US 1019984

I have the authoritative full text of this patent. Let me also run a live check for any litigation/docket context.

Summary — US Patent 1,019,984

Note on sourcing: I have the authoritative full text and front-page (bibliographic) data for this patent. I also ran live searches for litigation context. One caveat up front: this is a 1912 patent that expired in 1929, and I found no CAFC docket, district court case, or any 2026 litigation involving US 1,019,984. The 2026 Federal Circuit activity returned by search (e.g., Oasis Tooling v. Siemens, Nos. 2024-2085/2086; Q Technologies v. Walmart, No. 24-1667) concerns unrelated patents (7,685,545; 8,266,571; 9,635,108; 10,567,473; 10,594,774) and is not connected to 1,019,984 in any way. I am stating that as a null result rather than inferring litigation that does not exist.

Bibliographic data

Abstract

The patent as issued has no formal abstract — abstracts were not required in 1912. The "Abstract" field shown on Google Patents is simply the opening sentence of the specification: "My invention relates to new and useful improvements in cable transmission systems for mail boxes."

Technical gist

A rural-delivery mailbox conveyor. Two pairs of posts stand at a roadside "receiving" end and a farmhouse "delivery" end. From each crosspiece an inclined rod (4) descends at about 45°, oppositely inclined. A grooved wheel (7) rides each rod, carried on a spindle in a U-shaped bracket (8) with a shank; a tensioned wire cable (9) runs between the two bracket shanks. A trolley frame (16) with wheels (17) carries the mailbox (18) along the cable.

The system is powered entirely by gravity via two unequal counterweights (10) hung from the brackets — the delivery-end weight is heavier. Normally the roadside wheel rests in a semicircular recess (11) at the base of its rod, holding the cable low at the roadside. A pivoted lever (12) on post 6, bifurcated to engage the wheel spindle, lifts the wheel out of the recess so the heavier farmhouse weight pulls that end down and the box coasts downhill to the house. A cord (14) over a sheave (15) lets the resident hoist the farmhouse bracket, re-inclining the cable so the box returns to the road.

Independent claims in plain language

All five claims share the same preamble structure: a cable transmission system with oppositely inclined rods at each end, a wheel on each rod, a bracket mounting each wheel, a cable connecting the brackets, two unequal weights (one per bracket), and a wheeled frame traveling on the cable. They differ only in the additional element(s) recited:

1. Claim 1 — Adds means for holding the wheel carrying the lighter weight (i.e., the roadside wheel) to prevent it from traveling upward. This is the recess/normal-rest configuration.
2. Claim 2 — Claim 1's holding means plus a manually operated means for releasing that wheel from the holding means (the postman's lever).
3. Claim 3 — The base system plus a manually operated means for raising the bracket carrying the heavier weight (the farmhouse-end cord and sheave). Notably, claim 3 omits the holding structure.
4. Claim 4 — The base system plus both the holding means of claim 1 and the manually operated means for raising the heavier-weight bracket.
5. Claim 5 — The base system plus all three: the holding means, the manual releasing means, and the manual raising means. This is the broadest functional capture of the complete two-way operation.

Caveats / uncertainty

• Assignee: the issued document names no assignee. Any statement that it was assigned to a company would be unsupported by the patent face.
• Claims 3 and 4 as printed are split across the "Claims" and Description sections of the OCR, and portions of the specification OCR are garbled (e.g., "revce'aiyin'g," "inclix'ied"). The claim substance above is reconstructed from the consistent recitations in both locations, but I flag that character-level wording in the original may differ slightly from the OCR.
• Forward citations: US 1,019,984 is cited by several modern zip-line/trolley patents (e.g., US 4,961,385; US 2011/0239895; US 8,683,925; US 10,213,699; US 10,478,737; US 11,376,513; US 12,296,277; US 10,105,564), which is a bibliographic fact about citation linkage and not evidence of litigation over this patent.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 1019984.

Let me search more specific litigation databases.

Let me try a few more targeted sources.

Litigation search: US Patent 1019984

Bottom line

No litigation is known — and none is realistically findable as actionable, live litigation — involving US Patent 1019984.

I checked Google Patents, Unified Patents' portal/litigation caselist, PTAB/USPTO records surfaced in search, and general web/docket-aggregator coverage. No district court action, ITC investigation, PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM), or appeal naming this patent was found.

Identifying the patent correctly (no auto-correction applied)

I interpreted "1019984" literally as US 1,019,984 (US1019984A), and the search results are consistent with that reading — not with any eight-digit modern patent:

• Title: "Mail-box-transmission system"
• Inventor: John McGee, of Quinlan, Hunt County, Texas
• App. No.: US 663,614, filed December 2, 1911
• Granted: March 12, 1912
• Claimed subject matter: oppositely inclined rods, grooved wheels riding them, a bracket per wheel, a cable connecting the brackets, two unequal weights, a wheeled frame carrying a mail box, a recess/holding means for the lighter‑weighted wheel, and manually operated release/raising means (claims 1–5)
• Legal status: "Expired – Lifetime"; anticipated expiration March 12, 1929

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1019984/en; corroborating Texas-history record identifying "Patent Number: 1019984," Government Documents No. 02/663614 (UNT, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth510296/metadata/).

Why there is no litigation

1. The term expired in 1929. Under the law in force at grant (17 years from issuance), the patent's enforceable life ended March 12, 1929 — roughly 97 years before today (April 26, 2026). No infringement suit can be maintained on it now.
2. Any historical suit would predate modern dockets. A suit, if one ever existed, would have had to be filed between March 1912 and March 1929. Federal filings from that era are largely not indexed in the electronic systems (PACER, Docket Alarm, Unified Patents, Docket Navigator) that the query directs me to; those systems begin with modern case data. So the absence of hits is strong evidence of no known litigation, not proof that no 1910s–1920s-era case ever existed. I flag that limit rather than overstate certainty.
3. Nothing on the patent's own record indicates litigation. The Google Patents page lists a "Cited By" table (e.g., US 4,961,385; US 2011/0239895; US 10,105,564; US 10,213,699) and a "Similar Documents" table (e.g., US 785,490 "Trolley mail-box"; US 827,929 "Crane for rural mail-boxes"). These are patent citations and family/classification neighbors — not litigation. There is no "Litigation" section, no party names, and no case numbers.

⚠️ Two near-miss number traps (flagged so they are not mistaken for this patent)

Search engines readily return unrelated material for similar strings. Neither of the following involves US 1,019,984:

• US 6,201,984 — a different patent (voice control of surgical instruments, IBM/Intuitive Surgical v. Computer Motion, D. Del., 2001–2002). The string "…201,984" collides visually with "1,019,984" in search output, but it is a separate patent.
• "Article number 1019984" — a NGI Global product datasheet for a hygienic swivel caster. An unrelated commercial SKU, not a patent.

Suggested next steps if you need a belt-and-suspenders confirmation

• Run a PACER/Justia search restricted to the 1912–1929 window (expect sparse or no digitized coverage).
• Confirm the front-page and full text directly on USPTO PatentCenter for application 663,614, and check the "References Cited" / "Cited By" fields for any indication of interference or court citation.
• If your real target is a modern eight-digit patent with a similar prefix (the "10,19x,xxx" series), please supply the exact full number with commas as issued, and I will re-run the litigation search against that identifier specifically.

Confidence: High that no litigation is known or indexed for US 1,019,984. I cannot rule out a never-digitized pre-1929 suit, and I say so explicitly rather than asserting a negative I cannot fully prove.

I'll verify the structured block's null result with live searches before concluding.

Let me run two more targeted checks before committing to the null result.

PTAB Proceedings — US Patent 1,019,984

Sourcing note: The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest) returns an empty set for this patent, and my independent live checks against PTAB/E2E-adjacent sources, Docket Alarm PTAB pages, and general web indices returned nothing naming US 1,019,984 in a trial proceeding. I treat the structured block as canonical and report the null honestly rather than manufacturing proceeding numbers.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 1,019,984: 0 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs, no derivation proceedings; status breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 with claims invalidated / 0 with claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied, and the defensive posture for an accused party is not "the patent has survived two IPRs and is hardened" but rather the far stronger position that the patent expired on 1929-03-12 with all five claims intact and never adjudicated by the Board or any Article III court — so there is no PTAB record to attack and no live claim to assert.

No proceedings on file — why (and why the per-proceeding template below is empty)

I am deliberately not filling in the ### {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} blocks from the task template, because doing so would require inventing proceeding numbers and outcomes. Instead, here is the structural analysis of why each AIA vehicle is unavailable or unused:

• Post-Grant Review (35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329) — categorically impossible. PGR is limited by AIA § 3(n)(1) to patents having an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. US 1,019,984 has a priority/filing date of 1911-12-02 (App. No. 663,614). A PGR petition here would be dismissed as outside the statutory window on its face. See 37 C.F.R. § 42.202(a)–(b).
• Covered Business Method Review (AIA § 18) — impossible on two independent grounds. First, the CBM transitional program sunset on 2020-09-16; no CBM can be instituted now. Second, even during the window, the patent would have flunked the § 18(d)(2) "technological invention" exclusion: the claims recite a mechanical gravity-fed cable conveyor (inclined rods, grooved wheels, brackets, counterweights, a wheeled carriage). The Board routinely held such tangible mechanical/technological apparatus patentable-subject-matter-eligible inventions outside CBM reach, and the claims touch no "financial product or service."
• Inter Partes Review (35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319) — legally available in principle, filed in fact zero times. IPR is not limited by filing date, and the Board has discretion to institute on expired patents (see, e.g., Sony Corp. v. Yissum Research Dev. Co. of the Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, IPR2013-00219, Paper 15). But IPRs are defendant-driven economics: petitions are filed to defeat a live infringement threat, and this patent's enforceable term ended 1929-03-12 (17 years from issuance under the law then in force). With no assertion vector and no commercial value, no petitioner has ever had an incentive to spend the filing fee.
• Derivation / interference — the patent predates both the AIA derivation regime and is long past any interference window; the published record shows no interference or priority contest.

⚠️ Number-collision traps (flagged so they are not misread as this patent)

Live searching for "1019984" in a PTAB/patent context reliably surfaces unrelated records:

• EP/AT publication 1019984 — an optical element arrangement for focusing collimated beams (asphericon GmbH, DE 10 2015 201 639; EP 3 182 191 B1). A foreign family member's internal publication number, not US 1,019,984. Source: https://seeip.patentamt.at/EPatentSuche/Details/f609fa9d-8123-4c41-a4bd-7be5ac2d71e3.
• US 6,201,984 and the NGI "article number 1019984" caster SKU — carried over from the earlier litigation section of this analysis; neither is this patent.
• Also noted: results citing APJ McGee (e.g., Champion Laboratories v. Hengst SE, IPR2024-00603, Paper 9, 2024-09-18) are a panel-member surname coincidence, not this inventor and not this patent.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: all five claims UNTESTED and NOT canceled. Claims 1–5 of US 1,019,984 stand exactly as issued on 1912-03-12. No FWD canceled any claim; no Certificate of Correction or reexamination certificate altered them. This is an important correction to the template's framing: the template offers "claims 1-5 have been canceled — the troll has no case" as the favorable outcome, but that is not what happened. The favorable outcome for a defendant here is different and stronger: the patent right itself lapsed on 1929-03-12, so the claims cannot be infringed today regardless of their merit.

Estoppel landscape: § 315(e)(2) is a non-issue. With no petitioner, there is no IPR estoppel, no PGR estoppel, and no § 325(e) estoppel binding anyone. Conversely, there is also no SAS-style instituted-grounds record, no FWD to cite under Fresenius or Blonder-Tongue, and no Board claim construction to leverage. A defendant facing a demand letter citing this patent has no PTAB leverage because none is needed — the defense is temporal (expiration), not estoppel-based.

Pattern signals: none to read. No repeat petitioner, no patent-owner appeal activity, no Unified Patents / RPX / defensive-aggregator chain, and no Federal Circuit appeal. The heuristic that "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" does not misfire here: the patent has never been asserted because it has been unenforceable since 1929 (and the AIA trial regime did not exist until 2012, 83 years after expiry). I flag this so the zero-count is not misread as an absence-of-indexing artifact — the structural analysis above independently explains it.

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Recommended next steps

• If you received a demand letter citing US 1,019,984: do not build an IPR strategy. The dispositive facts are (a) grant 1912-03-12, (b) term expiration 1929-03-12, (c) statutory term = 17 years from issuance under the law in force at grant, and (d) Google Patents / USPTO status = "Expired – Lifetime." There is no FWD to quote because no FWD exists; cite the front page and the expiration date instead: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1019984/en.
• If a counterparty represents that the patent was "upheld" or "survived an IPR": that representation is false. No AIA trial was ever filed, instituted, or decided. Request the proceeding number; none exists.
• If you are clearing a modern zip-line / trolley / cable-conveyor product: this patent is irrelevant as an infringement risk, but note it appears in the "Cited By" tables of numerous modern zip-line patents (e.g., US 4,961,385; US 2011/0239895; US 8,683,925; US 10,213,699; US 10,478,737; US 11,376,513; US 12,296,277; US 10,105,564). That is prior-art citation linkage only — those citations are not PTAB proceedings and create no estoppel, but they do mean the modern patents in that family are where any real clearance work should be directed.
• If your actual target is a modern 8-digit "10,19x,xxx" patent (the "10,19" prefix collides visually with "1,019,"): supply the exact issued number with commas and I will re-run the PTAB search against it — proceeding numbers must come from the identifier, not from pattern-matching.

Confidence: High (near-certain) that zero AIA trial proceedings exist on US 1,019,984. The structured ODP-derived block reports an empty set, live searches corroborate, and the statutory analysis (PGR by filing date, CBM by sunset and by technological-invention exclusion) renders two of the three vehicles impossible as a matter of law; the third (IPR) is foreclosed by economics, not by rule.

I'll attempt to pull the live assignment record before writing anything up.

No hits yet for this specific patent. Let me check the database coverage window and try one more targeted angle.

One more check for any commercialization or NARA-era record tied to this inventor.

Assignment-chain analysis: US Patent 1,019,984

Scope note up front. I searched the USPTO assignment resources (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov, formerly assignment.uspto.gov / legacy-assignments.uspto.gov), Google Patents' Legal Events panel, and general web/NARA-adjacent sources. There is no recorded assignment for US 1,019,984 in any searchable database, and the issued patent names no assignee. I state that as a finding, not as a retrieval failure — but I explain below exactly why the negative is only strongly evidenced, not absolutely provable, for a 1912 patent.

There is also a minor internal inconsistency in my own earlier litigation section, which I flag per the cross-reference rule: it dated "today" as April 26, 2026, whereas the operative system date for this task is 2026-09-30. Nothing in that section turns on the five-month difference (the patent expired in 1929 either way), but the dates should not be read as consistent.

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Inventors

Unusual-pattern check (the "all inventors departing within 12 months" tell): Not applicable. This is a single-inventor patent with no corporate co-owner, so the classic pre-fire-sale signature (a research team all assigning away and leaving within a year of filing) cannot occur. There is exactly one interest holder from the start.

Other individuals of record — do not confuse with assignees or co-inventors:

• R. B. Bowden and J. L. Smith — subscribing witnesses to the specification. These are attestation witnesses, not inventors and not assignees.
• J. S. Murray and E. Ritchie — listed in the UNT Texas History metadata as "Witness for illustration" (archival-processing contributors, i.e., people who attested the deposited copy in the 1910s/collection stage), not parties to title.

Sources: patent face and specification at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1019984/en; UNT Government Documents record (Patent Number 1019984, Gov. Docs No. 02/663614) at https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth510296/metadata/.

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Original assignee

None. There is no original assignee on the face of US 1,019,984.

Practical consequence: because title was never severed from the inventor by any recorded instrument, there is no "operating company → NPE" chain to reconstruct. The chain has exactly one link: inventor → (nothing).

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Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center contains no records for US Patent 1,019,984 — for the application (Serial No. 663,614) or the issued patent. The chain is empty:

Corroborating negatives I actually checked:

1. Google Patents "Legal Events" for US1019984A lists exactly four events, none of them a title transfer:

   • 1911-12-02 Application filed by Individual
   • 1911-12-02 Priority to US66361411A
   • 1912-03-12 Application granted
   • 1929-03-12 Anticipated expiration (status: Expired – Lifetime)

   There is no "Assignment" event, no assignee-change event, and no "Current Assignee" other than the empty-field default "Individual." Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1019984/en

2. No correspondent of record exists for this patent at all. The specification names no attorney or agent — the application was evidently filed pro se by the inventor. This matters for the "repeat correspondent" tell in the next section: there is literally no attorney name to trace.

3. Forward citation lists are not ownership records. The "Cited By" table (US 4,961,385; US 2011/0239895; US 8,683,925; US 10,213,699; US 10,478,737; US 11,376,513; US 12,296,277; US 10,105,564) and the "Similar Documents" table (e.g., US 785,490 "Trolley mail-box"; US 827,929 "Crane for rural mail-boxes") are citations and classification neighbors. None of those parties ever acquired US 1,019,984.

Why the negative is strong-but-not-airtight — the database-coverage limit, stated explicitly:

• The online USPTO Patent Assignment Search covers records from August 1980 forward, not the whole history of the register. MPEP 301.01(a) describes a "historical database of assignments … maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980." (See the MPEP-derived summary at https://blueironip.com/ufaqs/how-are-historical-patent-assignment-records-maintained/.)
• All assignment records recorded before May 1, 1957 are held by NARA, not USPTO's online system: "All records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957, are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)… Certified and uncertified copies … are provided by NARA upon request." — 37 CFR § 1.12(a)(2), https://ecfr.io/Title-37/se37.1.1_112. The pre-1957 patent-assignment records sit in NARA Record Group 241 (Suitland, MD).
• Therefore: if John McGee had assigned this patent to a tool company or a neighbor in, say, 1915, that instrument would be a paper record in NARA and would not appear in any search I can run. I cannot rule that out. What I can say is that no such assignment is reflected in any indexed source, and that the patent's own front page and the inventor's surviving papers give no hint of one.

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 substantive answer is complete above. I am nevertheless appending the diagram and signal scorecard below, because the deliverable you asked for is a structured report and a verdict, and because all of those sections resolve to "not present / insufficient data" rather than requiring me to invent links. Treat the remainder as an explicit addendum, not as an expansion of the record.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1019984
    1911 : Filed by John McGee as sole inventor
         : No assignee named on the application
    1912 : Patent issued to John McGee personally
         : No assignment recorded at issuance
    1929 : Patent term expired
         : No assignment ever recorded

The chain has one node and no edges. Nothing to draw beyond filing, grant, and expiry.

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Because there is no recorded transfer of any kind, every acquisition-based signal resolves negative. I mark each not present and give the specific basis, rather than "unclear," since the absence of any reel/frame entry is itself the evidence.

Additional anti-signal worth recording: the closest thing to an "economic cluster" around this patent is the modern zip-line / challenge-course art that cites it forward (US 4,961,385 Abouzakhm; US 8,683,925 and US 2011/0239895 Liggett; US 10,213,699 / US 10,478,737 / US 11,376,513 / US 12,296,277 Ropes Courses–Jimi IP; US 10,105,564 Ropes Courses). Those parties litigate over trolley and challenge-course technology, but they never acquired US 1,019,984, and citation is not title. Do not let the citation graph be mistaken for an ownership chain.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — and, more precisely, no chain exists to classify.

The Assignment Center, Google Patents' Legal Events panel, and every indexed source I can reach return zero recorded assignments for US 1,019,984 (App. No. 663,614, filed 1911-12-02; issued 1912-03-12 to John McGee personally; expired 1929-03-12). With no assignment record and no assignee named on the patent, the presumptive owner throughout the term was the inventor himself, and there is no shell-entity transfer, repeat correspondent, cascading transfer, or known asserter to point at — the tests in this framework are all "not present" for the structural reason that nothing ever moved. I therefore fall back to Insufficient data rather than the affirmative "non-asserting" label, because the correct reading is "no evidence of any transfer" — not "evidence of a deliberate non-assertion decision." The residual uncertainty is a 1912–1929 paper assignment that would live only in NARA Record Group 241 and would never surface online (37 CFR § 1.12(a)(2)).

Verify directly here:

• USPTO Assignment Center (search by patent number 1019984) — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy/alternate portal — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents Legal Events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US1019984/en

Belt-and-suspenders follow-up, if you want the pre-1957 negative closed out: request a search of NARA Record Group 241 (Patent Office numbered-patent assignment records, 1836–1973, including the Digests relating to assignments of patent property rights, 1837–1905, with indexes, 1837–1923) for patent 1,019,984 and application 663,614. That is the only place a McGee-era assignment instrument could physically exist.

Confidence: High that no assignment is recorded in any searchable/online source. Moderate on the broader proposition that the patent was never assigned at all, because pre-1957 recordings are not online and I could not physically examine the NARA register.

I'll research the citation network for US 1,019,984 and verify details on the most relevant references.

Let me pull the specific prior-art references directly.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 1,019,984

Note on tool status: My searches hit the step limit before I could open the full text of every reference. I verified the content of US 322,392 (Telepher) directly from Google Patents. For the remaining references I have the citation data (number, title, publication date) from the Google Patents page for US 1,019,984 and from the Google Patents 1905 sitemap, but not their full specifications or filing dates. I flag below exactly which statements are verified versus title-inferred, and I do not invent claim language for references I could not open.

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0. Identification (no auto-correction applied)

The identifier "1019984" is read literally as US 1,019,984 A, Mail-box-transmission system, John McGee, Quinlan (Hunt County), Texas.

• Application/Specification Serial No. 663,614; filed December 2, 1911; granted March 12, 1912.
• Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1019984/en ; USPTO PatentCenter record for app. 663,614.
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration March 12, 1929).

This is not US 6,201,984 (IBM/Intuitive Surgical voice-control patent), and not the NGI Global caster datasheet "article number 1019984." Both are number-string near-misses only.

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1. The threshold problem: which "citations" are actually prior art

The Google Patents page for US 1,019,984 contains no "References Cited" (backward citations) section — the face of this 1912 patent does not list prior art. It shows two other citation tables:

Legal framing (and an anachronism flag): 35 U.S.C. § 102 did not exist in 1912 — the governing statute was R.S. § 4886 (as amended), which barred a patent if the invention was "known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof." I am applying the modern §102(a)/(b)/(e) framework you asked for as an analog, but the operative test in 1912 was the same in substance: the reference must pre-date McGee's invention (presumptively his December 2, 1911 filing date).

Critical date: December 2, 1911 (constructive reduction to practice via filing).

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2. "Cited By" forward citations — NOT prior art

Listed for completeness and expressly excluded from the anticipation analysis, because each postdates US 1,019,984 by 77–113 years:

These are relevant only as evidence that the McGee disclosure is treated as background art in the modern zip-line/trolley field. None can anticipate any claim of US 1,019,984.

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3. "Similar Documents" — split by critical date

3a. PRE-1911 references (eligible §102 candidates)

Publication dates are from the Google Patents table; filing dates unknown for all except US 322,392.

Verified content — US 322,392 ("Telepher"), pub. 1885-07-14, filed 1884-12-22:
Owens discloses a wire "attached at one end to an abutment… and at its opposite end to some suitable support at the point of delivery," "inclined so that the vehicle will be moved by gravity toward the abutment"; a vehicle/box "supported upon the wire by the grooved wheels p p"; and a rope from a windlass to a bucket, "connected to the vehicle, which is suspended below the wire." (Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US322392A](/patent/US322392A)/en)

This directly touches the §102 preamble element common to all five McGee claims: a wheel adapted to travel upon a rod/wire + a wheeled frame adapted to travel upon a cable, gravity-inclined. It is the single strongest verified item of generic prior art.

3b. POST-1911 references (NOT prior art on their face)

US 1,050,602 (1913-01-14); US 1,174,051 (1916-03-07); US 1,256,432 — "Mail-conveyer" (1918-02-12); US 1,398,204 (1921-11-22); US 1,531,677 — "Support for mail boxes" (1925-03-31); US 1,725,693 — "Mail-box hanger" (1929-08-20); US 1,813,516 — "Mail box" (1931-07-07); US 2,056,883 (1936-10-06); US 2,059,093 — "Clothesline" (1936-10-27).

These are interesting as later developments of the same art (note how the mailbox-crane art persists into the 1920s–30s), but by publication date they cannot be §102 prior art against a December 1911 filing. Caveat: I do not have their filing dates. If any was filed before December 2, 1911, it could qualify as §102(e)-type art (a patent granted on an earlier-filed application). I cannot confirm or exclude this without the individual records, and I say so rather than guessing.

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4. Claim-by-claim anticipation analysis

Every one of the five claims carries the same heavy preamble, which any anticipating reference must disclose in full:

oppositely inclined rods, one at each end; a wheel adapted to travel on each rod; a bracket mounting each wheel; a cable connecting the brackets; two unequal weights, one attached to each bracket; and a wheeled frame adapted to travel on the cable.

The claims then add:

• Claim 1 — holding means for the lighter-weighted (roadside) wheel (recess 11).
• Claim 2 — Claim 1 + manual release means (lever 12).
• Claim 3 — base + manual raising means for the heavier-weighted bracket (cord 14 / sheave 15); no holding means.
• Claim 4 — base + holding means + manual raising means.
• Claim 5 — base + holding means + release means + raising means.

Why no clean §102 hit: The novelty of McGee's claims sits in the cooperative combination — twin oppositely inclined rods at the two terminals, a grooved wheel and bracket on each, a single tensioned cable between the brackets, and two deliberately unequal weights that (a) hold the cable normally inclined toward the roadside and (b) reverse the incline when the roadside wheel is tripped out of its recess. I found no pre-1911 reference (verified or title-level) that discloses that whole combination. On the evidence available, these references are properly §103 (obviousness) / "lack of invention" material, not §102 anticipators — exactly the mode of attack that mattered in 1912 practice (see the contemporaneous hay-carrier "dog and pulley-supporting mechanism" line of cases surfaced in search, e.g., the Louden/Miller comparison in the Seventh Circuit materials, which shows how combination claims of this era were litigated on the "number and interaction of parts" axis).

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5. Bottom line

1. No reference anticipates any of claims 1–5 on the record available. No single pre-December-2-1911 reference discloses all of: oppositely inclined rods + a wheel per rod + a bracket per wheel + a cable joining the brackets + two unequal weights + a cable-borne wheeled frame, plus the recited holding/release/raising means.
2. All 8 "Cited By" references are excluded outright — they are 1989–2025 documents.
3. Best closest-prior-art candidates (for §103/obviousness, subject to full-text verification): US 827,929 (Crane for rural mail-boxes, 1906), US 785,490 (Trolley mail-box, 1905), and US 322,392 (Telepher, 1885 — the only one I verified).
4. US 1,256,432 "Mail-conveyer" (1918) is a later patent in the same subject matter and is not prior art, but it corroborates that McGee's concept was worked in the art.

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6. Caveats and confidence

• Confidence: high that no pre-1911 reference identified on the Google Patents "Similar Documents" table discloses the full claim combination — but this is based on titles and dates for all references except US 322,392. Full-text review of US 785,490, US 827,929, US 938,847, US 890,680, and US 1000,163 is required before any anticipation assertion could be made.
• Filing dates are missing for every reference except US 322,392. Several "post-1911 publication" documents could in principle be earlier-filed and thus §102(e)-type art; I cannot confirm or exclude that.
• The date discrepancy I am flagging: my earlier litigation summary carried today's date as April 26, 2026, while this task header states April 26, 2026 as well — consistent. The patent-card fetch date is 2026-09-24. These do not affect the prior-art analysis, which turns on the 1911/1912 dates.
• No litigation exists for this patent (expired March 12, 1929), so this prior-art exercise is historical/validity-reconstruction only, not an invalidity defense in any live proceeding.

I'll ground this analysis in the actual references listed on the patent page. Let me pull their disclosures.

Good — I have the Telepher disclosure. Let me pull the other key references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 1,019,984 ("Mail-box-transmission system")

Note on scope and a hard caveat up front. Two things must be stated before any § 103 reasoning, because they change how much weight the conclusion can bear:

1. The statute is anachronistic to this patent. US 1,019,984 issued March 12, 1912. The statutory "non-obviousness" condition of 35 U.S.C. § 103 was not enacted until the Patent Act of 1952. In 1912 the governing test was the judge-made "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851) (later caricatured as the "flash of genius" test in Cuno Engineering v. Automatic Devices, 314 U.S. 84 (1941)). I will run the analysis under the modern Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), / KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007), framework as requested, but I flag that a rigorous historical invalidity analysis would use the 1912 standard, which was in some respects more demanding of the patentee and in other respects less structured.
2. The patent expired March 12, 1929 (per the bibliographic record established in the prior sections) and is not in any known litigation. This is therefore an academic/retrospective exercise with no live controversy, consistent with the litigation section above.

Evidence limitation — read this as a standing qualifier on everything below. The tool budget ran out before I could retrieve the full disclosure texts of most of the references in the page's "Similar Documents" table. Except for US 322,392 (Telepher), whose full specification I did retrieve (https://patents.google.com/patent/US322392A/en), I have only titles and publication dates for the other references. Title-level evidence is weak: it establishes the field of a reference, not its disclosure. Where below I infer a reference's teaching from its title, I say so explicitly. A definitive § 103 rejection would require the actual texts. I also flag a genuine uncertainty identified below regarding filing dates of the post-1911 references.

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1. The person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA), c. December 1911

A mechanic or civil/mechanical engineer of ordinary skill, working in the field of rural mail delivery apparatus and cable/rope conveyors. That person would have been familiar with:

• Rural Free Delivery (RFD) practice and the roadside/farmhouse distance problem (the patent's own stated motivation);
• Aerial ropeways, telpherage, and inclined-wire gravity carriers, a technology dating back centuries and commercially mature by 1885–1900 (see the Telpher/Telpherage materials surfaced in search);
• Trolley/monorail carriers and grooved-wheel-on-wire suspensions;
• Counterweighting, windlasses, sheaves, and hoisting trip mechanisms.

This is a crowded, well-developed mechanical arts field — an important point for obviousness, because in a mature field the ordinary artisan has a large catalogue of known solutions to draw on (KSR, 550 U.S. at 421).

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2. What actually qualifies as prior art here

2a. The "Cited By" table is not prior art — flagging this explicitly

The page lists eight "Cited By" documents:

Every one of these post-dates 1912 and therefore cannot be § 102/§ 103 prior art against this patent. They are forward citations (later patents citing McGee), i.e., evidence that later inventors found McGee relevant — which is a fact about citation linkage, not about what was known in 1911. Anyone citing these against US 1,019,984 would be committing a fundamental error. I am listing them only so they can be excluded on the record.

2b. The "Similar Documents" table — the usable candidate art

Filtering the page's "Similar Documents" list to documents published before December 2, 1911, the candidate prior art is:

Documents in that same table dated 1913 or later (US 1,050,602 Truck; US 1,398,204 Headed-grain stacker; US 1,174,051 Harness-hook; US 1,251,432 Mail-conveyer; US 1,531,677 Support for mail boxes; US 1,725,693 Mail-box hanger; US 1,813,516 Mail box; US 2,056,883 Pole handling mechanism; US 2,059,093 Clothesline) likewise do not qualify on their face — with the important caveat in §2c.

2c. A genuine uncertainty I will not paper over

The page reports only publication dates. Under the pre-1952 statute (R.S. § 4886), the reference date was the date of invention, and a United States patent granted on an application filed before the inventor's date could be prior art even if published after 1911. Therefore:

• US 1,050,602 (published 1913-01-14) is the most plausible latency risk — if its application was filed in 1911 or earlier, it could be prior art.
• The 1916–1936 references are progressively less likely to have pre-1911 filings, but the page does not disclose their filing dates, so I cannot exclude them on the record given.

This is a reason to treat my conclusion as provisional pending verification of filing dates, not as a final determination.

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3. Claim construction — element-by-element scope

All five claims share a common preamble and core. I map the reference numerals from the specification (which the prior sections established, with the noted OCR corruption in claims 3 and 4) to the claimed elements:

Claim breakdown: 1 = A+B+C+D+E+F+G; 2 = 1+H; 3 = A+B+C+D+E+F+I; 4 = 1+I; 5 = 1+H+I.

Notice what this structure reveals: every claim is an aggregation of A–F plus one to three additional, functionally separate mechanisms. There is no claim reciting a synergistic interaction between the sub-elements. That matters under § 103 — see §5.

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4. Mapping the candidate references to the claimed elements

4a. US 322,392 — Owens, "Telepher" (July 14, 1885) — full text retrieved

This is the single most probative reference I was able to verify. From the specification (https://patents.google.com/patent/US322392A/en):

"This invention relates to that class of elevators which aim to elevate vertically, and then over an incline… a person can by their use convey a bucket or other receptacle some distance…"

"Fig. 1 shows a wire attached at one end to an abutment… and at its opposite end to some suitable support at the point of delivery. This wire is inclined so that the vehicle will be moved by gravity toward the abutment."

"p p′ are grooved pulleys traversing the wire and connected to the vehicle, which is suspended below the wire."

"…the rope which runs from the windlass to the bucket… the operator winds up the rope on the windlass, the vessel ascends…"

Element mapping: B (grooved wheels on a support) ✔; D/F (a carriage suspended from and travelling on a cable/wire) ✔; A (an inclined support producing gravity travel) ✔; and a manual rope-and-windlass return ✔ (functional analogue of I, though the numeral is a windlass rather than a counterweight).

Critically, the Telepher also discloses automatic engagement/disengagement at the ends of travel via a spring-loaded sliding vibrating plate and trap ("This position releases the vessel… the momentum acquired by gravitation down the inclined wire carries the vehicle toward the standard…"). That is a hold/release-at-end-of-travel teaching — the functional ancestor of element G + H here, though implemented differently.

4b. References I can map only at title level (explicitly flagged)

I emphasize that the right-hand column is an inference from the title alone. I could not verify these disclosures.

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5. The obviousness combinations

Combination A — Primary: US 827,929 (rural-mailbox crane) + US 322,392 (Telepher)

This is the most natural pairing and, on the evidence I could verify, the strongest.

• US 827,929 supplies the field, the problem, and the apparatus genus: moving a rural mailbox between the roadside and the farmhouse. (Title-level only — flag.)
• US 322,392 supplies the mechanism: an inclined support, a grooved wheel travelling on it, a carriage suspended from a wire, gravity as the motive force, and a manual windlass rope for the return stroke.

Motivation to combine: Both references address the same problem — conveying a receptacle between two points over an incline without applied power. A POSITA seeking to mechanize the RFD mailbox trip (the very problem the patent states at column 1) would look directly to the gravity-carrier art, which was mature, abundant, and commercially deployed by 1911. KSR expressly sanctions combining references "designed to address the same problem." 550 U.S. at 417. The combination yields nothing more than the predictable sum of the two disclosures — an inclined track over which a mailbox trolley descends by gravity and returns by a manual pull. No new and unexpected result is produced.

Combination B — Primary: US 785,490 (Trolley mail-box) + US 322,392 (Telepher) + a counterweight reference (US 646,984 and/or US 890,680)

• US 785,490 contributes the idea of a mailbox as a trolley on a suspended track.
• US 322,392 contributes the inclined support/grooved wheel/carriage architecture.
• US 646,984 ("Water elevating and carrying apparatus") and/or US 890,680 ("Carrier") contribute counterweighting — substituting a counterweight for the Telepher's windlass as the means of repositioning the carriage.

Motivation to combine: Substituting a counterweight for a windlass as a return/repositioning force is a classic known-alternative substitution, and the counterweight's behavioral properties (a constant force independent of operator effort) were fully predictable. Under KSR, "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." The inequality of the two weights (element E) is a result-effective variable — the artisan simply tunes the differential until the cable inclines the desired way. That is a design choice within the ordinary skill in the art, not invention. In re Boesch, 617 F.2d 272 (CCPA 1980) (routine optimization of a result-effective variable is obvious).

Combination C — Adding the "hold" and "release" elements (G and H)

• G (recess/hold for the lighter wheel): A detent, stop, notch, or recess to prevent a member from moving in one direction is about as elementary as mechanical engineering gets. The Telepher's trap-and-plate at the end of travel is a functional analogue in the same reference. The Dore references — US 617,267 ("Hoisting trip") and US 559,653 ("Hay-elevator jack") — are, at title level, organ-stop-type trip mechanisms.
• H (manual release lever): A bifurcated pivoted lever engaging a wheel axle is a textbook hand-operated release. US 617,267 (hoisting trip), US 559,653 (hay-elevator jack), and US 195,171 (jacks for vehicles) are, by title, all hand-actuated lifting/release devices. Combining a known trip mechanism with a gravity-carrier to release a held carriage at the operator's will requires nothing beyond ordinary mechanical skill and yields the expected result.

Combination D — Adding element I (manual raising of the heavy-weight bracket)

A cord over a sheave is the most elementary hoisting expedient in the mechanical arts — appearing in the Telepher itself (rope + windlass), in US 620,913 (derrick), in US 646,984 (elevating apparatus), and in US 559,653 / US 195,171 (jacks). If the counterweight alone cannot re-incline the cable, adding a manual pull as a supplement is obvious to try with a reasonable expectation of success. There is no teaching away, and the result (the carriage returns to the road) is precisely what the operator would predict.

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6. Claim-by-claim conclusion

The aggregation point deserves emphasis. Under both pre-KSR and post-KSR law, "[a] mere aggregation of a number of old parts or elements which, in the aggregation, perform or produce no new or different function or operation than that theretofore performed or produced by them, is not patentable invention." Lincoln Engineering Co. v. Stewart-Warner Corp., 303 U.S. 545, 549 (1938); KSR, 550 U.S. at 418–22. Claims 1–5 recite a hold, a release, and a raise — each fully capable of operating without the others, each independently old. There is no claimed interaction, no new cooperative result, no unexpected property.

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7. Secondary considerations (Graham factors 2–4) — largely absent, and cutting against the patent

• Long-felt need: Some evidence exists — the RFD distance problem was real and the patent acknowledges it. But the need was not unmet: US 785,490 ("Trolley mail-box," 1905) and US 827,929 ("Crane for rural mail-boxes," 1906) were already in the field years before McGee filed. Prior attempts in the very same field weigh against a finding of long-felt, unsolved need.
• Commercial success: None disclosed in the record; no assignee is named on the patent face (per the prior section), and no evidence of sales, licensing, or industry adoption appears.
• Nexus: Even if some success existed, there is no evidence tying it to the claimed subject matter rather than to market factors (Ormco Corp. v. Align Tech., Inc., 463 F.3d 1299 (Fed. Cir. 2006)).
• Copying / praise / unexpected results: None in the record. The specification claims no unexpected result; to the contrary, it describes entirely expected mechanical behavior (release → gravity descent; pull → ascent).

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8. Direct answers to the task

Combinations that would render the claims obvious:

1. US 827,929 + US 322,392 (rural-mailbox apparatus + gravity inclined-wire carrier) → renders claim 1 obvious, and supplies A–F for all claims.
2. US 785,490 + US 322,392 + US 646,984/890,680 (trolley mailbox + inclined carrier + counterweighting) → renders claims 1 and 3 obvious, including the unequal-weight element E as routine optimization.
3. US 322,392 + US 617,267 / US 559,653 / US 195,171 (gravity carrier + hoisting trip/jack) → renders claims 2 and 5 obvious as to elements H and I.
4. US 617,267 / 559,653 / 620,913 / 646,984 (trip, jack, derrick, elevating arts) → renders elements G and I obvious individually.
5. Any of the above, aggregated → renders claims 4 and 5 obvious as mere aggregations of old elements with no synergistic result.

Why a POSITA would combine them:

• Same field of endeavor, directed at the same problem the patent itself identifies (the RFD roadside-to-farmhouse trip), which KSR treats as a paradigm motivation.
• Known-alternative substitution of a counterweight for a windlass, and of a recess/detent for the carriage's natural rest, both yielding predictable mechanical results.
• Routine design choice / optimization of the weight differential (element E), a result-effective variable.
• Mature, crowded art with a large catalogue of known lifting, holding, releasing, and counterbalancing mechanisms — the very conditions KSR says counsel against finding non-obviousness.

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9. Explicit uncertainties — do not over-read this analysis

1. I did not obtain the disclosure texts of US 827,929, US 785,490, US 646,984, US 890,680, US 617,267, US 559,653, US 195,171, US 330,805, US 620,913, US 938,847, US 1,000,163, US 672,152, US 699,189, US 310,362, or US 473,229. All element mappings for those references are title-level inferences and must be verified.
2. US 310,362 and US 473,229 appear on the page as inventor names (OCR artifacts), so their subject matter is unknown to me.
3. Filing dates of the post-1911 "Similar Documents" are undisclosed; US 1,050,602 in particular could potentially be prior art under pre-1952 law if filed before December 2, 1911.
4. The § 103 framework postdates the patent by 40 years. A historical analysis applies the Hotchkiss "invention" standard.
5. The claims as printed are OCR-degraded in the "Claims" section for claims 3 and 4 (split across two locations in the OCR), so character-level claim language may differ from the original. The element structure I used is consistent across both OCR locations.

Bottom line: On the evidence available and verified, and viewing claims 1–5 as aggregations of separately-old mechanical elements, US 1,019,984 would very likely have been held obvious over the combination of the page's own "Similar Documents" prior art — principally US 827,929 and/or US 785,490 in view of US 322,392 (Telepher) and the trip/jack/counterweight references. I reach that conclusion with moderate-to-high confidence as to the legal framework and the evidentiary shape of the art, but lower confidence as to specific mappings, because most of the underlying reference texts were not retrievable within the tool budget and my mappings for those references rest on titles alone.