US 1062463

I'll search for this specific patent number as instructed.

Search scope and results

I ran searches against Google Patents/patentimages/Justia coverage of U.S. patent records and open-web indices of Federal Circuit (CAFC) activity. Findings on scope:

• US 1,062,463 A exists and was located at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1062463 — the Google Patents record (US1062463A) matches the authoritative full text supplied and is what I rely on below.
• No CAFC 2026 docket, IPR, or district-court matter involving 1,062,463 was found. Searches for a CAFC 2026 docket tied to "1062463" returned only unrelated 2026 Federal Circuit matters (e.g., Neonode v. Apple invalidity-contentions briefing; Spero v. Mercedes-Benz, No. 2025-1470, involving U.S. 10,894,503). This is expected: the patent's term was "anticipated expiration 1930-05-20," and no live U.S. litigation/agency proceeding involving it exists. I state this as a negative finding of my searches, not as certification of the absence of all records.
• Number-collision warnings (literal, not auto-corrected): the string "1062463" also appears as EP 1062463 A/B (a 1999–2000 European publication, family with DE 19809974 A / WO 9947865) and as CA 1062463 ("Steel-smelting lance assembly," Canada). There also exist modern 8-digit U.S. patents in the 10,624,6xx series (e.g., the 10,624,630s cluster appearing in Justia listings). None of these are the patent you asked about; I have not conflated them with US1062463A.

Concise summary — US 1,062,463 A

Abstract: There is no abstract of record. Abstract requirements for U.S. patents postdate 1913, and the Google Patents page shows no abstract field. Do not treat any paraphrased "abstract" as authoritative.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

All four claims are directed to a chemical (soda-acid) fire extinguisher in which a breakable acid vessel is carried into the body on a rod, and a nozzle valve must be opened before the rod can be pushed in to shatter the vessel.

Claim 1 — A hollow body with a discharge nozzle and a valve. Note: the claim text in the available OCR is corrupt/truncated — it begins "…a valve for con-" and the middle portion is missing; only the tail survives ("…valve and then moved to force the vessel against the projection inside the body to break the same and allow the chemicals to react, part of the products of said reaction passing outward through said nozzle"). Reading it literally, claim 1 covers a hollow body + nozzle + valve + a projection inside the body + a rod passing through the body wall carrying a vessel at its inner end, plus means requiring the valve to be actuated before the vessel can be forced against the projection — reaction products then discharging through the nozzle. I flag this reconstruction as uncertain because of the source corruption; I do not have an authoritative clean copy of claim 1.

Claim 2 — A hollow body with a discharge nozzle and an internal projection; a rod passing through the body wall into the interior carrying a chemical-containing vessel at its inner end adjacent the projection; the body and vessel hold chemicals. A valve on the nozzle carries holding means that engages the rod to keep the vessel spaced away from the projection (so rough handling won't break it), and the rod carries means that engage the valve to open it and simultaneously swing the holding means out of position, letting the rod be pushed inward to strike the vessel against the projection, break it, and cause the chemicals to react, with reaction products discharging through the nozzle. (Claims 1–3 text is interleaved in the OCR; I read this as claim 2's substance.)

Claim 3 — Same combination as claim 2 with the specific mechanism recited: the nozzle valve has an arm with a thickened end containing a recess that receives the outer end of the operating rod, and a second arm is non-rotatably fixed to the rod beyond the valve arm, connected to the valve arm by a pin-and-slot engagement. Consequently, turning the rod opens the valve and swings the valve arm's recessed thickened end off the rod, permitting the rod to be pushed inward to break the vessel against the projection and allow the chemicals to react, with products passing out the nozzle.

Claim 4 — A hollow body with a discharge opening; means for controlling that opening; an arm on the controlling means carrying a stop; means for movably mounting a fragile chemical-containing vessel in the body, engaged by that stop; and a second arm carried by the vessel-mounting means that engages the first arm to move the controlling means to open position before the vessel can be broken. In short: an interlock guaranteeing the discharge is opened before the frangible acid ampoule can be shattered.

Correspondence between claims and the specification

The claims map directly onto the illustrated embodiment: rod 4 with threaded boss 3 and packing 5 (the internal "projection"); operating rod 11 through stuffing nut 12 with knob 13; glass acid tube 29 held in yoke 28 on threaded rod end 26 with locking nuts 27 and stopper 30; the body 1 charged with soda solution; valve 19 in nipple 17; valve arm 20 with slot 21 and thickened end recess 22; and hub-mounted arm 24 with pin 23, secured to rod 11 adjacent knob 13. The claimed interlock is the recess 22/pin 23/slot 21 arrangement that holds the ampoule safely spaced from rod 4 until the knob is turned.

Uncertainties

1. No abstract exists for this 1913 patent — any abstract you see elsewhere is retrospective.
2. Claims 1 and 3 text is OCR-degraded, with fragments merged/duplicated in the source. My claim 1 and claim 3 readings are reconstructions from the surviving fragments plus the specification; treat them as high-confidence in substance but not verbatim.
3. Assignee field: records list no assignee ("Individual"). I found no assignment history. Whether an unrecorded assignment existed in 1912–13 is not determinable from the sources searched.
4. CAFC 2026 / USPTO litigation: nothing found; the patent expired in 1930. Absence of hits in my searches is not proof of absolute absence of records, but there is no indication of any 2026 docket activity for this number.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1062463 (record and full text); https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3961669A](/patent/US3961669A)/en (citation of US1062463A to Sumpter Lea Harwood).

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 1062463.

Let me check litigation-specific databases directly.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 1,062,463

Bottom line

No litigation is known — and essentially none is possible — involving U.S. Patent No. 1,062,463 ("Fire-extinguisher," Sumpter Lea Harwood).

I searched litigation-focused sources (Unified Patents portal, PTAB/PTACTS filings, PACER-adjacent docket aggregators, CourtListener, and general web) and found zero district court actions, zero PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM), zero ITC Section 337 investigations, and zero CAFC appeals naming this patent.

Why the null result is expected, not merely a search gap

From the authoritative patent record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1062463](/patent/US1062463)/en):

Three points make modern litigation a legal impossibility:

1. The patent term ended in 1930. Under the law then applicable, the term was 17 years from grant. Any infringement action would have had to be filed in or before 1930. The patent has been public domain for roughly 96 years.
2. The PTAB did not exist until 2012 (and IPR proceedings until Sept. 16, 2012). An IPR/PGR/CBM against a patent that expired in 1930 could not have been instituted.
3. The CAFC was created in 1982, long after expiration. No appeal of any 1062463 action could exist there.

On the specific sources you named

• Unified Patents litigation/PTAB case lists: no entry for 1062463. Unified's docketed matters are all directed to 20th/21st-century patents (e.g., 7,650,234; 8,538,498; 8,767,824; 10,110,898). No 1913-era patent appears.
• Google Patents "Cited By" / "Similar Documents": the single citing document is US 3,961,669 (Toyota Jidosha Kogyo K.K., filed Dec. 6, 1973). Being cited as prior art is not litigation. The "Similar Documents" list (e.g., US 1,207,393; US 903,527; US 719,403) are likewise patent publications, not cases.
• CourtListener: returns an unrelated match — Virginia Retirement System v. Cirillo, 276 S.E.2d 368 (Va. 2009), where "1062463" is the CourtListener opinion URL ID, not a patent number. This is a false positive from a numeric-string search, not a patent case.
• General web: another false positive — Mississippi Secretary of State Business ID "1062463" for Advanced Home Repair LLC (Brandon, MS). Unrelated to the patent.

Caveats on record-keeping

I want to be explicit about the limits of this conclusion rather than overstate it:

• Pre-1930 U.S. district court records are largely not digitized. I cannot rule out a long-forgotten 1913–1930 infringement suit that exists only in paper archives (e.g., National Archives regional files, or the Federal Reporter/Federal Supplement print volumes). I found no evidence of one, and the patent's single-inventor, never-assigned status makes aggressive enforcement commercially unlikely — but absence of a digital record is not affirmative proof of absence.
• Similarly, I cannot search the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (a predecessor court) docket for pre-1930 interference/priority appeals. If a proceeding existed, it was not an infringement action.

Requested table

If you need to pursue the paper-archive question (e.g., for a historical-clearance or academic exercise), the productive next steps would be the National Archives regional facility covering the Southern District of Georgia or Northern District of Georgia for the 1913–1930 window, and a manual check of the Federal Reporter/Federal Supplement digests for "Harwood" and "fire extinguisher." I would not represent the negative result above as conclusive without that manual search.

I'll verify the structured data with a search before writing this up.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 1,062,463. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and independent web verification surfaced no PTAB petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, termination, or Federal Circuit appeal touching it — the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. For a defendant, this is not the "hardened patent" signal that a clean PTAB history normally conveys: US 1,062,463 issued 1913-05-20 and its "anticipated expiration" is 1930-05-20 (17-years-from-grant term, per the statute then in force; no maintenance-fee regime applied to a pre-1980 grant). The patent has been in the public domain for roughly 96 years, so there is no enforceable right for anyone to assert and nothing for the Board to review — the defensive posture is "this patent cannot be asserted by anyone," not "this patent survived attack."

---

Per-proceeding sections

None — no proceeding numbers exist

I am deliberately not generating IPR20XX-XXXXX-style identifiers. There is no petition, no petitioner, no panel, no FWD, and no appeal to report, and inventing a docket number would be the single most damaging error in this analysis. The AIA trial regime itself post-dates this patent by nearly a century:

• IPR — created by the America Invents Act (Pub. L. 112-29), available only for petitions filed on or after 2012-09-16. This patent expired 1930-05-20, i.e. 82 years earlier.
• PGR — available only for patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16 (AIA § 3, first-inventor-to-file). This application was filed 1912-05-02 (Serial No. 694,605), so PGR jurisdiction never existed.
• CBM — limited to patents claiming a "covered business method" of a financial product or service; a 1913 soda-acid fire extinguisher cannot qualify, and the CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16 in any event.

Authority for the above: 35 U.S.C. §§ 311–329 (as enacted by the AIA); the bibliographic record at Google Patents US1062463A (filing 1912-05-02, grant 1913-05-20, expiration 1930-05-20, status "Expired - Lifetime"); and the Espacenet bibliographic record (app. US19120694605, priority 19120502).

The one item that looks like a PTAB hit but is not

The Google Patents page shows a "Cited By (1)" table containing US3961669A (Toyota Jidosha Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha, priority 1973-12-06, granted 1976-06-08, "Automobile fire fighting apparatus"). This is a later-issued patent that cites US 1,062,463 as prior art — a forward citation in the specification/classification sense — not a PTAB proceeding, not a petitioner, and not a validity challenge. Similarly, the Google Patents "Prior art keywords" field (rod, arm, valve, extinguisher, fire) and the "Similar Documents" list are algorithmic metadata generated from the disclosure; neither is a record of trial activity. Do not let these populate a proceedings chart.

---

Strategic summary

Claim status: Untested — because the patent itself has lapsed. US 1,062,463 has four claims (claim 1 reciting the hollow body / discharge nozzle / valve combination; claim 2 adding the internal projection, rod, and chemical vessel; claim 3 adding the valve arm with thickened recessed end plus the pin-and-slot arm on the rod; claim 4 reciting the stop-and-fragile-vessel sub-combination). No claim has been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the Board, because no AIA trial was ever instituted. Note also the OCR damage in the issued text: the printed claim 1 runs into what should be claim 2's language and the "claim 3" text is garbled in the OCR, so any verbatim quotation of these claims from a web scrape rather than the patent PDF risks misquoting the claim you are relying on.

Estoppel landscape: No § 315(e)(2) estoppel exists and none ever could. Estoppel under § 315(e)(2) attaches only to a petitioner (and its RPI/privies) after a final written decision. With no petition and no FWD, no party is estopped from raising anything — which cuts both ways: it also means no one has ever cleared this art, so you cannot borrow a prior-art win from anyone. More importantly, estoppel is irrelevant here because the patent is expired and unenforceable; every § 102/§ 103 ground in the prior art is "available" in the sense that the entire patent is available to the public as prior art itself. Anyone threatening assertion should be evaluated under § 292-style false marking / abuse theories and Rule 11 rather than under an invalidity theory.

Pattern signals: None observable. There is no repeat petitioner, no patent owner appeal history (the Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982, and this patent lapsed in 1930), and no defensive aggregator — Unified Patents, RPX, or otherwise — has ever touched this patent. The absence of any of the usual escalation markers is total. One formatting caution worth flagging to a client: the number as given, 1062463, is a seven-digit 1913 patent; do not conflate it with an eight-digit 10,624,463. Both unformatted strings begin with "1062," and a demand letter drafted carelessly could be pairing a 1913 extinguisher patent's number with a modern patent's claims. If a demand letter cites "10,624,463" and attaches this specification, that discrepancy is itself worth documenting.

Recommended next steps

1. Say it plainly in your memo: no PTAB activity exists on US 1,062,463. The structured ODP data and web verification agree. There is no FWD to quote, no disposition to link, no trial-stage milestone calendar to build — and I will not supply a placeholder docket number.
2. Do not treat the clean PTAB history as a validity endorsement. The conventional inference — "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs, so no IPRs means a strong patent" — is inverted here. This patent attracted no IPRs because it expired 1930-05-20, before the Board's predecessor even existed in its current form. The correct reading is "unassertable," not "robust."
3. If your client has received a demand citing this patent, preserve everything and evaluate the sender. You can verify the lapse yourself in under a minute via the Google Patents legal-status timeline (grant 1913-05-20 → anticipated expiration 1930-05-20 → "Expired - Lifetime") and the USPTO Patent Center record. Assertion of a patent that lapsed in 1930, accompanied by a licensing demand, is worth reviewing for § 292 false marking exposure, state-law unfair-practices claims, and Rule 11 sanctions against the asserting party.
4. If the real target is a modern patent, re-verify the number before doing any work. Confirm the number had the correct digit count and check the PTAB End-to-End docket and USPTO PTAB Decisions directly for that number, plus CourtListener for any CAFC appeal. For this seven-digit patent, all three will return nothing.

Verification caveat: My conclusion rests on the ODP structured data supplied in this prompt plus public web verification (Google Patents, Espacenet, and searches for PTAB/litigation activity on "Sumpter Lea Harwood" and on the patent number). I did not have direct console access to PTAB E2E or the ODP API during this session; if you need a belt-and-suspenders record for a filing, pull the PTAB E2E search yourself and attach the null result. I flag this only so the negative finding is documented as verified-and-sourced rather than assumed.

I'll search for the assignment record and inventor/assignee context for this patent.

Good lead — a related Harwood patent shows a recorded assignment. Let me dig further.

Let me check whether any post-issuance assignment was recorded, and gather inventor/assignee context.

Assignment Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 1,062,463 ("Fire-extinguisher," Sumpter Lea Harwood)

Up-front finding: USPTO Assignment Center contains no recorded assignment of any kind for US 1,062,463 — not at issuance, not afterward. The chain of title is a single step: inventor → public domain. Everything below that can be documented is documented; where I could not verify something, I say so rather than filling the gap.

---

Inventors

• The specification identifies the inventor as "SUMPTER LEA HARWOOD, a citizen of the United States, and a resident of Dublin, in the county of Laurens and State of Georgia" (App. No. 694,605, filed 1912-05-02; patent text via https://patents.google.com/patent/US1062463/en).
• No joint inventors. There is therefore no "co-inventors departing the assignee within 12 months" pattern to report — that signal is structurally absent here, not merely unobserved.
• Known employment history / migration: Harwood's earlier patent, US 594,741 (mechanical movement, filed 1897-04-29), lists him as "of Uniontown, in the county of Perry and State of Alabama." By US 972,189 (shearing device, filed 1909-11-15) and by this patent he is a resident of Dublin, Laurens County, Georgia. So the record shows an Alabama→Georgia relocation sometime between 1897 and 1909.
• Occupational inference (flagged as inference, not record): US 972,189 states the shearing device is "especially devised for cutting cotton ties" — i.e., Harwood's 1909 work was aimed at the cotton-gin/cotton-tie trade in Dublin, Georgia. That is a context clue, not a documented employer. I found no evidence of a company that employed Harwood or manufactured his extinguisher.
• The only other individuals named in US 1,062,463 are the two subscribing witnesses to the specification as printed: "G. L. DIXON" and "H. R. Mom'rr" (the second surname is garbled in the OCR source; I am not correcting it). Witnesses to a specification are not assignees, and the record does not identify a prosecuting attorney for this 1912 filing.
• Related-inventor note: Harwood was a repeat filer, not a one-off. His known portfolio is US 594,741 (1897), US 972,189 (1910), US 1,062,463 (1913) and US 1,068,897 (1913).

---

Original assignee

There is no original assignee. The patent issued to the inventor personally.

• Did the assignee ship a product embodying the claims? Undeterminable, and probably not in any corporate sense — there was no corporate assignee to ship anything. I found no evidence of a manufacturer, no trade catalogue, no corporate successor for this extinguisher. I want to be explicit: absence of evidence here is not proof no one ever built one, but there is no entity in the chain at all.
• Primary line of business: Not applicable — no business entity. On the record, Harwood's activity is that of an independent, unaffiliated inventor; his contemporaneous work points to the cotton-handling trade in Laurens County, Georgia (see US 972,189).
• Current status: No entity to be operating, acquired, dissolved, or in bankruptcy. The patent expired 1930-05-20 (17 years from grant under then-applicable law) and has been in the public domain for roughly 96 years. Google Patents records the status as "Expired – Lifetime."

Important contrast worth flagging (this is where the real signal is): Harwood did part with equity in his sibling patents, but not this one.

The pattern is unusual and worth stating precisely: the middle filing of three — this one, filed 1912-05-02 — is the one Harwood appears to have kept in full, while both the patent filed before it (1909) and the one filed nine days after it (1912-05-11) went to the same Dublin, Georgia associate, James M. Finn. Whatever the commercial logic, it means the only documented co-owner in the Harwood family is Finn, and he is not in the 1,062,463 chain on the face of the document. Note the rule I am applying: a face-of-patent assignee legend is evidence of an assignment interest; it does not by itself give me a USPTO reel/frame, and none is available.

---

Assignment timeline

USPTO Assignment Center has no records for US 1,062,463. There is no assignment timeline to reconstruct.

Searches of https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and the legacy index at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html surface no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no assignor, no assignee, and no correspondent of record for this patent number. Consequently there is nothing to tabulate at the per-assignment level, and no correspondent attorney exists to flag for recurrence — the repeat-player-correspondent signal is inapplicable, not merely weak.

What I actually verified, and against which sources:

Record-keeping caveat (do not over-read the null): US 1,062,463 predates the modern reel/frame system, and pre-1930 assignments were recorded in bound volumes. I could not independently confirm that the online Assignment Center index has complete, digitized coverage for this early a period, and I am not going to assert a coverage cut-off I have not verified. So the correct statement is: no assignment is recorded in the databases I searched, and there is no affirmative evidence that anyone other than Harwood ever acquired an interest in this specific patent — but a paper-only transfer (if one existed) would not necessarily surface online.

Flagged contradiction in the task instructions: this section's own governing rule says to "say so plainly and stop after this section" when Assignment Center has no records, while the task separately requires a Timeline diagram, NPE-pattern signals, and a Verdict. Those cannot both be satisfied. I have followed the stop rule for the substantive body above. A clearly-labelled Addendum below gives the user the two minimal artifacts the stop rule would otherwise withhold, without manufacturing any assignment facts.

---

Addendum (outside the stop rule — see contradiction flag above)

Timeline diagram. Only non-assignment, documented events; there are no transfers to plot.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1062463
    1912 : Harwood files application on May 2
         : No assignment executed at filing
    1913 : Patent issued May 20
         : Harwood is sole owner of record
    1930 : Term expires May 20
         : Public domain thereafter

NPE / troll-pattern signals. Every signal in the checklist is either factually inapplicable or not present — none is "unclear" in a way that would support an NPE finding, because there is no chain at all:

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present (no assignment; no LLC of any kind in the record).
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present (no Acacia/Marathon/IV/IPNav/Wi-LAN/Mosaid/Vringo/Pendrell/Innovatio/MPHJ/Lumen View/Round Rock successor or any other entity appears).
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / inapplicable (no recorded recording; no correspondent of record exists to recur).
4. Cascading transfers — not present (zero transfers, let alone <24 months of them).
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present (no suit exists; the patent expired 1930-05-20, and the last possible infringement action lapsed then — consistent with the previously-generated litigation screening).
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present (no assignee entity, no insolvency proceedings identifiable).
7. Privateering — not present (no operating company and no NPE counterparty).
8. Defensive aggregator — not present (no RPX/AST/LOT/Unified/OIN acquisition; the patent simply lapsed naturally in 1930).

Verdict: Insufficient data (the task's own category for "no records, or only the original assignment"). Justification: the sole ownership datum is Harwood's original, unassigned grant of 1913-05-20 (no reel/frame exists to cite), the record shows the patent lapsed for failure to run its term on 1930-05-20, and no assignee — operating company, NPE, or defensive aggregator — ever appears. Any NPE characterisation would require an assignment record that does not exist; the only non-inventor name adjacent to this family, James M. Finn of Dublin, Georgia, is a 1909-era local co-investor in sibling patents, not an asserter, and he is not in this patent's chain.

Verification links: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html • https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ • https://patents.google.com/patent/US1062463/en • https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=1062463A&KC=A&FT=D

I'll verify the citation record for this exact patent number before analyzing prior art.

Now let me examine the pre-1912 "similar documents" that could actually qualify as prior art, and confirm the citation record.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 1,062,463 ("Fire-extinguisher," Sumpter Lea Harwood)

1. Confirmation of the record searched (number interpreted literally)

I searched the exact identifier 1062463 and did not substitute similar numbers. The record located is US 1,062,463 A — application US 694,605, filed May 2, 1912, granted May 20, 1913, inventor Sumpter Lea Harwood, Dublin, Georgia, assignee "Individual," anticipated expiration May 20, 1930, class A62C 13/00 / A62C 13/003, citing document count = 1. This matches the authoritative full text supplied and the earlier sections of this analysis; no contradiction found with the prior Patent summary or Litigation summary.

2. What the citation record actually contains (important accuracy point)

Two distinct things are being conflated by the phrase "patent citation," and they must be separated:

Caveat stated plainly: I relied on the Google Patents mirror of the USPTO file. I was not able to complete a separate pull of the USPTO Patent Public Search "References Cited" view for application 694,605 within this session, so my "zero backward citations" finding is based on the full text supplied plus the Google Patents record — both of which show no citations field.

Statutory framework note: for a May 2, 1912 filing, the governing novelty provision was R.S. §4886 (as amended March 3, 1897), not the 1952 Act. The 1897 form bars a patent where the invention was "patented or described in any printed publication in this or any foreign country … more than two years prior to his application," or known/used by others before the applicant's invention. The modern §102(a)/(b) labels requested below are therefore used as analogues; I flag this rather than silently applying post-1952 law.

3. Reference-by-reference analysis

3(a) The single forward citation — NOT prior art

3(b) Pre-1912 "Similar Documents" — the only genuine §102 candidates on the record

All five items below issued more than two years before May 2, 1912, so each is at minimum a §102(b)-analogue statutory-bar printing, and also a §102(a)-analogue "patented … before the invention" reference.

3(c) Additional pre-1912 references located by my own search (NOT on the patent's face)

These are not citations of US 1,062,463; I surface them because they are the closest structural art I found for the claims' distinguishing mechanism.

3(d) Post-1912 items expressly NOT prior art

The remaining "Similar Documents" all postdate the May 2, 1912 filing and are therefore incapable of anticipating any claim of US 1,062,463: US 1,099,767 (1914); US 1,207,393 (1916); US 1,237,550 (1917); US 1,266,353 (1918); US 1,289,253 (1918); US 1,303,765 (1919); US 1,323,992 (1919); US 1,452,657 (1923); US 1,670,806 (1928); US 1,795,560 (1931); US 1,976,074 (1934); US 2,166,277 (1939); US 2,370,426 (1943); US 2,560,468 (1951); US 2,574,890 (1951); US 3,149,677 (1964); US 3,650,329 (1972); NO 117091 B (1969); WO 2017/107602 A1 (2017); JP 6063833 B2 (2017). The direction of citation runs the other way — these are candidates for which US 1,062,463 is itself prior art.

4. Claim-level conclusion

5. Gaps I am not closing, and what would close them

1. US 719,403 (Acid-holder for fire-extinguishers, 1903), US 940,614, US 675,103, and US 524,377 were not retrieved; I have labelled them indeterminate rather than characterizing them from titles. Given that US 719,403 is expressly an acid-holder, it is the one reference most likely to alter the claim 1/2 assessment.
2. US 686,056 was read only in excerpt via a third-party PDF (grimh.org), and I did not read its claims. Its claim set may be broader or narrower than the description suggests.
3. I did not retrieve the USPTO Patent Public Search "References Cited"/file-wrapper view for application 694,605 directly; the "no backward citations" finding rests on the Google Patents mirror plus the supplied full text.
4. Foreign counterparts: none are shown for this family (Family ID 3130709 contains only US 694,605). The EP 1062463 / CA 1062463 collisions noted in the earlier Patent summary are different documents and were not treated as this patent.

Net answer to the task: the only patent citation touching US 1,062,463 is the forward citation US 3,961,669 A, which is legally incapable of anticipating any claim under §102. Of the pre-1912 prior art, US 903,527 and US 686,056 are the most relevant, and US 719,403 is the most important unexamined reference; none of the references located discloses the valve-carried rod-holding means of claim 2 or the recessed-thickened-arm / pin-and-slot interlock of claim 3, which appear to carry the novelty of the patent.

Minor note: the two session prompts state different current dates (2026-09-30 vs. April 26, 2026); it does not affect the analysis, since every date used above is taken from the patent documents themselves.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1062463/en (record, claims, and "Cited By"/"Similar Documents" lists); https://patents.google.com/patent/[US3961669A](/patent/US3961669A)/en (the sole citing document); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c3/ca/07/927b1cc46d4925/[US903527](/patent/US903527).pdf (Wilbur/Pyrene); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ad/95/9d/1e6b62ac64568f/[US730333](/patent/US730333).pdf (Badger); https://grimh.org/images/Ressources/Cinema/origenesdelcine/personas/h/hale_george_1901_brevet_US686056.pdf (Hale & Wiesner).

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the actual prior-art records before reasoning about combinations.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 1,062,463 ("Fire-extinguisher," Sumpter Lea Harwood, filed 1912‑05‑02, granted 1913‑05‑20)

Builds on the previously generated sections; I do not repeat the bibliographic table, the litigation/PTAB null findings, or the plain-language claim summaries.

---

0. Two threshold caveats before any §103 reasoning

(a) The statute is an anachronism, and I will not paper over it. 35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted by the Patent Act of July 19, 1952 (effective Jan. 1, 1953) — 39 years after this patent issued. US 1,062,463 was examined, allowed, and granted under the pre‑1952 novelty/"invention" regime: R.S. §§ 4886/4892 as construed by Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851). The 1952 Act's codification coexisted with the stricter "flash of genius" doctrine of Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941), which was itself repudiated by Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and further loosened by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). Any § 103 opinion on this patent is therefore a counterfactual exercise, not a legal proceeding. I flag it because a memo that says "claims 2 and 3 are obvious under § 103" without this caveat is affirmatively misleading about what § 103 could ever have meant for a 1913 grant.

Two corollaries that matter for claim construction, and therefore for obviousness:

• § 112(f) did not exist in 1913 (the means-plus-function paragraph was added by the 1952 Act). Claims 1, 2, and 4 nonetheless recite "means" ("means carried by said valve…," "means carried by the rod…," "means for controlling said discharge opening," "means for movably mounting…"). Under modern practice those limitations would be construed under § 112(f) as limited to the corresponding structure disclosed (rod 11, yoke 28, locking nuts 27, glass tube 29, recess 22/pin 23) and equivalents — which narrows them and can make some § 103 grounds easier (equivalent structures in the art) and others harder (equivalents may be limited to the disclosed linkage).
• All four claims are in the "In an improvement of the kind described, the combination of…" form. That is a pre‑1952 drafting convention; it does not tell us whether claim 1 is independent of claims 2–3, and the OCR interference discussed in the prior section makes the claim-1 boundary textually unreliable.

(b) The record is incomplete in a specific, material way. The page's "Prior Art" content consists of (i) the algorithmic "Prior art keywords" field (rod, arm, valve, extinguisher, fire — not a search result), (ii) the "Cited By (1)" table, and (iii) the "Similar Documents" list. I could retrieve machine-readable full text for only some of those items. Where I did not read the reference, I say so rather than infer its disclosure from its title.

---

1. What the page's own prior-art section actually yields (date-filtered)

Pre‑AIA § 102/§ 103 required the reference to predate the applicant's filing date of 1912‑05‑02 (or the invention date, subject to swearing behind). Applying that filter literally to the 25 "Similar Documents":

Finding: only five of the 25 "Similar Documents" predate the Harwood filing, and only one of those five (Wilbur, US 903,527) has disclosure I verified. The page's list is algorithmically generated (classification/text-similarity), not a novelty search. Notably, it omits the closest art — the pre‑1912 soda‑acid patents that actually disclose rod-through-the-tank-wall ampoule breakage and nozzle-mounted acid release (see §2). A client relying on that list alone would badly misjudge this patent's exposure.

References I retrieved independently (outside the page's Prior Art section; labeled as such, per your instruction to use the page's results as the anchor): US 470,293 (Durand, glass-bulb extinguisher, ~1892 — date not verified in this session); US 673,383 (Chapman, 1901); US 686,056 (Hale & Wiesner, 1901); US 730,333 (Badger, 1903); and US 1,058,937 (Barron, filed 1912‑05‑10, granted 1913‑04‑15). I treat these as corroborating evidence of the state of the art, and I flag Barron's date problem explicitly in §5.

---

2. Element-to-reference mapping (only for references whose text I verified)

Claim 2 and claim 3 (per the prior section's reconstruction) decompose into these elements:

Net result of the mapping: E1–E6 are thoroughly old by 1912 — the soda‑acid, plunger‑breaks‑glass‑ampoule, valved‑nozzle combination was a crowded, decades‑old art. The entire inventive distance of this patent sits in E7–E9: the sequencing interlock. Any serious § 103 analysis must therefore turn on whether that interlock is a predictable mechanical expedient, not on the extinguisher architecture.

---

3. Ground 1 — Wilbur (US 903,527) in view of Hale & Wiesner (US 686,056), further in view of US 719,403 / Badger (US 730,333)

Claims affected: claim 1 (as reconstructed) and claim 2.

• US 903,527 (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US903527A](/patent/US903527A); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c3/ca/07/927b1cc46d4925/[US903527](/patent/US903527).pdf) supplies E1, E2, E6 — and, critically, supplies the stated object Harwood's valve serves: "a further important feature of the invention relates to means for shutting off the flow of the extinguishing stream at the will of the user." It also recites gas‑generating materials "held within the body of the extinguisher separate from each other… until such time as it is desired to eject liquid under gas pressure," i.e., the same storability‑until‑use problem Harwood invokes.
• US 686,056 (https://grimh.org/images/Ressources/Cinema/origenesdelcine/personas/h/hale_george_1901_brevet_US686056.pdf) supplies E3, E4, E5, E6, and the functional core of E7: an operating rod entering the tank through a cover opening, a spring confining the rod in a normally-released position, and a frangible acid holder shattered by actuating that rod — with a "nozzled and valved hose or pipe" downstream.
• US 719,403 / US 730,333 supply the field‑standard acid‑holder-in-an-alkaline-canister subcombination (E1, E4) — Badger's cage 3 supporting acid bottle 4 inside canister 1 of alkaline liquid.

Why a PHOSITA would combine them (motivation, stated in terms KSR recognizes):

1. Same field, same problem, same solution space. All are portable chemical fire extinguishers classified in the same art; both Wilbur and Hale & Wiesner address the two recognized failure modes of soda‑acid extinguishers — premature/gradual reaction during storage and uncontrolled discharge — which are precisely the two evils named in Harwood's own specification ("no matter how much rough handling the extinguisher may be subjected to the tube 29 will be kept away from the rod 4, so as not to be broken at the wrong time").
2. Known technique applied to a known device ready for improvement (KSR ground (C)/(D)). Adding a user‑operable outlet valve to the discharge of a plunger‑break extinguisher is not a reconstruction of either reference; it is the placement of Wilbur's already‑disclosed shut‑off at the discharge of Hale & Wiesner's already‑disclosed valved hose.
3. Predictable result. The combination yields exactly the expected result — a storable soda‑acid extinguisher that, when triggered, generates CO₂ and discharges it through the nozzle. Nothing in the combination produces an unexpected property.
4. Substitution of known elements (KSR ground (B)). Hale & Wiesner's spring 5 bias (keeping the breaking member out of contact until deliberately actuated) is a known element performing the same function as Harwood's recess 22 hold: preventing inadvertent rupture. Substituting a valve‑carried stop for a spring bias to accomplish the same retention is a substitution of one known element for another with predictable results.

Assessment: claim 1 (as reconstructed) and claim 2 would be strongly obvious on this ground. The only element not fully met by the base combination is E8 — and claim 2's E8 functional language ("means carried by the rod to engage the valve to open the same and move said holding means out of position") is broad enough that a POSITA's routine linkage (see §4) satisfies it.

---

4. Ground 2 — Adding a rotary-to-swing then axial-translate coupling: the pin-and-slot. Claims 2 and 3.

This is the heart of the case, so I give the mechanism its own analysis.

The design problem. Harwood's knob 13 must do two different things on one shaft, in sequence: (i) rotate rod 11 to swing valve arm 20 (thickened end + recess 22) clear of the rod, opening valve 19; and (ii) then translate rod 11 axially to drive glass tube 29 against rod 4. The claimed pin 23 (on arm 24, non‑rotatably fixed to rod 11 beyond the valve arm) engaging slot 21 (in valve arm 20) is a single coupling that transmits torque but permits axial slip. That is the entire novelty.

Why that is a predictable expedient:

1. It is a textbook motion-conversion mechanism. A pin in an elongated slot is the canonical way to convert rotation into a swinging motion while allowing relative translation along the slotted member. It appears throughout 19th‑century mechanical practice — valve gear, sewing machines, slotted crank/rocker linkages, and the screwdriver‑slot principle. Under KSR, "a combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results," and "the use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way" is an articulated rationale.
2. Wilbur's valve‑operator is the genus. US 903,527 expressly discloses a "valve operating lever" with a "stem-to-lever connecting link" (Figs. 6–7) and a modified construction for actuating the valve (Fig. 8). A POSITA seeking to operate Harwood's valve from a knob already on the rod would begin with exactly such a lever/link operator; converting a link to a pin‑and‑slot is a mechanical simplification, not invention.
3. The recess 22 is the simplest possible removable coupling. To make the valve arm hold the rod (E7) and be keyed to it for rotation (E9), the arm must present a seat that the rod end drops into. A notch, recess, or thickened shoulder is the trivial solution — Badger's annulus 9 "overlap[ping] the stopper 8 and the mouth of bottle 4" and Hale & Wiesner's skeleton guide/cage 7 receiving a stopper show the art already using overlapping‑shoulder retention in this exact apparatus class.
4. The geometry is design choice, not invention (KSR ground (G)). Harwood's own specification justifies the geometry functionally, not inventively: "the hub 20 is thickened… so that the thickened end containing the recess will take up a considerable space between the outer end of the nut 12 and the inner end of the hub 25." That is a description of packaging — filling the available axial space between two existing parts — which is the paradigm of an obvious design choice.
5. "Obvious to try" — a finite, identified set of solutions (KSR ground (E)). For sequencing "open the discharge, then break the ampoule," the field had a small, known menu: (a) spring bias holding the breaker retracted (Hale & Wiesner, spring 5); (b) a nozzle‑mounted actuator releasing a spring‑loaded breaker through a remote connection (Barron, US 1,058,937 — inadmissible by date, but evidence of what POSITAs were doing in the same weeks); and (c) an interlock keyed to the valve member itself (Harwood). Choosing among three known alternatives with foreseeable results is the definition of obvious to try.

Assessment: claim 2 is obvious on Ground 1 + Ground 2; claim 3 is obvious on Ground 2, with the caveat that the specific thickened‑recess geometry is the single strongest nonobviousness argument available to a defender (see §8).

---

5. The Barron problem — a date trap you must not fall into

It is tempting to write "US 1,058,937 (Barron) discloses freeing the acid from the discharge nozzle, therefore Harwood's interlock is obvious." Do not put that in a brief. Barron was filed 1912‑05‑10 — eight days after Harwood's filing date of 1912‑05‑02. Under pre‑AIA § 102(e), a U.S. patent is prior art as of its own filing date; Barron's date is later than Harwood's, so Barron is not § 102(e) art unless Harwood's actual date of invention post‑dates 1912‑05‑10, which cannot be inferred and would require a priority showing. Barron is therefore inadmissible as a § 103 reference.

What Barron is good for is the opposite purpose: it is powerful evidence of the level of ordinary skill in the art at the exact moment of filing, and of the field's direction of travel — an independent inventor, eight days after Harwood, solving the same "release the acid from the nozzle at the operator's will" problem with a completely different mechanism (nozzle collars → flexible connection → cam → calipers → spring‑loaded plunger). Near‑simultaneous independent solutions to the same problem are evidence that the solution was within the ordinary skill of the art, which cuts against nonobviousness. Cite it in the Graham factor‑2/factor‑3 discussion, never in the claim chart.

(Near‑simultaneity caveat: I have not verified an interference or priority contest between Harwood and Barron; the previously generated sections found none, and I found none. Barron's Ser. No. is 696,293 vs. Harwood's 694,605 — sequential, confirming contemporaneous prosecution.)

---

6. Ground 3 — Claim 4

Claim 4 (per the prior section's reading) is the broadest claim: hollow body + discharge opening + "means for controlling said discharge opening" + "an arm carried by said controlling means having a stop thereon" + "means for movably mounting a fragile vessel containing a chemical in said body engaged by said stop" + "an arm carried by said last‑named means engaging the first arm to move the controlling means to open position before the said vessel can be broken."

Mapping:

• "means for controlling said discharge opening" → Wilbur's valve 19 analogue + valve stem 16, operable "at the will of the user."
• "arm carried by said controlling means having a stop thereon" → Wilbur's valve operating lever; the stop is any shoulder/abutment, and Badger's annulus 9 (overlapping shoulder) and Hale & Wiesner's plunger cap are old stop structures.
• "means for movably mounting a fragile vessel… in said body" → Hale & Wiesner's bracket 2 / clasp 2ᶜ / hinged leaf 2ᵇ; Badger's cage 3; US 719,403 (an "acid‑holder for fire‑extinguishers" as a named subcombination of the art).
• "an arm carried by said last‑named means engaging the first arm to move the controlling means to open position before the vessel can be broken" → Ground 2's pin‑and‑slot.

Assessment: claim 4 adds essentially nothing structural beyond claim 2 and is drafted almost entirely in means language. Under a modern § 112(f) construction it would be narrowed to the disclosed structure and equivalents; under a 1913‑era broad reading it reads on a wide range of valve‑stop linkage arrangements. Claim 4 is the most vulnerable claim in the patent to a § 103 challenge.

---

7. Secondary/alternative combinations

• Ground 4 (frangible vessel + valved nozzle, no through‑wall rod): US 470,293 (Durand — glass bulb C in yoke D, bottom indented by trigger to break the bulb; discharge nozzle F with valve, Figs. 5–8) + US 903,527 (user‑operable shut‑off) + US 719,403 (acid‑holder subcombination). This covers claim 1's broader elements and demonstrates that both halves of the claimed combination were independently old — the classic "combination of old elements" posture (cf. the Fire‑Extinguisher Case, 21 F. 40 (C.C.D. Mass. 1884), which reasoned that adding a hose and nozzle to an old discharging stop‑cock "cannot constitute the combination of a new and patentable one").
• Ground 5 (explosion/over‑pressure motivation): US 673,383 (Chapman, 1901) states the object "to provide a fire‑extinguisher of this nature which is safe and reliable in use and will not explode." This supplies the safety‑rationale motivation for the interlock (open the discharge before generating gas) directly from the prior art itself, not from hindsight.
• Ground 6 (changing the motive operation to the point of use): US 903,527 + US 1,058,937 (Barron — for state‑of‑the‑art context only, per §5). The recognized design trend was to move actuation from the tank to the nozzle; locating the valve/breaker interlock at the rod adjacent the user's knob is the same trend applied without modification.

---

8. Graham/KSR factor analysis and the strongest counterarguments

Scope and content of the prior art. Extremely broad and crowded. The soda‑acid extinguisher art runs from Graham (c. 1837, litigated in The Fire‑Extinguisher Case, 21 F. 40) through Latta (US 142,637, 1873), Carr (US 524,377, 1894), Durand (US 470,293, ~1892), Chapman (US 673,383, 1901), Hale & Wiesner (US 686,056, 1901), Badger (US 730,333, 1903), Wilbur/Pyrene (US 903,527, 1908), Read & Campbell (US 940,614, 1909), and US 719,403 (1903) — a 75‑year accumulation. Every architectural element (E1–E6) is old and repeatedly re‑patented in variant form. That density is itself a Graham factor‑1 finding that weighs against patentability of minor mechanical variations.

Differences (factor 2). The genuine differences are (i) the sequencing interlock (E7 + E8) and (ii) the dual‑function coupling that lets one knob rotate‑then‑translate (E9). These are real differences — they are why I rate claim 3's specific geometry as the patent's most defensible subject matter.

PHOSITA level (factor 3). A mechanic or fire‑apparatus designer of ordinary skill in 1912: conversant with soda‑acid practice, stuffing glands/packing (Harwood's packing 5 and nut 12 are entirely conventional), ordinary hand‑valves, and simple linkages. No advanced training required; the entire disclosure is describable with reference to plumbing and lever hardware. A high skill level supports obviousness.

Secondary considerations (factor 4). I found none in the record: no commercial‑success evidence, no long‑felt‑but‑unsolved‑need evidence, no failure of others, no licensing, no praise, no unexpected results. The one datum that does bear on factor 4 is the near‑simultaneous independent Barron filing, which is at best neutral for the patentee and arguably evidence that the solution was ordinary. Also note the absence of any interference proceeding of record between Harwood and Barron (per the litigation section's null findings), so no administrative determination exists on priority.

Where a defender would push back — honestly stated:

1. Claim 3's "thickened end with recess + non‑rotatably secured second arm beyond the valve arm + pin‑and‑slot" is a specific structural combination. No reference I verified discloses it. Under a strict TSM standard, a defender argues no reference suggests the combination of (a) a valve arm that holds the rod and (b) a pin‑and‑slot coupling on the same shaft. That argument is available, though weaker post‑KSR.
2. The claimed retention is not a mere bias — it is a positive, mechanical block. A defender can distinguish Hale & Wiesner's spring 5 as a bias (which can be overcome by inertia during "rough handling") from Harwood's recess 22 as a positive stop. That is the patent's best nonobviousness argument, and it is a genuine one.
3. Claim 1 cannot be reliably assessed at all, because the printed claim 1 is OCR‑corrupted and runs into what should be claim 2's language. No invalidity conclusion should be drawn for claim 1 without the patent PDF (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8d/32/de/b593f553cd18af/US1062463.pdf).

Bottom line per claim:

---

9. Practical conclusion and stated limits of this analysis

Conclusion. Under a hypothetical application of 35 U.S.C. § 103 as construed by Graham and KSR, claims 2 and 4 would very likely have been held obvious over US 903,527 (Wilbur/Pyrene) in view of US 686,056 (Hale & Wiesner), further in view of US 730,333 (Badger) and/or US 719,403; claim 3 would have presented a closer question, resolvable either way depending on the standard applied, with the pin‑and‑slot/recessed‑arm coupling being a predictable mechanical expedient rather than an inventive contribution. Claim 1 should not be the subject of any opinion given the corrupted claim text.

But the analysis has no operative legal effect, and you should say so. § 103 did not exist when this patent was granted; the patent expired on its anticipated date of 1930‑05‑20 and has been in the public domain for roughly 96 years; no PTAB, district court, ITC, or Federal Circuit matter has ever touched it (per the litigation/PTAB sections). If a client is being asked to pay for a license under US 1,062,463 — or, more likely, under a mis‑transcribed "10,624,463" — the correct response is not a § 103 invalidity opinion but the lapse/expiration and false‑marking analysis already set out in the prior sections.

Limits of the record, stated plainly:

1. I could not read the full text of US 719,403, US 675,103, US 524,377, or US 940,614, all of which are the page's pre‑1912 prior art. My element mapping is therefore limited to references whose text I actually retrieved: US 903,527, US 686,056, US 730,333, US 673,383, US 470,293 (partial), US 1,058,937. If US 719,403 ("Acid‑holder for fire‑extinguishers," 1903) discloses a valve‑arm‑carried stop, claim 4 could be anticipated outright (§ 102) — I cannot tell from the title alone, and I decline to guess.
2. Dates shown for the "Similar Documents" are publication dates. The reference's effective prior‑art date may be its own earlier filing date; a formal search should compute each reference's § 102 date rather than relying on the table in § 1.
3. The claim chart in § 2 is a reconstruction. Claims 1–3 are OCR‑degraded with fragments merged and duplicated; element boundaries (especially whether E7/E8 belong to claim 2 or claim 3) must be confirmed against the patent PDF before any of this is relied upon.
4. No search of foreign art (GB/DE/FR patents or printed publications) was performed. For a 1912 filing, British and German soda‑acid practice is a material gap — the UK was a major source of this art (note Barron's London residence and Pyrene's commercial activity).
5. The KSR rationales applied here are modern doctrine, deployed against a 1913 claim set; I use them because you asked for a § 103 analysis, not because they would have governed in 1913.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1062463 (record, full text, legal‑status timeline); https://patents.google.com/patent/US903527A and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c3/ca/07/927b1cc46d4925/US903527.pdf (Wilbur/Pyrene 903,527); https://grimh.org/images/Ressources/Cinema/origenesdelcine/personas/h/hale_george_1901_brevet_US686056.pdf (Hale & Wiesner 686,056); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ad/95/9d/1e6b62ac64568f/[US730333](/patent/US730333).pdf (Badger 730,333); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f6/f3/60/1c53b5f9056724/[US673383](/patent/US673383).pdf (Chapman 673,383); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/82/27/e1/99f8897881a5b5/US1058937.pdf (Barron 1,058,937); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/59/19/9f/f8e543c1b9b0a3/[US470293](/patent/US470293).pdf (Durand 470,293); https://www.freepatentsonline.com/0940614.html (Read & Campbell 940,614).