go.
• B — hook. Sits on/engages the cross-head itself: this is the part that actually pulls the work.
• C — lever. Forked at one end so the forks (branches c c) straddle and embrace the ratchet-bar between the bar's ends. The hook B is jointed/pinned to the branches of the lever.
• D — pawl. Pivoted at one end to the lever at the junction of the branches c; its other end rests on the serrated side of the ratchet-bar, and a spring (d) keeps it continuously pressed into the teeth.

Operation: Working the lever C back and forth feeds the pawl tooth-by-tooth along the ratchet-bar. The pull (drawing the cross-head along the guideways) happens as the lever is raised toward the perpendicular; on the return/lowering stroke the pawl simply picks up the next tooth, so the tool "gains distance along the ratchet every time it is lowered." Per the specification, the cross-head can be advanced "at every stroke from one sixty-fourth of an inch up to two [inches]" (the unit is cut off in the OCR).

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4. Independent claim(s) — with an explicit uncertainty

I cannot give you authoritative claim language for this patent. The full text retrieved (Google Patents) contains the description and the signature block ("JOHN S. FUNK… this 18th day of January, 1870… Witnesses GEO. H. VANTINE/VAUGHN, CHAS. M. DICKINSON" — OCR uncertain on the witnesses' names) but no "What I claim" / claim paragraph. The text ends after the description and signature.

Given 1870 claiming practice, this patent most likely had a single claim (there would be no separate independent/dependent claim structure). Based on the disclosed combination, that claim would in substance have covered the combination of:

1. A ratchet-bar (A) having at each end, at right angles, a clamping-socket (a) adapted to inclose and be fastened to the cross-head guideways;
2. a hook (B) adapted to be placed upon the cross-head;
3. a lever (C) forked at one end to embrace the ratchet-bar, the hook being jointed to the fork branches (c c); and
4. a spring-pressed pawl (D) pivoted to the lever at the junction of the branches and bearing on the serrated side of the ratchet-bar.

This is my reconstruction from the description, not a quotation of the granted claim. If you need the verbatim claim, it must be pulled from the original printed copy (USPTO Patent Public Search's pre-1976 scanned-image collection or the PDF linked from the Google Patents page), since the HTML full text here does not include it.

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5. Litigation check — USPTO and CAFC 2026 dockets

• No 2026 CAFC docket involving patent 100,390 was found. Searches of Federal Circuit 2026 materials (public argument calendars, Rule 36 judgments, docketing notices) returned only unrelated appeals. Three independent reasons this is the expected result: (a) the patent's term expired on/about 1887-03-01, so it cannot be asserted in 2026; (b) the Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982 and has no jurisdiction over an 1870 patent dispute; (c) the low patent number places it far outside any modern docket.
• Do not conflate digit strings. My CAFC-oriented searches surfaced, among other 2026 items, Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc. v. Kurin, Inc. (Fed. Cir., 2026) concerning U.S. Patent No. 10,039,483, and Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc. (Fed. Cir. No. 2026-2012). 10,039,483 is not 100,390, and a hypothetical US 1,003,900 (a turn-of-the-20th-century number) would also be a different patent. Nothing in those matters relates to US 100,390.
• Similarly, a search for "Funk" patents returns Funk Brothers Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co., 333 U.S. 127 (1948) — a different Funk and unrelated subject matter. Not relevant.
• The Google Patents "similar documents" list is useful contemporaneous-art context but is not litigation or family data: notably US 99,686, "Improvement in cross-head shifter" (issued 1870-02-08) — essentially the same technical neighborhood, just weeks before this patent — plus period lifting-jacks such as US 117,114; US 130,733; US 132,753; US 134,086; US 149,855; and later ones (US 147,916; US 323,237; US 356,443).

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6. Record reliability notes (uncertainty disclosure)

• Filing date: unknown/uncertain. Only the issue date (1870-03-01) appears; the January 18, 1870 signature is the best available proxy. I will not assert it as the filing date.
• Assignee: no assignee data appears in the record; pre-1980s assignment records are largely not digitized, so the absence of an assignee in Google Patents/PatentCenter is not proof no assignment was ever recorded.
• Claim text: absent from the retrieved documents (see §4).
• OCR quality: the scanned text is heavily degraded (e.g., "J'AOKS," "OI'Y LOCOMO'IVES," "sncll 4drawing being eiected," "crossllead"). Any technical detail quoted above is my best reading of that text and is stated with that caveat.

I'll search litigation-specific sources for this patent number.

Litigation Search — US Patent 100,390

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving US Patent 100,390. I found no case — in any court, at any time — in which US 100,390 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise placed at issue. I could not identify a plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome for this patent, because no such case surfaced in any source I searched.

This is stated as "none found," not as "none ever existed" — see the caveats in §4.

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1. Case list

There are no rows to populate. Every litigation-shaped result my searches returned involved a different patent number (see §3).

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2. Searches run and what they returned

Note on methodology: my ITC-style site-restricted query against the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) returned no indexed results, and I was not able to complete a direct browse of that portal or a PACER docket query before running out of search steps. The negative result above therefore rests on the aggregation sources I could reach, not on an exhaustive PACER sweep.

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3. Confusable numbers — explicitly excluded (do not merge these)

Per the strict interpretation rule, each of the following is a different patent or document and is not US 100,390:

None of these cases involves US 100,390, and none should be reported as if they did.

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4. Why the absence is expected (and where it could still hide)

1. Term. US 100,390 issued 1870-03-01 and, per the record, its anticipated expiration is listed as 1887-03-01 — the then-standard 17-year term. An expired patent cannot be asserted in 2026.
2. Forum. The Federal Circuit was created in 1982 (Federal Courts Improvement Act) and cannot have heard an 1870 patent dispute. Any nineteenth-century enforcement would have sat in a U.S. circuit court (or a state court), whose records are very unevenly digitized.
3. Databases. The Unified Patents litigation portal, Docket Navigator-style compilations, and PACER coverage are dominated by post-1970s dockets. A pre-1900 infringement suit over an 1870 locomotive jack would likely fall outside all of them.
4. Caveat — the one place a real case could exist and I would not see it: a pre-1900 or early-1900s infringement action in a federal circuit court. I have not been able to search those archives, so I cannot represent that no such suit was ever filed. If such a case exists, confirming it would require the pre-1976 records at the National Archives / a regional federal records center, or the Federal Cases / Federal Reporter volumes, not modern docket tools.

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5. Cross-reference and a flagged inconsistency

• The prior section's §5 conclusion — no 2026 CAFC docket activity involving US 100,390 — is consistent with this search and is reinforced by it: I found no case activity at all, of any vintage.
• Flagged contradiction (date): the prior section is timestamped 2026-09-29, whereas this task states the current date as April 26, 2026. That is a four-to-five-month inconsistency in the working date. It does not change any conclusion above (an expired 1870 patent is unassertable under either date), but it should be reconciled before this analysis is finalized.
• Prior section still stands: its §4 caveat that the verbatim claim text is unavailable also means that even if a case were located, I could not presently map a judgment to specific claim language.

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6. Bottom line for the file

Litigation involving US Patent 100,390: none found — no plaintiff, no defendant, no jurisdiction, no case number, no filing date, no outcome. Any report citing "100390" litigation should be checked against §3 before being accepted, because every apparent hit my searches produced was a trailing-digit coincidence rather than this patent.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US Patent 100,390

Source of record: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest), which is the canonical proceedings list. That block reports no AIA trial proceedings. Web search (run 2026-09-29) returned no PTAB petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or appeal tied to US 100,390. The two are consistent, and the previously generated sections of this analysis (which reached the same conclusion for litigation) are not contradicted.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled/terminated, 0 institution denied — which means there is no PTAB record to defend against and no PTAB-based estoppel in play; the defensive posture for anyone facing this patent is not "the PTAB already killed it" but "the patent itself cannot be asserted at all," because its statutory term expired on or about 1887-03-01 (see §5 of the previously generated summary), leaving no enforceable right for a demand letter to rest on.

Because there are zero proceedings, the per-proceeding template below cannot be populated with any real data. I am recording that fact explicitly rather than describing hypothetical proceedings — per the constraint against inventing proceeding numbers.

No proceedings to report

• Count from canonical structured data: 0
• Count from independent web search (2026-09-29): 0
• Type breakdown: Inter Partes Review — 0; Post-Grant Review — 0; Covered Business Method — 0
• Verbatim status strings available: none (nothing to quote)
• Judge panels / petition grounds / institution decisions / FWDs / settlements / appeals: none exist for this patent; I will not paraphrase non-existent papers

Statutory context for the zero count (all three regimes):

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Cross-check for number confusability (important — do not cite these as "100390")

PTAB and Federal Circuit materials are full of documents that say "the '390 patent" or contain the digit string 390, and none of them are US 100,390. Concretely, from the 2026 search results:

• A PTAB petition document refers repeatedly to "the '390 patent" in the context of a portable device varying a communication data rate — that is a different, modern '390 patent (a different digit group entirely, e.g., a X,XXX,390-style number). ptacts.uspto.gov petition document
• A separate petition argues about a "Gilhousen390" reference — that is an exhibit/reference label, not a patent number, and has nothing to do with US 100,390. ptacts.uspto.gov petition document
• Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc. v. Kurin, Inc., IPR2026-00097 (Director's precedential discretionary-denial decision, 2026-05-14) concerns U.S. Patent 12,138,052 B1; the related Magnolia litigation and ex parte reexamination (90/019,177) concern U.S. Patent 10,039,483. Neither is US 100,390. See USPTO Director Discretionary Decision (IPR2026-00097) and In re Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc., No. 2025-1961 (Fed. Cir. 2026-07-09).
• Also flagged in the prior summary and repeated here: the OCR'd specification header reads "Laim Parent No. 100,300". That is a garbled rendering, not a different patent number, but if a third party's file or demand letter cites "100,300," treat it as a distinct number that this analysis has not verified.

Note also that ex parte reexamination is not an AIA trial and would not appear in a "PTAB proceedings" list in any event; nothing in the returned material suggests any reexamination, interference, or public-use proceeding touching this patent. I state that as an absence of evidence, not as verified proof of non-existence — pre-1900 USPTO records are not comprehensively digitized.

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Strategic summary

Which claims are canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. All of them are untested — every claim of US 100,390 retains whatever scope it had on 1870-03-01, because no AIA trial ever reached an institution decision, let alone a Final Written Decision. There are no canceled claims and no sustained claims. There is also, as the previously generated §4 flagged, no verbatim claim text in the retrieved HTML, so the "claim set" for this patent is itself something you would have to pull from the printed copy (USPTO Patent Public Search's pre-1976 image collection, ppubs.uspto.gov, or the PDF linked from the Google Patents page).

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel (and § 325(e)(2) for PGR) attaches only to a petitioner in a proceeding "that results in a final written decision," and § 315(e)(1) applies to requesting or maintaining a proceeding after a final written decision. With zero instituted trials and zero FWDs, no estoppel exists against anyone on any ground. Every § 102/§ 103/§ 112 ground — including art a petitioner never even raised — remains unencumbered by PTAB estoppel. That is a real but largely theoretical advantage, because the patent's expiration since 1887-03-01 means there is nothing to infringe: a claim of an expired patent cannot be infringed by post-expiration conduct, and the patent is not a candidate for assertion in 2026.

Pattern signals. None of the usual patterns are present: no repeat petitioner (there is no first petitioner), no patent-owner PTAB appeal practice, no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) in the chain, and no PTAB-originated Federal Circuit docket. The only "pattern" worth noting is the historical one the prior summary already identified: the Google Patents similar documents list shows contemporaneous crowding in this exact technical space — most notably US 99,686, "Improvement in cross-head shifter" (1870-02-08), filed weeks before this patent but a different document — plus period lifting-jacks (US 117,114; US 130,733; US 132,753; US 134,086; US 149,855). That is prior-art context, not a PTAB proceeding.

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Recommended next steps

1. Say it plainly in any client-facing memo: there is no PTAB activity on US 100,390 — not a denial, not a settlement, not a canceled claim. Zero. The absence here is not the usual negative signal ("well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs"), because the patent is not assertable to begin with; it expired on/about 1887-03-01. There is no "IPR-based defense" to build and no FWD to cite.
2. If a demand letter or cease-and-desist cites US 100,390 (or "100,300"), the dispositive response is term expiration, not invalidity. An expired patent provides no injunctive or damages exposure for conduct occurring after expiration; a letter asserting it is, at minimum, misleading. If the demand instead cites 10,039,483, 12,138,052, or any other modern X,XXX,390 patent, that is a different patent and should be answered on its own record — the Magnolia matters above are a useful illustration of how easily the numbers are confused.
3. Verify the primary record before relying on this section. Confirm the zero count yourself against (a) USPTO PTAB E2E (ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb) and (b) USPTO Patent Public Search for the scanned original of US 100,390, so you can also capture the missing claim text. If you need the PTAB Center search UI for a docket-number/patent-number sweep, use it with the number formatted as 100390 and separately as 0100390.
4. If (contrary to the record) a live matter surfaces the patent, the trial-stage milestone framework would be: institution decision due within 6 months of the petition's filing-date notice (35 U.S.C. § 314(b)); patent owner preliminary response due 3 months after that notice (§ 313); and an FWD due within 1 year of institution, extendable up to 6 months for good cause (§ 316(a)(11)). None of these clocks is running on US 100,390.

Uncertainty disclosure: the zero count is based on (i) the structured ODP-derived block in this prompt and (ii) web searches that returned no matching proceeding. I did not obtain a primary-source PTAB Center docket printout, and I will not assert the absence beyond what those two sources support.

I'll check the assignment record sources for this patent number before writing up.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US Patent 100,390

Critical framing before the sections: US 100,390 issued 1870-03-01 and its term expired on/about 1887-03-01. The USPTO's online Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center — the primary source named in this task — contains patent assignment recordations only from August 1980 to the present (USPTO Assignment Search documentation, and MPEP 301.01, which states that "the historical database of assignments is maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980"). Sources: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf and https://blueironip.com/ufaqs/how-are-historical-patent-assignment-records-maintained/.

So the Assignment Center is structurally incapable of returning a hit for this patent number. That is a coverage fact, not a finding that no assignment ever occurred. I flag this because a "no records" result from that tool, standing alone, would otherwise be misreported as "never assigned."

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Inventors

• The specification is signed 1870-01-18 by Funk; witnesses are OCR'd as "GEO. H. VANTINE" (or VANTINE/VAUGHN — uncertain) and "CHAS. M. DICKINSON."
• Unusual-pattern check (12-month departures, fire-sale precursors): not applicable / not assessable. There is a single inventor, no co-inventor team, and no assignee entity from which any inventor could "depart." There is no digitized corporate or employment record for an 1870 Pennsylvania individual to check against.
• Marysville, Perry County, PA was a Pennsylvania Railroad shop and bridge town in this period (Rockville Bridge crossing), which makes a railroad-employment context plausible — but I did not verify Funk's employment in any primary source, so I am not asserting it. Do not treat it as established.
• Contemporaneous-neighborhood check: US 99,686, "Improvement in cross-head shifter" (issued 1870-02-08, three weeks earlier) is to Charles R. Joyce of Alexandria, Virginia — a different inventor, not a Funk co-inventor or assignee. Confirmed at https://patents.google.com/patent/US99686A/en.

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Original assignee

None. The patent was issued to John S. Funk as inventor, with no assignee named on the record.

• Google Patents front-matter and legal events for US100390 show no assignee field, no assignment events, and no family members other than the internal ID variants (US100390A / US100390D / US100390DA). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US100390/en.
• Product embodying the claims: the disclosed device is a shop tool (a ratchet-lever jack for inching a locomotive cross-head along its guideways), not a consumer or commercial product. There is no evidence in the record of manufacture, sale, or a catalog entry, and I could not locate any. Whether Funk built or sold the tool is unknown.
• Primary line of business (hypothetical assignee): none exists — there is no assignee entity to characterize.
• Current status: no entity. The patent itself is Expired – Lifetime, anticipated expiration 1887-03-01, per Google Patents legal status (https://patents.google.com/patent/US100390/en).
• Assignment-record caveat: pre-1980 assignment records exist only in the USPTO's separate historical (paper/CASSIS-era) collection and are retrievable only by manual request to the Assignment Recordation Branch or via a PTRC — not by online search. So absence of an assignee in the online record is not proof that Funk never assigned his rights (e.g., by an unrecorded or historically-recorded instrument).

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for US patent 100,390. No reel/frame entries, no conveyance types, no assignors, no assignees, and therefore no correspondent of record to capture — which in this case removes the single most diagnostic field in the whole NPE-analysis playbook.

Two independent reasons, both verified:

1. Coverage window. The online Assignment Search database begins August 1980. US 100,390's last possible assignment had to be executed and recorded before its term ended in 1887 — 93 years before the database's coverage starts.
2. No legal-event entries. Google Patents' legal-events section for US100390 lists only the issue event (1870-03-01), the anticipation of expiration (1887-03-01), and the current "Expired – Lifetime" status. Zero assignment, security-agreement, merger, change-of-name, or license events.

Per the task's stop rule ("If the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, say so plainly and stop after this section"), the analysis terminates here. I am noting explicitly that this conflicts with the instructed output order, which also asks for the timeline diagram, NPE-signal matrix, and verdict. I have supplied those three sections below in compressed form so the deliverable is complete and machine-parseable, but every substantive answer is "no data / not applicable" rather than inference. If you prefer strict adherence to the stop rule, truncate after this line.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 100390
    1870 : Application signed by John S Funk
         : Patent issued to Funk as sole owner
         : No assignee named on the record
    1887 : Patent term expires by anticipation
    1980 : USPTO online assignment database begins
         : No records exist for this patent

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is scored against a blank chain. With zero reel/frame entries there is nothing to cite, and the instruction is explicit that "could be a shell" is not a finding. I am marking each cell accordingly rather than scoring silence as innocence.

Digit-confounder warning (carried forward from the earlier section, re-flagged because it is the most likely way this patent gets falsely flagged): US 100,390 is not US 1,003,900 (a different, much later grant), and is not US 10,039,483 (the patent at issue in Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc. v. Kurin, Inc., Fed. Cir. 2026). Any ownership/NPE hit generated by those numbers belongs to a different asset and must not be transplanted onto this one.

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Verdict

Insufficient data.

The assignment chain for US 100,390 is empty, but not for an evidentiary reason — it is empty because the USPTO Assignment Center's coverage starts in August 1980 while this patent's enforceable life ended on/about 1887-03-01 (Google Patents legal events, https://patents.google.com/patent/US100390/en: issue 1870-03-01, anticipated expiration 1887-03-01, status Expired – Lifetime). There are no reel/frame entries, no conveyance types, and no correspondent of record to analyze, so no NPE signal can be scored present on the evidence required by this task. The only positive ownership fact in the record is that the patent issued to John S. Funk of Marysville, Perry County, Pennsylvania, individually, with no assignee named — meaning the original inventor appears to have retained title, and I cannot rule out an unrecorded or historical-database-only transfer.

For verification: query the Assignment Center by patent number at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) — it will return no records for 100390 for the coverage reasons above. Any pre-1980 instrument, if it exists, requires a manual request to the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch, since MPEP 301.01 places pre-1980 records in a database separate from the online system.

I'll run targeted searches on the USPTO record and on prior-art neighbors for this patent number.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 100,390 (John S. Funk, "Improvement in jacks for moving tee cross-heads of locomotives")

Scope note / step-limit disclosure: I ran the searches available to me (Google Patents record for US100390A, the record's own reference/similar-document listings, USPTO-mirror pages, and contemporaneous-art searches for cross-head shifters and period ratchet jacks) and then hit the search step limit. One planned query — a direct USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search citation pull — did not complete. Where a statement below depends on that gap, I say so.

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1. The threshold finding: US 100,390 has no patent citations of record

The authoritative full text of the patent page (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US100390](/patent/US100390)/en) contains these sections: Info, Images, Classifications (B66F 15/00 – Crowbars or levers), Definitions, Landscapes, Description, Publications (1), Family (ID=2169850), Country Status (1), and Similar Documents. It contains no "Citations" section and no "Cited By" section.

• Therefore there is no list of references cited against US 100,390 to walk through, and no "each patent citation for 100390" in the sense the task assumes. I am stating that literally rather than manufacturing one.
• This is consistent with the era: the practice of printing a "References Cited" list on the face of a U.S. patent is a 20th-century development (it is generally dated to c. 1947 in the USPTO's printed front pages). Google Patents builds its citation graph almost entirely by OCR-scraping those front pages, so pre-1900 U.S. patents characteristically show zero citations on both sides. US 100,390 shows exactly that signature.
• What remains unverifiable from here: whether an 1870 examiner cited anything during prosecution. Nineteenth-century prosecution papers ("patent jackets") are held at the National Archives and are largely undigitized. I cannot represent that no examiner citations exist; only that none appear in any digitized record I could reach.

Do not mistake the "Similar Documents" list for a citation list. It is a machine-generated semantic-neighbor list. Two consequences matter for a §102 analysis:

1. It contains many documents that post-date US 100,390 and therefore legally cannot be anticipating prior art against it.
2. It contains at least one document whose indexed title is obviously garbled (US 73,101 indexed as "Office"; US 70,502 indexed as "Thomas j"), so title-based filtering of that list is unreliable.

2. Governing law — an explicit anachronism warning

35 U.S.C. § 102 did not exist in 1870. US 100,390 issued 1870-03-01, four months before the Act of July 8, 1870. Novelty was then governed by § 6 of the Act of July 4, 1836, as amended by the Act of March 2, 1861, which in substance required the invention to be one not (i) known or used by others in this country before the applicant's invention, and not (ii) patented or described in a printed publication in this or any foreign country before the applicant's invention, or more than two years prior to the application.

For the mapping the task requests, I use these approximations and flag them as approximations:

Critical-date problem: the record gives no filing date. The specification is signed January 18, 1870; issue date is 1870-03-01. So the critical date is somewhere in [1869–1870-01-18] most likely, but I cannot fix it. Every reference below is dated relative to both the signature date and the issue date because the choice changes the §102 theory.

And the central limitation, restated from the prior section: the retrieved full text contains the description and signature block but no "What I claim" paragraph. I therefore cannot map any reference to claim language. I map only to the four-element reconstruction of the probable single claim (1870 practice: one claim, combination-form):

• (1) ratchet-bar A with clamping-sockets a at each end at right angles, adapted to inclose and be fastened to the cross-head guideways;
• (2) hook B adapted to be placed upon the cross-head;
• (3) lever C forked at one end to embrace the bar between its ends, hook B jointed to the fork branches c c;
• (4) pawl D pivoted to the lever at the junction of the branches, bearing on the serrated side of the ratchet-bar, spring d pressing it continuously against the teeth.

3. Candidate prior art, with the pre/post critical-date filter applied

The record's own neighbor list mixed pre- and post-dating documents. Filtering to those published before 1870-03-01:

This filter matters more than anything else in the list: roughly three-quarters of the documents Google Patents surfaces "similar" to US 100,390 issue after it and cannot anticipate it. They are state-of-the-art context only (e.g., for construing "ratchet-bar" or "pawl" as terms of art), not references under § 102.

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4. Reference-by-reference §102 analysis

4.1 US Letters Patent No. 99,686 — Charles R. Joyce, "Improvement in Cross-Head Shifter" (most relevant reference)

• Full citation: Charles R. Joyce, of Alexandria, Virginia, "Improvement in Cross-Head Shifter," U.S. Letters Patent No. 99,686, dated February 8, 1870; specification signed January 1, 1870. Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US99686A/en ; facsimile https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/e7/d7/e1/a704ac8fa374c8/US99686.pdf
• Publication/filing dates: granted 1870-02-08 — i.e., 21 days before US 100,390 issued, and the specification was executed 17 days before Funk signed his (1870-01-18).
• Brief description: Purpose is expressly the same — "moving the cross-heads of locomotive-engines, for the purpose of filing the brasses, when they become worn." Structure: parallel bars A A joined by cross-bars a and b, laid on top of one of the engine guides; adjustable straps D D (cross-bar d with depending arms d′) bolted to the bars, "extending down upon each side [of the guide], to prevent them from moving laterally"; a sliding plate B clamped to the bars by bolt b, guide b′, and nut b², carrying a pin b³ serving as the fulcrum for lever C. Operation: adjust plate B for a "purchase," shift the cross-head with the lever, then reset the plate for a new purchase. Single claim: "The device described, consisting of the bars A A, a and b, sliding plate B, with bolt b and nut b², and straps D, when combined and arranged as described, for the purpose set forth."
• § 102 mapping (against the reconstructed claim):

Anticipation conclusion: Under § 102(a)/the "before his invention" prong, US 99,686 anticipates a claim drawn only to the bare cooperative combination of (i) guide-engaging clamp means + (ii) a bar + (iii) a lever giving an adjustable purchase for drawing a locomotive cross-head along its guides. It does not anticipate any claim that includes element (1) in its socket-at-each-end-at-right-angles form, or any of elements (2)–(4). If (as the specification suggests) the granted claim is a combination claim including the hook, forked lever, and spring-pressed pawl, 99,686 does not anticipate it — it is instead the strongest § 103-type reference for the clamp/bar/lever subcombination.
Caveat that cuts both ways: because Joyce's patent issued after Funk's specification was signed, Joyce's status as § 102(a) art depends entirely on whether Joyce's invention and/or publication date precedes Funk's invention date. Joyce's own evidentiary date (spec. signed 1870-01-01) is earlier than Funk's (1870-01-18), which is why I rank it first — but I cannot establish Funk's actual date of invention beyond his declaration, and under 1870 practice this is an interference-flavored question, not a clean anticipation call.

4.2 US Letters Patent No. 95,968 — William Ball, "Improved Railway Moving-Machine"

• Full citation: William Ball, of Wilmington, Ohio, "Improved Railway Moving-Machine," U.S. Letters Patent No. 95,968, dated October 19, 1869. Source: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a0/53/d7/c4d2e5ef00719d/US95968.pdf
• Brief description: A machine for moving cars and other heavy bodies on rails. Relevant structure: moving-levers P P, "each of which is forked at the fulcrum p, and terminates in the hinged hooks p′ and p″," which work above and below in the teeth of a ratchet-wheel B; a coiled spring g holds hook p″ against the ratchet-wheel; levers r r and pin t selectively hold the other hook out of engagement; and a ratchet-bar Y "serving to hold the lever M in any desired position."
• § 102 mapping: Discloses, in one document: a lever forked at one end, a hook jointed/hinged to the lever, a ratchet engaged by that hook, and a spring biasing the hook into the ratchet — i.e., functional analogues of elements (2)–(4) minus the pawl's specific pivot-at-the-fork-junction placement and its resting on the serrated side of the bar. It does not disclose element (1) at all (nothing engages a locomotive cross-head guideway), nor the cross-head application of the hook.
  Anticipation conclusion: US 95,968 does not anticipate the reconstructed combination claim — it lacks the guideway-clamping socket and the cross-head hook environment. It is a strong § 103-type reference for the proposition that a forked lever carrying a hinged hook with a spring-biased ratchet engagement was known in heavy-load moving machinery as of October 1869, i.e., for combining with 99,686's guideway-clamped bar-plus-lever arrangement. Ranked second behind 99,686.

4.3 US 98,977 — "Improvement in spike-extractor" (1870-01-18)

• Full citation: U.S. Letters Patent No. 98,977, "Improvement in spike-extractor," dated January 18, 1870 (listed among US 100,390's similar documents).
• Brief description: Not retrieved in substance — I have only the title and date from the neighbor list.
• § 102 mapping: Different art (railroad spike extraction) and same-date as Funk's signature. Not analyzed further; no anticipation position asserted. Flagged only for completeness.

4.4 US 73,101 (1868-01-07) and US 70,502 (1867-11-05) — unverified, cannot be analyzed

• Both pre-date the critical date and both sit in the same neighbor cluster as period lifting-jacks, so each could in principle be a § 102(a)/102(b)-analogue reference on elements (1) and (4) (a bar clamped to a structure with a spring-pressed pawl engaging serrations).
• But the only metadata I could reach is corrupt: US 73,101 is indexed on Google Patents with the title "Office," and US 70,502 with "Thomas j." I did not retrieve either document's text. I will not guess at their content. If the verbatim claim of US 100,390 is ever recovered, these two are the first documents that should be pulled from the scanned-image collection alongside 99,686.

4.5 Post-dating documents — explicitly excluded as § 102 art

US 117,114; 130,733; 132,753; 134,086; 147,916; 149,855; 276,268; 323,237; 349,179; 356,443; 425,495; 448,363; 451,339; 666,642; 959,475; 988,762 — all issued after 1870-03-01. None can anticipate or render obvious US 100,390. They are useful only to show that the ratchet-jack art developed continuously after Funk, which is a forward-citation observation, not a § 102 analysis.

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5. Answer to "which claims it potentially anticipates"

• Best available answer, on the record I could reach: US 99,686 (Joyce), granted 1870-02-08 / spec. signed 1870-01-01, is the single most relevant reference, and it potentially anticipates only a claim limited to the combination of cross-head-guideway clamp + bar + adjustable-purchase lever. It does not reach the hook, the forked lever embracing the bar, or the spring-pressed pawl.
• US 95,968 (Ball), 1869-10-19, is the most relevant reference for elements (2)–(4) (forked lever + hinged hook + ratchet + spring), but it lacks element (1) and the cross-head context.
• If the granted claim is the four-element combination (which is what the specification describes and what 1870 combination-claim practice suggests), then no reference I identified anticipates it under § 102, and the strongest challenge to it would be an obviousness-type attack built on 99,686 in view of 95,968. That conclusion is conditional on a claim text I do not have.
• Explicit non-finding: I found no reference that discloses the clamping-socket a fixed at right angles to each end of the ratchet-bar, in combination with the hook B jointed to the fork branches c c of a lever embracing the bar between its ends. That specific arrangement is the apparent point of novelty in Funk's disclosure and is what distinguishes it from both 99,686 and 95,968.

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6. Reliability and uncertainty disclosures

1. No citation list exists to analyze. The premise of the task — "look at each patent citation for 100390" — is not satisfiable from any digitized source, because US 100,390 has no citations of record (see §1). Everything above is prior art I identified, not prior art cited.
2. Claim text still unavailable. Restated from the prior section: the retrieved full text has no "What I claim" paragraph. Every § 102 mapping above runs against my reconstruction, not against granted claim language. The prior section's §4 caveat and this section are consistent on this point and it remains the single largest analytical gap.
3. Filing date unavailable. The Jan. 18, 1870 signature is the only anchor; the critical date is therefore uncertain, which changes which of the 1869–1870 references qualify.
4. Pre-1900 court records not searched. Any 19th-century infringement or interference proceeding involving US 100,390 (including one that might have adjudicated 99,686 against it) sits in unevenly digitized circuit-court and Patent Office records. I did not search them and do not represent that none exists.
5. Date inconsistency, re-flagged. This task states the current date as April 26, 2026; the system context I was given states 2026-09-29, and the prior section is timestamped 2026-09-29. This is the same four-to-five-month discrepancy the litigation section already flagged. It changes nothing substantive here (an 1870 patent whose term ended c. 1887-03-01 is inert either way), but it should be reconciled before the file is finalized.
6. Step-limit gap. I did not complete a direct USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search query for US 100,390's prosecution-file references. My "no citations of record" finding rests on the authoritative Google Patents full text (no Citations / Cited By sections) plus the general absence of pre-1900 front-page citation data — a sound basis, but not the same as having inspected the patent jacket.

I'll pull details on the key prior-art references cited in the "Similar Documents" section before running the §103 analysis.

Let me try to locate the original printed copy (for any claim paragraph) and the two pre-1870 items in the Similar Documents list.

Obviousness Analysis — US Patent 100,390 (35 U.S.C. §103)

Reference point: the granted document, "Improvement in jacks for moving tee cross-heads of locomotives," John S. Funk, Marysville, Perry County, Pennsylvania. Issued 1870-03-01; Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 1887-03-01. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US100390](/patent/US100390)/en

Building on prior sections: the identifiers, disclosure reconstruction, empty assignment chain, and "no litigation found" findings are taken as given. What this section adds is (a) a legally sorted prior-art universe drawn from the page's Similar Documents list, and (b) actual retrieved reference texts. It also refines one prior-section statement — see §5.

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1. Threshold caveats you must read before the merits

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2. The prior-art universe from the page's Similar Documents list — sorted by date, not by similarity

Consequence: of ~26 listed "similar documents," only two (70,502; 73,101) unambiguously predate Funk's invention date, one (98,977) is same-day, and one (99,686) is the pivot point. Everything else is later art and cannot be combined to show obviousness — hindsight from post-1870 devices is impermissible. Any combination I build must be grounded in (i) US 99,686, and (ii) the pre-1870 state of the art, for which I use a judicially certified source rather than the page's list.

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3. Ground 1 (primary): US 99,686 (Joyce) in view of the notorious pre-1870 lever-jack ratchet-and-pawl art

3.1 Why US 99,686 is the closest art — and the dating problem

US 99,686 is not merely "similar"; it is the same invention, same object, same machine: "moving the cross-heads of locomotive-engines, for the purpose of filing the brasses, when they become worn." Full text retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US99686A/en and the printed specification at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/e7/d7/e1/a704ac8fa374c8/US99686.pdf.

Its claim reads verbatim:

"The device described, consisting of the bars A, A, a and b, sliding plate B, with bolt b and nut b², and straps D, when combined and arranged as described, for the purpose set forth."

Dating (flag it, don't paper over it): Joyce's specification is signed 1870-01-01; Funk's is signed 1870-01-18; Joyce's patent issued 1870-02-08. Under pre-AIA §102(a) the reference must be patented or described in a printed publication before the invention thereof by the applicant — and Joyce's February 8 issue date falls after Funk's January 18 signature, so §102(a) is not clean. The best route is a §102(e)-type theory: Joyce's U.S. application was filed before Funk's invention date, which makes the resulting patent art as to what it discloses. If Funk's invention date can be proven earlier than Joyce's actual filing, the entire primary ground collapses. This is the single most important vulnerability in the obviousness case, and it cuts the other way too: Joyce's own claim is limited "as described," so he is not a §102 anticipation of anything beyond his four-element combination.

3.2 Element-by-element mapping

3.3 The gap-filler: a court-certified statement of the pre-1870 art

My search surfaced a case of exactly the right type and vintage: Joyce v. Chillicothe Foundry & Machine-Works Co., 127 U.S. 557 (1888) (aff'g 15 F. 260 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1883)), full text at https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/US/127/127.US.557.html and the circuit opinion at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F1/0015/0015.f1.0260.pdf.

Identifier discipline: this case involves US 154,989 (Jacob O. Joyce, lifting-jack), US 168,663 and US 172,471 (S. E. Mosher). It is not US 100,390 and not US 99,686. Note also that Charles R. Joyce (US 99,686) and Jacob O. Joyce (US 154,989) are two different inventors with the same surname — do not merge them. Consistent with the prior Litigation section, this case does not contradict "no litigation involving 100,390 was found"; it independently confirms that section's §4 caveat that pre-1900 circuit-court litigation exists only outside modern dockets.

Its value here is as evidence of the level of ordinary skill and the content of the prior art, and it is unusually strong evidence:

1. The spring-pressed pawl-and-ratchet-bar lever jack was the baseline, not the invention. The Court quotes the patent's own admission: the object was "to substitute the weight of the pawl, sliding in inclined slots, grooves, or guides, for the elastic spring usually employed to press it against the teeth of the ratchet-bar." — 127 U.S. at 560. A reference that treats "the elastic spring usually employed" as the thing to be removed conclusively establishes that Funk's element 4 — spring-pressed pawl riding a serrated bar — was old and conventional in lever jacks. That is the only element US 99,686 lacks.

2. The mechanical principles were old. The circuit court held, and the Supreme Court affirmed, that "the mechanical principles embodied in the invention of complainant were old and well known in constructions used for the same or analogous purposes," and limited the claim accordingly. 15 F. at 262.

3. The defendants' pre-1870 art list is a ready-made §103 arsenal (15 F. at 260), and several items predate Funk:

   Pre-Funk item	Date	Subject
   US 11,298 (Genung)	1854-07-11	Lifting-jack
   US 11,303 (Smith, F. B.)	1854-07-11	Lifting-jack
   US 10,541 (Connelly)	1854-02-21	Sash-fastener
   US 36,144 (Fasig)	1862-08-12	Lifting-jack
   US 56,111 (Smith, L.)	1866-07-03	Lifting-jack
   US 51,469 (Masser)	1866-12-12	Sash-holder
   US 60,735 (Hutton)	1867-01-01	Sash-holder
   US 65,015 (Sawtell)	1867-05-21	Sash-holder
   US 87,708 (Rodgers)	1863-03-09	Sash-holder

   Each of these is a lever + serrated bar/rack + spring- or gravity-pressed pawl mechanism — the sash-holders and elevator pawls being the traditional Bigio/Clay-style analogous art for a one-way holding pawl. I have not retrieved the texts of these nine patents; their titles and dates come from the reported case. Verifying two or three of them (particularly US 56,111 and US 36,144, both lifting-jacks) is the recommended next step, and would put Ground 1 beyond argument on the pawl element.

3.4 Motivation to combine — taken from Joyce's own mouth

The motivation is not inferred; it is stated in the reference:

"The cross-head may now be shifted by means of the lever, and the sliding plate be readjusted for a new purchase. This operation should be repeated until the cross-head is moved far enough to permit the removal of the brasses." — US 99,686

Joyce thus discloses a device whose operation is inherently intermittent: each stroke requires manually unclamping the plate B, sliding it along the bars, and re-tightening the nut b². The problem to be solved — continuous, repeatable take-up without resetting a fulcrum — is identified by the reference itself, and the solution (a ratchet-bar with a spring-pressed pawl) was the standard, ubiquitous mechanism in the identical art (§3.3). The further asserted advantage, fine increments — Funk claims "from one sixty-fourth of an inch up to two [inches]" per stroke — is nothing more than increasing the tooth count, which Joyce already achieves in the same art by a screw (bolt b + nut b²), so the same result is obtained by a known alternative means (Smith v. Nichols, 88 U.S. at 119).

Reasonable expectation of success: high. Both devices are hand-operated lever-and-bar machines that are laid on and clamped to the same locomotive guide, act on the same cross-head, and are used for the same purpose (filing the brasses). The only engineering novelty is that Funk's ratchet is loaded in tension (pulling the cross-head) rather than lifting a load. Sizing a pawl and pin for a tension pull is ordinary mechanical design; nothing in the record suggests a new principle of operation, a new result, or a surprising property.

No hindsight: the combination uses only art available on or before January 1870 — a three-week-old U.S. patent in the identical field plus pre-1854–1867 lever-jack/pawl mechanisms.

Secondary considerations: essentially unavailable and, on this record, adverse. There is no evidence of commercial success, copying, licensing, or long-felt need (§Assignment section: no product, no assignee, no sales record). The 1888 Joyce litigation shows the field was crowded and competitive, which under Graham factors cuts toward obviousness, not away from it.

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4. Ground 2 (alternative, and weaker): the pre-1870 items on the page's own list

US 70,502 (1867-11-05) and US 73,101 (1868-01-07) are the only two Similar Documents that unambiguously predate Funk's invention, and therefore the only two on that list that could be used without a dating fight.

I could not retrieve either document, and I will not guess at its contents. The "titles" on the Google Patents page — "Thomas j" and "Office" — are visibly truncated parse artifacts, not titles. Two search attempts failed to surface either text. Until these are read:

• Ground 2 is not asserted. It is a lead, not a finding.
• If either turns out to be a lever jack or a lever-and-ratchet take-up, it becomes the cleanest secondary reference in the entire set, because it clears §102 on dates as well as subject matter.
• If either is outside the jack art, the analogous-art analysis (In re Bigio; In re Clay — a reference is analogous if it is from the same field of endeavor or reasonably pertinent to the problem) must be run before it can be combined.

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5. Refinement of a prior statement (flagged, not contradicted)

Prior §4 said: "I cannot give you authoritative claim language for this patent… the text ends after the description and signature," and inferred that the failure to include a claim paragraph reflects an OCR/HTML gap rather than legal practice. That inference is correct and I strengthen it: §6 of the Patent Act of 1836 already required the applicant to "particularly specify and point out the part, improvement, or combination, which he claims as his own invention or discovery." A claim should therefore exist on the printed copy even though the 1870 claim-drafting conventions were looser than today's and the claim will most likely be a single "the combination … substantially as described" formula (exactly the form used by both US 99,686 and US 147,916 in the same era). The claim is missing from the digital text, not from the grant. Nothing in the prior section's bottom line changes; the consequential addition is that the claim, when read, will probably be narrow and combination-limited, which is the single biggest determinant of the §103 outcome (§6).

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6. Outcome assessment

Practical note on 1870s jurisprudence. In this era the courts almost never invalidated these claims outright; they construed them narrowly to the specific construction shown and found no infringement — precisely what happened in Joyce v. Chillicothe (claim limited to "a pawl … moving by gravity alone, between and in inclined guideways in the side walls of the frame," bill dismissed). A realistic prediction for US 100,390 is therefore narrow construction rather than a §103 hold, which is functionally close to the obviousness result for the broad reading.

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7. Digit-confounder addendum (extends prior §3 / §6 lists)

A naive search for the identifier string US100390 does return a false positive that the prior sections had not captured:

This joins AR-100390-A1, US 7,116,390 / IPR2023-00475, the "'390 patent" catalyst IPRs, and US 10,039,483 (Magnolia v. Kurin) in the exclusion list.

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8. Bottom line for the file

Obviousness of US 100,390 under §103: probable as to any claim of ordinary breadth, and unresolved as to the narrowly-construed claim.

The strongest case is a single-reference-plus-common-knowledge combination: US 99,686 (Joyce, cross-head shifter, same field, same problem, filed three weeks earlier) in view of the conventional spring-pressed pawl-and-ratchet-bar lever jack, evidenced by the judicial findings and pre-1870 patent list in Joyce v. Chillicothe, 127 U.S. 557 (1888) and 15 F. 260 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1883). Motivation is supplied by Joyce's own text — its sliding-plate fulcrum must be re-clamped "for a new purchase," an intermittent operation whose standard remedy in this exact art was the ratchet take-up Funk adopted. No element of the reconstructed claim required a new principle of operation, and the asserted fine-increment advantage is achieved in the same art by a known alternative means (Smith v. Nichols).

Two things can defeat this analysis, and neither can be resolved on the material I have:

1. Dating. If Funk's invention predates Joyce's actual U.S. filing, US 99,686 drops out as §102 art and the primary ground fails. (Also note the pre-AIA §102(a) problem: Joyce issued 1870-02-08, after Funk's 1870-01-18 signature.)
2. The claim. Prior §4's reconstruction is not the granted language; a narrow, "substantially as described" combination claim of the US 99,686/US 147,916 type is materially harder to invalidate.

Recommended next steps, in priority order: (1) pull the printed copy of US 100,390 for the verbatim claim; (2) retrieve US 70,502 and US 73,101 — the only two Similar Documents that clear the dates; (3) retrieve US 56,111 and US 36,144 (pre-1870 lifting-jacks) to lock down the pawl element with primary, not secondary, evidence; (4) determine Joyce's actual filing date from the Patent Office record.

One methodological warning to carry forward: the page's Similar Documents list is a similarity list, not a prior-art list. Roughly 85% of it postdates US 100,390 and is legally unusable for §103. Building an obviousness case from that list as presented would be hindsight.