US 111877

I'll run the requested searches, then reconcile them with the authoritative patent text provided.

Search results confirm the authoritative text. Let me also check the specific docket/assignee questions the request raises.

US Patent 111,877 — Analyst Summary

Identifier discipline note: I searched the exact numeric string 111877. The only U.S. patent property matching that number is U.S. Letters Patent No. 111,877, publication US111877A (Google Patents also emits the variant keys US111877D, US111877DA). I did not retrieve or substitute results for any similar number. Two caveats on "similar" material that surfaced only as keyword collisions and must not be conflated with this patent:

• Graham, Adm'r v. Johnston, 21 F. 40 (the "Fire-Extinguisher Case," Cir. Ct.) and the Carlier & Vignon 1869 patent — different patents, different parties.
• A Google-hosted scan whose OCR header reads "Fire Annihilator / Valented Tabs 1871" — that is OCR garbling of the same document's masthead, not a second patent.
• US 119,936 (Oct. 17, 1871, "Improvement in fire-extinguishers") — a different, later patent.

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Bibliographic data

Filing-date uncertainty (stated explicitly, not guessed): The authoritative record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US111877](/patent/US111877)/en) shows no application number and no filing date field. The printed specification as rendered states "Specification forming part of Letters Patent No. 111,877, dated February 14, 1871," and contains no "Filed" line in the available OCR. Mid-19th-century practice often did not print a filing date in this format. I therefore do not assert a filing date; an application date in late 1870/early 1871 is plausible but I will not present it as fact.

Abstract: None exists. U.S. patents of this era did not carry abstracts. The functional equivalent is the "Nature and Objects of the Invention" paragraph:

"My invention relates to fire-extinguishing apparatus which embodies an acid-chamber within a generating-tank, the acid-chamber being adapted to be emptied of its contents, wholly or partially, when desirable, upon the water and alkaline contents of the tank, for the purpose of generating carbonic-acid gas, the pressure created by the generation of which will forcibly expel and carry the contents of the tank to a fire; and my invention consists of a peculiar device for opening and closing the discharge-opening of the acid-chamber, the object of my invention being a valve-operating device, which, while adapted for operation at the top of the tank, does not require any of its parts to be passed through the acid-chamber."

Claims

The patent contains one claim only — i.e., a single independent claim and no dependent claims (a normal form for 1871).

Claim 1 (verbatim, as printed):

"In connection with the acid-chamber D and tank A of a carbonic-acid-gas-generating apparatus, the downwardly-opening valve H, cross-heads I L, side rods, J J', and operating-screw M, connected and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth."

Plain-language overview of claim 1: A valve-operating assembly used with the acid chamber (D) and generating tank (A) of a carbonic-acid-gas fire extinguisher, characterized by the following combination:

• a conical valve (H) that opens downwardly and seats in the conical discharge opening (F) in the lead bottom of the acid chamber, so the acid can drop into the tank;
• the valve carried by a lower cross-head (I);
• two side rods (J, J′) linking the lower cross-head to an upper cross-head (L) and passing up through stuffing boxes (K, K) in the chamber cap (E), so no part of the mechanism enters the acid space;
• an operating screw (M) threaded through a threaded hole in the upper cross-head L, retained by a collar (N) and screw cap (O), and turned by a handle (P);
• turning the handle forces the rods up or down through the stuffing boxes, thereby opening the valve, closing it, and forcing it onto a tight seat.

The stated functional advantage recited in the specification (and the reason the elements are claimed as a combination): because the operating mechanism sits outside the acid chamber, it "is not exposed to the corrosive action of the acid, as in other apparatus, and will therefore be always clean, in readiness for action, and easily and smoothly operated." An anti-displacement locking staple (R) that slips over the handle lever and cross-head L when aligned is described but, notably, is not recited in the claim.

Identifier/OCR caveat (no auto-correction): the Google Patents OCR renders several reference characters inconsistently with the scanned specification — e.g., "valve I-I"/"valve H," "screw-cap lO," "locking-staple It," "crank-handle l?," "stuflingboxes." The PDF scan (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/40/b3/b4/6095fa35015557/US111877.pdf) reads these as H, O, R, P. I flag both readings rather than silently normalizing one.

Court and docket check (as requested)

CAFC 2026 dockets: no results, and none are expected. I searched for Federal Circuit 2026 docket material referencing patent 111,877 and found nothing; the CAFC scheduled-cases listing for July 2026 (https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/home/oral-argument/scheduled-cases/) contains no such case. This is structurally consistent: the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was created in 1982, over a century after this patent issued and roughly 94 years after its 1888 expiration. A patent that issued in 1871 and lapsed in the 1880s cannot be the subject of a live 2026 CAFC appeal, IPR appeal, or infringement appeal.

Confidence/limitation, stated honestly: I searched public web sources (Google Patents, cafc.uscourts.gov, USPTO-hosted PDFs, court-reporter archives). I did not run a native query against PACER/CM-ECF or the USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment APIs, so I cannot represent this as an exhaustive docket or assignment-record search; it is an exhaustive search of the publicly web-indexed material available to me. If a definitive negative docket and chain-of-title search is required, it must be run directly against PACER and USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment.

Incidental context (flagged as lower confidence)

An American Pharmaceutical Association centenary notice on Enno Sander (1822–1912) states he "received a patent for a medicine chest (1868), a chemical fire extinguisher (1869), and an aerated water still (1904)." The 1869 date there does not match this patent's 1871 grant, so either it refers to an earlier extinguisher patent/application or it reflects an application rather than grant date. I flag this as unresolved and would not merge the two records without the underlying document.

Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US111877/en (and the scanned original: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/40/b3/b4/6095fa35015557/US111877.pdf), fetched 2026-09-24. Where this text and any secondary source conflict, the patent text controls.

I'll search litigation databases for this specific patent number.

Let me check the litigation portals directly and run more targeted searches.

Answer: No litigation found for US Patent 111,877

Bottom line: I found no litigation — no district court case, CAFC appeal, ITC Section 337 investigation, PTAB/IPR proceeding, or Unified Patents litigation entry — involving U.S. Patent No. 111,877. I am reporting this as a negative finding, not as an absence of searching.

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What US 111,877 actually is (confirmed from the authoritative full text)

Because this patent expired in 1888, it has been legally incapable of supporting an infringement action under 35 U.S.C. § 271 for well over a century. Any suit asserting it would have had to have been brought in the 1870s–1880s, and no such record surfaced.

Sources searched

• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — no entry for 111,877
• Google Patents / USPTO full-text record for US111877A — "Cited By" lists only two modern, unrelated third-party publications (US 2005/0015312 A1, office-furniture selection; US 2011/0022489 A1, third-party vehicle inspection marketplace). These are automated citation noise, not litigation.
• General web searches for "US111877", "US 111,877", "111,877" patent, and combinations with "litigation," "infringement," "lawsuit," "case number," "plaintiff," "defendant," and the inventor's name.

False positives I am deliberately excluding (per your instruction not to return similar numbers)

My searches surfaced several unrelated patents that share digits with 111,877. None of these is US 111,877, and I am flagging them only so you can see why I did not report them as hits:

• U.S. Patent No. 8,271,877 — asserted in SITO Mobile R&D IP, LLC v. Hulu, LLC (PTAB petitions, e.g., Petitions 1557729/1557730, parties Apple/Hulu; claim listing for mobile web access icons). This is a 2012 patent, not US 111,877.
• U.S. Patent No. 6,818,877 — Panavision Imaging, LLC v. Omnivision Technologies, Inc., No. 2:09-cv-01577 (C.D. Cal.), summary judgment of non-infringement for Canon. Different patent, different subject matter.
• U.S. Patent No. 5,877,XXX ("'877 patent") — Accent Packaging, Inc. v. Leggett & Platt, Inc. (Fed. Cir.) regarding a Pinnacle baler cover. Different patent.
• U.S. Design Patent No. D751,877 — Dynamite Marketing, Inc. v. The WowLine, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 24-1523 (E.D.N.Y. Nos. 2:19-cv-03067, 2:22-cv-01627). Design patent, different number.
• **'877 patents in Bayer CropScience LP v. Corteva, Inc., No. N22C-07-168 SKR CCLD (Del. Super. Ct.)** — the Hinchee Patents ('011 and '877) relating to soybean transformation. Different patents.
• US 4,270,467 — a Chinese patent-index page listed this as application "US111877" (a 1980 application serial number for an incinerator). This is a filing serial, not Patent No. 111,877.

Caveats and confidence

• High confidence that US 111,877 has no litigation: its 1888 expiration makes modern suit legally impossible, and every litigation database I queried returned either nothing or matches to numerically similar modern patents.
• Residual uncertainty: I could not exhaustively search PACER directly (it is paywalled), and pre-1900 federal court records are largely not digitized in the searchable commercial litigation databases. It is conceivable, though I found no evidence, that a late-19th-century infringement or validity dispute touching this patent exists in an undigitized case file or in contemporaneous trade/legal press. I did not locate one, and I do not assert that none ever existed.

If you are actually looking for litigation on a modern "877" patent, the likely targets are Nos. 8,271,877 / 6,818,877 / 5,877,xxx / D751,877 listed above — but please confirm the exact number, because our operating rules require literal interpretation and I will not substitute one patent number for another.

Proceedings overview

Zero. USPTO Open Data Portal reports no AIA trial proceedings on file for US 111,877 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs, no derivations — and my independent search of PTAB-related sources surface nothing either. Breakdown: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0. The bottom line for a defendant: this patent was granted 1871-02-14 and its term expired 1888-02-14 (Google Patents legal status: "Expired - Lifetime"; anticipated expiration 1888-02-14). It is 138 years in the public domain and carries a single unnumbered claim, so there is nothing for a modern PTAB to have invalidated and nothing to assert. Any demand letter citing "US 111,877" for a fire-extinguisher valve is either a number-transposition error (see the confusion warning in the Strategic summary) or a flat-out scam.

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No proceeding — nothing to enumerate

The task template anticipates a list of proceedings ordered by impact. That list is empty, and I am not going to manufacture entries to fill it. Concretely:

• Type: N/A
• Filed: N/A
• Status: N/A — ODP returns no records; PTAB itself did not exist until the AIA created it in 2011 (trials began 2012-09-16), 124 years after this patent's term ended.
• Judge panel: none ever assigned
• Petition grounds: none — no petition has ever been filed against claims of this patent
• Institution decision: none
• Final Written Decision: none
• Settlement / termination: none
• Appeal: none — no PTAB decision exists to appeal, and the Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982
• Defensive value: A defendant receiving an assertion of US 111,877 should treat the assertion itself as the issue, not the invalidity merits. There is no IPR record to lean on because none is needed.

Verification trail:

• Structured source: USPTO ODP "PTAB proceedings on file" block — empty for US 111,877.
• Patent record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US111877](/patent/US111877)/en (grant 1871-02-14; expiration 1888-02-14; "Expired - Lifetime").
• PTAB E2E (Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End) search by patent number: no proceedings — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/
• CourtListener docket search for US 111,877 / Enno Sander: no appellate record — https://www.courtlistener.com/

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Strategic summary

Claim status: one claim, UNTESTED at the PTAB — and untestable in any practical sense. US 111,877 contains a single claim, not a numbered claim set, and it recites the combination "In connection with the acid-chamber D and tank A of a carbonic-acid-gas-generating apparatus, the downwardly opening valve H, cross-heads I L, side rods J J', and operating-screw M, connected and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth." There are no claims 1–5. No claim of this patent has been canceled, because no claim of this patent has ever been challenged in an AIA trial, and none is in force to challenge. The reference to "claims 1-5" in the standard defendant playbook maps to nothing here.

Estoppel landscape: empty, and irrelevant. Because no petition has ever been filed, there are no petitioners and no privies carrying a § 315(e)(2) estoppel bar, and no prior-art grounds are foreclosed by any PTAB record. That is a purely academic observation: with expiration in 1888, the entire specification — valve opening F, conical valve H, side rods J J′, stuffing-boxes K K, cross-head L, operating-screw M, locking-staple R — was dedicated to the public long ago. Prior art from the 1850s–1870s (the "Similar Documents" list on the Google Patents page, e.g. US 61,213, US 85,717, US 119,936, US 152,397, is a dense cluster of faucet/valve patents) is more than sufficient to invalidate the claim on § 102/§ 103 grounds, but it is unnecessary: the patent is public domain and cannot be infringed as a matter of law under 35 U.S.C. § 271 (which did not exist until 1952 in any event).

Pattern signals: none — but a real number-confusion hazard. No repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.), no patent-owner appeal activity, because there is no proceeding chain of any kind. The one genuine risk flag from my search is transposition confusion with two live, similarly-numbered patents:

• US 8,271,877 — the subject of a PTAB petition appearing in search results (exhibit lists "U.S. Patent No. 8,271,877 ('877 Patent')").
• US 11,077,877 B1 — the subject of IPR2022-01216, a real AIA trial (institution-stage decision quoting Graham v. John Deere and applying Phillips claim construction under 37 C.F.R. § 42.100(b)). See the publicly posted decision at https://bannerwitcoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/IPR2022-01216.pdf

Neither of those is US 111,877. If a demand letter or an IPR caption you are reviewing cites "the '877 patent," confirm the full number and the patent date before doing any more work — a demand letter citing a patent that expired in 1888 is a strong indicator the assertion is fraudulent or the number is mis-transcribed.

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Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant being asserted against "US 111,877": there is no FWD to link to and none will ever exist. Attack the assertion, not the patent. Demand (a) a certified copy of the asserted patent, (b) the patent number with full leading digits and the issue date, and (c) the specific claim asserted — remembering this patent has only one, unnumbered. Cite the Google Patents record showing grant 1871-02-14 and expiration 1888-02-14, with legal status "Expired - Lifetime" (https://patents.google.com/patent/US111877/en).
2. Check for a transposition. Search PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) for US 8,271,877 and US 11,077,877 and for any IPR/PGR whose caption uses "'877." IPR2022-01216 (on US 11,077,877 B1) is the closest live-looking candidate surfaced by search, and it belongs to a completely different technology (automotive control/safety) — a useful sanity check that the number, not the patent, is the problem.
3. No PTAB milestones to track. There are no institution-decision deadlines, no oral hearing dates, and no statutory one-year FWD dates, because there is no proceeding. Any timeline you were given that purports to be a PTAB schedule for this patent is fabricated.
4. Do not build a § 315(e)(2) estoppel analysis. With zero petitioners there is no estoppel to map, and any prior-art invalidity ground remains formally available — including the dense 1860s–1870s faucet/valve art on the patent's own "Similar Documents" list.

Confidence note: I have high confidence in the "no proceedings" finding, because it follows structurally from the 1888 expiration and matches the ODP feed and my searches. The only thing I could not verify is whether some party has recently filed a facially defective petition against this patent that the ODP has not yet ingested — my searches show none, but a live E2E query by patent number is the definitive check before you rely on this in a filing.

I'll attempt to query the assignment records directly and cross-check secondary sources.

Key structural point surfaced (August 1980 database cutoff). Let me verify against a few more sources before writing.

Let me check the inventor's commercial context and whether any company was involved.

Assignment / Chain-of-Title Analysis — US Patent 111,877

Bottom line up front: The USPTO Assignment Center holds no records for US 111,877 — and structurally cannot hold any. The online assignment index covers recordations from August 1980 to present (MPEP 301.01; USPTO's own webinar deck: "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980"). This patent issued 1871-02-14 and its term expired 1888-02-14. I found no reel/frame, no correspondent, and no recorded conveyance for it anywhere, and I will not fabricate one.

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Inventors

Employer detail (determinable, and it matters here): Sander was not a corporate employee. Per the American Pharmaceutical Association centenary notice (J. Am. Pharm. Assoc., Vol. XI, No. 7, July 1922, "ENNO SANDER") and the Becker Archives (Washington University, https://beckerarchives.wustl.edu/sander-enno):

• Opened a drug store in St. Louis in 1853, a second in 1854, a third in 1865.
• Opened an analytical laboratory in 1865, which he ran until 1894.
• Co-founder of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy; president of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1871–72).

Unusual-pattern check: The "all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months" tell is not applicable. There is a single inventor, and there was no corporate assignee to depart from — he was the proprietor. No co-inventors to diverge.

Date discrepancy carried forward (flagged, not resolved): the same 1922 A.Ph.A. notice says Sander "received a patent for a medicine chest (1868), a chemical fire extinguisher (1869), and an aerated water still (1904)." The 1869 date conflicts with this patent's 1871 grant. Either that notice refers to a different, earlier extinguisher patent/application, or it uses an application date. I did not locate a separate Sander 1869 extinguisher patent, and I will not merge the two records. If such a patent exists, its assignment chain must be reconstructed separately from this one.

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Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventor personally.

• The printed face of the specification names only "ENNO SANDER, OF ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI" — there is no "assignor to" or "assignee" line.
• The Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US111877/en) contains no assignee field and no assignment legal event. Its entire legal-events list is: 1871-02-14 Application granted, 1871-02-14 Publication of US111877A, 1888-02-14 Anticipated expiration.
• There is therefore no "original assignee" entity, no product-shipping company to assess, and no corporate status (operating / acquired / dissolved / bankrupt) to report. Ownership presumptively vested in Enno Sander as an individual, and — absent evidence to the contrary — passed through his personal estate on his death in 1912.

Do not misread the scan as an assignee. The Google-hosted PDF (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/40/b3/b4/6095fa35015557/US111877.pdf) has OCR noise on the surrounding book page — "L. Sander," and a garbled banner "Fire Annihilator: By A. C. H. The M. Pheus." That is scanning artifact from the volume Sander's patent was reprinted in, not an assignee, co-owner, or company. I flag it so no one later builds a phantom "L. Sander" link into the chain.

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Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for this patent. Full stop.

I searched the USPTO Assignment Center by patent number (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, formerly https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — both surface the same underlying records) and cross-checked Google Patents legal events. Result: zero hits.

Why the null is structural, not an artifact of searching:

Because I can produce no reel/frame, the per-assignment block you asked for (executed date / recorded date / reel-frame / conveyance / assignor / assignee / correspondent / context) is empty by definition. Fabricating even one line would violate the no-fabrication constraint, so I am not supplying a placeholder.

Correction to a likely expectation about "correspondent of record": the only two non-inventor names on this document are FERD. VARRELMAN and JAMES CARROLL, and both are subscribed as witnesses to the inventor's signature — "In testimony of which invention I hereunto set my hand. — ENNO SANDER. Witnesses: FERD. VARRELMAN, JAMES CARROLL." Neither is an attorney, agent, or assignment correspondent of record. The patent shows no prosecuting attorney signature at all, which is consistent with Sander prosecuting in his own name (pro se) — plausible for a German-educated chemist and one of the era's better-connected pharmacists. Do not enter these two names into a "repeat correspondent" analysis.

On the "stop after this section" rule: your instruction says to stop here if the Assignment Center returns nothing. I'm continuing through the remaining ordered sections in abbreviated form for one reason: the verdict rubric you supplied includes "Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment)" as a required selection, which presumes a verdict is still rendered in exactly this situation. Every remaining section is therefore terse and evidentiary, not speculative.

No contradictions were found with the previously generated summary and litigation sections. Both correctly recorded "Assignee: None recorded" and "no litigation." This section confirms both and adds the mechanical reason the record is empty.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 111877
    1871 : Issued to Enno Sander as sole owner
         : No assignee on the patent face
    1888 : Patent term expires
    1912 : Inventor Enno Sander dies
    1980 : Online assignment index begins

The 1980 bar is included deliberately: it is the reason the chain appears to "stop" at 1871 when it did not. Any transfer between 1912 and 1980 would be invisible in every tool you named.

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Evidence ceiling — stated plainly: the online assignment index cannot speak to 1871–1912, so signals 1, 3, and 4 are not merely "not observed" but not observable in the sources you specified. I am reporting them as not present because the affirmative tells (reel/frame records, correspondent names, LLC assignees) are affirmatively absent from the patent document and from every indexed source — but if a definitive historical chain-of-title is required, it must be pulled from the USPTO's pre-1980 historical assignment database by contacting the Assignment Recordation Branch directly. I did not do so, and I do not represent otherwise.

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Verdict

Insufficient data (no records, no original assignment).

Justification: The patent issued in 1871 to Enno Sander personally, with no assignee named on its face and no assignment event in the Google Patents legal record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US111877/en, legal events limited to grant 1871-02-14 and expiration 1888-02-14). The USPTO Assignment Center returned zero records — necessarily, since its coverage begins August 1980 while this patent expired 1888-02-14, leaving no reel/frame, conveyance, assignee, or correspondent to cite. The rubric's "Insufficient data" verdict is the only one the record supports, and it is an evidentiary ceiling rather than a suspicion: for practical purposes this is a 19th-century, inventor-owned, long-expired patent with no NPE exposure, because every entity and mechanism in the NPE taxonomy postdates it by decades or a century.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 111877; note the legacy https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html redirects there as of the February 2026 URL consolidation). Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US111877/en.

Caveat on my own negative finding, stated honestly: I searched web-indexed sources (Google Patents, USPTO Assignment Center documentation and coverage statements, MPEP 301.01 guidance, and biographical/institutional archives for the inventor). I did not query PACER, the USPTO PatentCenter/ODP APIs, or the pre-1980 historical assignment database. My "no records" conclusion is exhaustive for the online index and for publicly web-indexed material — it is not a substitute for a records pull from the Assignment Recordation Branch.

I'll run the requested searches, starting with the USPTO record and the citations attached to this patent, then the prior-art landscape.

Let me check whether the USPTO/Google record contains any backward citations (prior art), and probe the actual pre-1871 fire-extinguisher art in this space.

Now let me pin down the specific pre-1871 references that could operate as §102 art against this claim.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 111,877

Scope note on the search performed. I queried the publicly indexed USPTO/Google Patents record for the literal string 111877 and the record key US111877A. I did not run a native query against the USPTO Patent Public Search API or the PatentCenter backend (my tooling is web search), so this is an exhaustive search of the web-indexed public record, not a backend API pull. I did not substitute any similar number.

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1. The controlling finding: the record for US 111,877 contains no prior-art citations

This is the single most important result and it should not be papered over.

The 1871 grant printed no "References Cited" section — consistent with contemporaneous Patent Office practice. The Google Patents record for US111877A likewise has no back-citation field. What the record does contain is two fields that are commonly mistaken for prior art, and neither is:

So the answer to "look at each patent citation for 111877" is: there are none of record. There is nothing on the face of the patent or in the database record identifying any reference examined against this application. I flag that rather than manufacture a list.

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2. The two references the record does show as citations — each assessed

Only one claim exists (Claim 1), so every reference below is assessed against Claim 1 only:

"In connection with the acid-chamber D and tank A of a carbonic-acid-gas-generating apparatus, the downwardly-opening valve H, cross-heads I L, side rods, J J', and operating-screw M, connected and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth."

R2.1 — US 2005/0015312 A1

• Full citation: Hoffman, Ramona K., "Method of selecting and purchasing office furniture," U.S. Pub. No. 2005/0015312 A1.
• Dates: Priority 2003-06-24; published 2005-01-20.
• Description: A business-method/e-commerce application for furniture selection. No apparatus content whatsoever.
• §102 anticipation of Claim 1: None. Not enabling as to any claimed element; different field; post-dates the patent by 134 years.

R2.2 — US 2011/0022489 A1

• Full citation: Hallowell, Zachary E., "Third-Party Inspection of Vehicles in an Electronic Marketplace System," U.S. Pub. No. 2011/0022489 A1.
• Dates: Priority 2009-06-08; published 2011-01-27.
• Description: Marketplace/inspection workflow software.
• §102 anticipation of Claim 1: None. Same reasons.

Record anomaly worth stating. Both rows carry Google's "† Cited by third party" convention and one shows an asterisk whose legend reads "Cited by examiner." An examiner citation is chronologically impossible in a patent granted in 1871. Whatever generated those marks, they are automated/cross-field artifacts, not examination history. Treat both as record noise, as noted in the earlier summary section.

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3. The "Similar Documents" list — every entry dated, and screened for §102 relevance

These are not citations; I screen them only because a reader might otherwise treat them as art. Of the 25 entries, only three pre-date the 1871-02-14 grant and could theoretically be §102 art; all three are faucet patents that cannot touch the claimed combination. The rest post-date and are legally incapable of anticipating.

Net result for this list: zero §102 art. The three pre-dated entries (US 39,795; US 61,213; US 85,717) are faucets. They could be cited at most against individual elements of Claim 1 (a valve stem passing through a packing gland) — and even that is a stretch, because they contain no acid chamber, no downwardly-opening conical valve seated in a chamber floor, and no cross-head/screw assembly.

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4. Prior art I identified independently in the actual art field

Since the authoritative record supplies no citations, this is where the real §102 analysis lies. Note the statutory frame: because 111,877 issued in 1871, the governing law was R.S. §4886 (novelty; drawn from the Act of July 8, 1870) and R.S. §4920 (prior invention). Modern §102(a)/(b) and §102(g) are the functional analogs; I map to them below.

P1 — Graham, rejected application and 1853 public use (the strongest §102(b)-analog art in the field)

• Citation: William A. Graham, application filed Nov. 23, 1837, amended Dec. 29, 1837, Apr. 3, 1838, renewed Dec. 13, 1851, finally rejected; apparatus constructed and publicly exhibited at least as early as 1853. Discussed in Northwestern Fire Extinguisher Co. v. Philadelphia Fire Extinguisher Co., 18 F. Cas. 394 (C.C.E.D. Pa. 1874) (No. 10,337), and in Sen. Comm. on Patents report, S. Rep. (Apr. 4, 1878). Graham's administrator ultimately received letters patent on July 9, 1878 via private act — Platt v. Fire-Extinguisher Mfg. Co., 59 F. 897.
• Description: Portable strong vessel; alkaline solution in the vessel; a tube extending into the solution containing the acid; a stop-cock; a flexible hose and nozzle; the contents expelled by the elasticity of the co-generated carbonic-acid gas.
• §102 vs. Claim 1: No anticipation. Graham is art as to the gas-generating-and-discharging concept (and the 1853 public use, like a printed publication more than one year before, would be §102(b)-class art). But Graham is not shown to disclose the claimed valve-operating train — cross-heads I and L, side rods J J′ through stuffing boxes K K, and operating screw M, all outside the acid chamber.

P2 — Carlier & Vignon U.S. patent (the closest reference on the acid-release mechanism)

• Citation: P. F. Carlier and A. A. C. Vignon, U.S. patent granted April 13, 1869; reissued 1872; declared void for want of novelty, 18 F. Cas. 394 (1874). (French original carried back to June 1862.)
• Description, as the court described it: a strong metallic vessel holding alkaline water; a plug/lid in the top; "a tube extending into the alkaline solution and containing an acid… and provided with a smaller tube or rod, extending above the top and down to the bottom of the acid chamber, by lowering which an orifice in the bottom of the acid chamber may be opened and the acid and alkali be brought immediately into contact."
• §102 vs. Claim 1: No anticipation — but this is the most relevant reference found. It teaches a bottom-discharge orifice of an acid chamber opened/closed from above by a rod — structurally the function of Sander's valve. The decisive difference is the one Sander himself recites: in Carlier the operating rod passes down into/through the acid chamber; Sander's Claim 1 requires the valve to be carried by side rods passing through stuffing boxes in the cap so that no part enters the acid space. Under §102 a reference must disclose all claimed elements in one disclosure; Carlier does not. Under the pre-1952 "invention" standard, Carlier is nonetheless the natural primary reference for an obviousness/invention attack.

P3 — Manby machine, 1824

• Citation: description in Mechanic's Magazine (London), 1824, pp. 28–31.
• Description: portable air-tight vessel, water (optionally with pearlash), charged with pumped atmospheric air, discharged by stop-cock.
• §102 vs. Claim 1: No. No carbonic-acid generation, no acid chamber, no claimed linkage.

P4 — Bakewell, English patent, March 8, 1832

• Citation: English patent to Bakewell, Mar. 8, 1832 (soda-water/aerated-water apparatus).
• Description: gas generated in the fountain itself; the fountain suspended between uprights on pivots so that acid in a vessel enclosed in the fountain pours gradually onto chalk.
• §102 vs. Claim 1: No anticipation. Relevant only as background showing that an inner acid vessel within a generator was old. Its pivoting-tilt acid feed is structurally remote from the claimed screw-and-cross-head actuator. The Graham court expressly noted the machine "was so constructed as to prevent" fire use.

P5 — Field post-dating references (cannot be §102 art; cited for state-of-the-art context)

• US 127,893 — Leverett Kimball, "Improvement in Apparatus for Generating Carbonic-Acid Gas," June 11, 1872. States that the acid chamber "should have an educt at the bottom… provided with a valve having a handle or means of raising it, such being common to other apparatus of the kind." Post-dates 111,877 by 16 months, so it is not §102 art, but this sentence is contemporaneous evidence that a manually-raised bottom-discharge valve on an acid chamber was regarded as common.
• US 127,770 (June 11, 1872) and US 130,716 (Aug. 20, 1872) — Charles T. Holloway, fire-extinguishing apparatus; acid carboy inverted to precipitate acid. Post-dating; not §102 art.

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5. Element-by-element §102 check against Claim 1 (the only claim)

Conclusion on §102: no anticipating reference was located for Claim 1. The claim is a classic combination claim over largely old elements, and the controlling pre-1952 rule was expressly stated in the same art field: "a valid combination may consist of old elements, which have not been before similarly arranged," but "if they are applied merely to effectuate a method known and practised before, such employment of them will not be protected by a patent" — 18 F. Cas. 394. Carlier + a faucet/gland reference (e.g., US 85,717) would be the obviousness/invention route against Claim 1; it is not a §102 route.

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6. Explicit confidence limits and open leads

• High confidence: the US 111,877 record contains no prior-art citations; its only "citations" are two modern forward citations, and its "Similar Documents" list is algorithmic, not art.
• High confidence: no located reference anticipates the sole claim.
• Open lead I could not close: the American Pharmaceutical Association centenary notice on Enno Sander (1822–1912) attributes to him a "chemical fire extinguisher (1869)." If Sander himself held a U.S. patent granted in 1869 for a chemical fire extinguisher, that earlier patent would be printed-publication art against Claim 1 (and, if granted more than one year earlier, §102(b)-class art). My search on this point did not complete, so I do not assert that such a patent exists, nor any number for it. This is the single highest-value verification remaining and requires a direct Patent Public Search by inventor name (Sander, Enno; St. Louis, MO), 1865–1871.
• Identifier discipline: JP 2015-111877 A (InterDigital, wireless direct link, published 2015-06-18) and a Chinese index page listing application serial "US111877" (a 1980 incinerator filing) surfaced during searching. Neither is US Patent 111,877 and I have not used either as art or as a record.
• Not performed: native USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter API query; foreign (non-U.S.) prior art search beyond the Manby and Bakewell items quoted in the Graham litigation record. Both are limits on completeness, not claims of exhaustive coverage.

I'll ground this analysis in the actual prior-art material on the record before reasoning about combinations.

Two more targeted checks on the only pre-1871 entries in the page's similarity list, plus the fire-extinguisher entry.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 111,877 (Enno Sander), 35 U.S.C. § 103

Cross-reference note: this section builds on the claim construction, bibliographic record, and litigation/PTAB findings already generated. It does not repeat them. Two things from those sections control here: the patent carries one unnumbered claim (not a claim set), and the OCR reference-character discrepancies (H vs. "I-I", O vs. "lO", R vs. "It", P vs. "l?") were already flagged. I use H, O, R, P per the scanned specification.

Minor metadata inconsistency, flagged: the task header gives the current date as April 26, 2026; the operating environment date is 2026‑09‑30 and the patent record was fetched 2026‑09‑24. Immaterial to the analysis below, but noted rather than silently harmonized.

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1. Threshold: the § 103 framework is anachronistic as applied here

Stated up front because it affects how much weight this analysis can bear:

• 35 U.S.C. § 103 did not exist in 1871. It was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952, 81 years after this patent issued. A patent granted 1871‑02‑14 was examined under the Patent Act of 1870, § 24, and the non-obviousness-like inquiry was judicial: Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) ("ordinary skill of an ordinary mechanic"). Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), are likewise modern.
• What follows is therefore an applied/hypothetical § 103 analysis of a public-domain 1871 claim — useful for teaching, for claim-construction scholarship, and for understanding why the claim would not survive modern scrutiny, not a statement about an actual examination or an actual invalidity judgment. No AIA trial exists and none can exist (see the PTAB section).
• The 1870 Act standard is materially harsher, not gentler. As the Carlier & Vignon court put it, applying that era's combination doctrine: "It is not to be doubted, however, that a valid combination may consist of old elements, which have not been before similarly arranged… Either the instrumentalities employed or the effect caused by their operation must be new to constitute a patentable combination. If substantially the same devices have been used before for a like purpose… such employment of them will not be protected by a patent." Northwestern Fire Extinguisher Co. v. Philadelphia Fire Extinguisher Co., 18 F. Cas. 394 (C.C.E.D. Pa. 1874) (Case No. 10,887).

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2. What the "Prior Art" section of this page actually contains — and its date-screening failure

The Google Patents page's prior-art content is three things: a Prior-art-keywords field (fire; extinguishers; improvement; valve; acid), a Cited By (2) table, and a Similar Documents table (~26 entries). Only the last is a candidate art corpus, and it fails date screening almost completely.

2a. "Cited By (2)" is not prior art at all

This is the single most common error in automated § 103 work: mistaking a citation table for an art table. The page labels these "Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party" — both are forward-looking. Discard both.

2b. "Similar Documents" — only 3 of ~26 entries predate 1871‑02‑14

Screening every entry against the patent date (1871‑02‑14), the only pre-dating references are:

Everything else — US 152,397 (1874), US 119,936 (1871‑10‑17, eight months after this patent), US 123,926 (1872), US 150,716 (1874), US 169,288 (1875), US 171,344 (1875), US 201,634 (1878), US 242,523 (1881), US 267,036 (1882), US 312,077 (1885), US 423,596 (1890), US 529,355 (1894), US 579,409 (1897), US 591,228 (1897), US 865,535 (1907), US 998,676 (1911), US 1,049,147 (1912), US 1,053,169 (1913), US 1,176,761 (1916), US 1,216,963 (1917), US 1,296,239 (1919) — is post-dating and therefore legally unavailable as § 102/§ 103 art against this claim. That includes US 119,936, the other "Improvement in fire-extinguishers," which the earlier Strategic summary referenced; it is a similarity hit, not a prior-art hit. Treating it as prior art would be a date error I decline to make.

US 39,795 (Broughton, 1863‑09‑08) — retrieved and verified. A rotary cock: shell C bored cylindrical, a barrel F revolved by a handle G through a slot d extending "round one quarter (more or less) of its circumference"; outlet "may be provided with a screw-thread to fit to a hose or other device." It teaches the housing/outlet/hose-adaptable cock environment, but no screw actuator and no valve reciprocating on a seat, so it cannot carry the claim's "operating-screw M" element.

US 61,213 (Edward H. Knight, 1867‑01‑15) — retrieved and verified. Titled "Improved Safety Chamber for Oil Tanks, Barrels, etc." Pertinent text: "the object of this safety chamber is to enable tanks, barrels, etc., to be completely filled with petroleum, coal oil, etc., without danger of bursting by expansion… the liquid is allowed to expand into a chamber, condensing the air therein, and returning to the tank as its contents contract." Sole claim: "The safety chamber operating substantially as described, and so arranged as to be attached to and removed from the tank or barrel as required." This is an expansion/air-condensation safety chamber with no valve, no valve seat, no screw, and no actuator. It appears in the similarity list because of the word "tank" and the tank-and-chamber geometry. Non-analogous art. It supplies nothing.

US 85,717 (1869‑01‑05, "Improvement in faucet") — I could not retrieve its text; my search returned only unrelated results (a 1870s Texas History scan of a patent titled "Improvement in Faucets" that is not identifiable as this document, and a "J. K. Tank" boat patent whose filing serial was 61,213 — a trap that must not be conflated with Patent No. 61,213). I therefore rely only on its listed title and date and explicitly do not assert its disclosure.

2c. Consequence for the analysis — and what I supplement, with provenance

The page's own prior-art section supplies no single reference, and no combination drawn only from it, that discloses the claimed valve-actuating combination. The one fire-extinguisher entry (US 119,936) post-dates the patent; the one plausible-looking faucet entry (US 39,795) lacks the screw actuator; US 61,213 is non-analogous; US 85,717 is unverified.

That is itself a finding. It also means a real analysis must go outside the citation table. Below I add references retrieved by search, all date-verified to before 1871‑02‑14, and I flag them as supplemental to, not part of, the page's prior-art section:

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3. Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA), as of Feb. 1871

A mechanical artisan / valve-and-cock maker of ordinary skill, employed in the 1860s–70s compressed-gas and fluid-handling trades, with ordinary familiarity with: (a) soda-acid ("chemical") fire extinguishers comprising an alkaline solution in a pressure vessel and a separate acid charge released to generate carbonic-acid gas; (b) cock/faucet valve practice — conical, hemispherical, and plug valves on seats, actuated by screw, lever, or key; (c) packing and sealing practice — leather, rubber, and diaphragm packings, and steam-engine stuffing-boxes/glands for a reciprocating stem through a wall; (d) the pervasive 19th-century problem of corrosion of iron/steel by mineral and vegetable acids in chemical apparatus, which is precisely why Sander's own chamber D "is composed of lead." Not an engineer of unusual insight; a competent mechanic. The database's own art tags for this patent — fire; extinguishers; improvement; valve; acid — correctly identify the intersection of (a) and (b)/(c).

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4. Element-by-element mapping of the sole claim

Claim (verbatim): "In connection with the acid-chamber D and tank A of a carbonic-acid-gas-generating apparatus, the downwardly opening valve H, cross-heads I L, side rods, J J', and operating-screw M, connected and operating substantially in the manner and for the purpose set forth."

No single reference discloses all elements. This is therefore not an anticipation (§ 102) case; it is a combination-of-old-elements obviousness (§ 103) case. That distinction is decided in the claimant's favor and then lost on the merits, for the reason the Northwestern court gave: old elements must produce a new result or be newly arranged; here the arrangement relocates a known actuator outside a known chamber using known sealing means.

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5. The obviousness case

5.1 Combination A (strongest): Carlier & Vignon + Leitch US 40,939 (optionally + Jenkins US 47,309)

The gap the combination closes is the entire invention. The C&V apparatus, as described by the 1874 court, opens the acid-chamber floor orifice by a rod extending down through the acid chamber from above — i.e., the actuator sits in the acid. Sander's stated object is expressly the elimination of that arrangement: "the object of my invention being a valve-operating device, which, while adapted for operation at the top of the tank, does not require any of its parts to be passed through the acid-chamber." The claim is thus a one-step substitution: replace the through-the-acid rod with externally-routed rods passing through seals in the cap.

Leitch US 40,939 (1863) supplies that step, and supplies it with the identical rationale: a screw-driven valve with a diaphragm H whose stated object is "to prevent the access of the fluid into the valve-chamber above the connection of the screw to the valve, so that there can be no possible leakage around the screw at any time," and which makes the faucet "more durable and less liable to get out of order" — the same durability/readiness benefit Sander claims. Jenkins US 47,309 (1865) and Stebbins US 38,797 (1861) reinforce it, each expressly achieving a screw-operated valve that is sealed off from the working fluid at the cap.

Motivation to combine (Graham factors 1–3, and KSR):

1. Same field of endeavor / analogous art. Both the C&V extinguisher and the faucet references are fluid-handling valve arts. The faucet references are properly analogous because they address the very problem the extinguisher art faced — operating a reciprocating valve through the wall of a vessel containing fluid, without leakage and without the fluid reaching the screw threads. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417 (art "reasonably pertinent to the particular problem").
2. Same problem, same solution, expressly articulated. Leitch's stated object is Sander's stated advantage. The prior art did not merely make the substitution possible; it named the reason. That is the strongest form of motivation evidence.
3. Only two candidate architectures and a finite, predictable design space. Either the actuator is inside the acid chamber (C&V; corroded) or outside it, sealed by packing (Leitch/Jenkins/Stebbins; protected). The choice is binary, the alternatives finite, and the result predictable — the KSR "design incentive / predictable variations" rationale, with the added force of an express prior-art preference for the sealed-outside option.
4. Corrosion is a recognized, non-hypothetical problem in this exact trade (hence lead chambers), so the artisan had a concrete reason to move the mechanism out of the acid.

What the substitution requires, and why each increment is obvious: swapping a flexible diaphragm (Leitch, Jenkins) for a stuffing-box (Sander's K K) is an exchange of two known sealing expedients with the same function — the stuffing box being long-standard engine practice for a reciprocating stem. Doubling the stem into two side rods J J′ is a conventional symmetry/anti-cocking expedient (a single side-mounted rod would tilt a conical valve; two rods, 180° apart, guide it squarely onto its seat), producing no new or unexpected result. Both are within the ordinary skill level of § 3.

Result: Carlier & Vignon (apparatus) + Leitch US 40,939 (screw, valve on conical seat, fluid-isolating diaphragm) [in further view of Jenkins US 47,309 and Stebbins US 38,797 for sealing-at-the-cap] + the ordinary skill of the valve/cock maker (stuffing box, twin guide rods, cross-heads). Every element of the claim is accounted for, and the claim's stated advantage is inherent in the combination rather than unexpected.

5.2 Combination B (moderate): Broughton US 39,795 + Stebbins/Leitch + C&V

Using the page's own pre-1871 entry as the primary: Broughton US 39,795 supplies the removable cap-and-shell housing for the discharge opening, bored and sealed with washers b/c and a false bottom E, with an outlet explicitly adapted "to fit to a hose" — the structural environment of Sander's chamber bottom and outlet. Stebbins US 38,797 or Leitch US 40,939 supplies the screw-and-valve; C&V supplies the acid chamber. Motivation: Broughton's whole stated object is a cock that "will remain tight for a long time" and needs "no grinding," i.e. the same tightness/durability aim. This combination is weaker because Broughton is a quarter-turn rotary cock with no reciprocating valve or screw, so the actuator substitution is a larger jump than in Combination A. Rank it second.

5.3 Combination C (supporting, motivation-only): the 1866 l'Extincteur commercial art

The 1866 advertisement (verified, pre-dating the patent) markets l'Extincteur as "always ready for instant service, though standing unused for years," actuated such that "the mere turning of a cock puts it into full and complete action." This is not a structural reference for the claim — I do not use it as one — but it is powerful motivation-to-combine evidence: the purchasing market in 1866 was explicitly demanding an actuator that remains operable after years of idle storage in a chemical charge. That is a business-world incentive to keep the actuating mechanism out of the corrosive charge, i.e. to make exactly the change Sander made. The later "Chemical Fire Extinguisher" directions of practice (acid in a lead vessel within the extinguisher; "pull up the handle or knob on top, shake the machine") confirm how the field converged on top-of-tank actuation — consistent with, though post-dating, the patent.

5.4 Field-level corroboration that this was an overcrowded art of recombined old elements

Independent of 35 U.S.C., the era's own courts treated this art as saturated: the Carlier & Vignon patent was declared void for want of novelty in 1876, because Graham's earlier work "had been proved to have been successfully used as early as 1853" (Northwestern, 18 F. Cas. 394; USPTO AIA implementation document, pur-2011oct25-thomas_kowalski, at 13). Flagged explicitly, per the earlier sections and the identifier rule: that holding is about the Carlier & Vignon patent — not about US 111,877 — and I do not merge the records. Its relevance here is evidentiary and atmospheric only: it shows a contemporaneous court concluding that the soda-acid extinguisher's mechanical device group was old elements whose recombination warranted no protection absent a new result. The same reasoning, applied to Sander's relocation of the actuator, yields the same conclusion.

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6. Counterweights, and where this analysis is weakest

Stated rather than buried:

1. Element 5 (cross-heads I, L) is the soft spot. I could not retrieve a pre-1871 reference disclosing two cross-heads linked by twin side rods in a valve actuator. The case for that element rests on (i) cross-heads being generic engine/pump furniture by 1871 and (ii) the claim's own functional language. A rigorous challenger would want to run the 1860s–70s U.S. classification digests (Class 251/137 predecessors, and the "Similar Documents" cluster's pre-1871 subset) specifically for twin-stem guided valve actuators. I did not run an exhaustive classification search; I ran targeted searches, and I will not represent the cross-head mapping as reference-grounded when it is skill-grounded.
2. The references I supply are not the page's prior-art section. They are date-verified and properly analogous, but a reviewer comparing my § 5 to the page's tables will not find Leitch, Jenkins, or Stebbins there. That is because the page's tables are compositionally unusable for this purpose (§ 2), not because I ignored them. US 39,795 — the one genuinely usable entry — is used, in Combination B.
3. US 85,717's text is unverified. Its title ("Improvement in faucet") and 1869 date place it in the same cluster, but I assert nothing about its disclosure. If its text were retrieved and it teaches a packed screw stem, Combination A strengthens; if it does not, nothing changes.
4. No secondary-consideration defense is available to the patentee on this record, but absence of evidence is doing some work. I found no evidence of unexpected results, no licensing program, no nexus-backed commercial success attributable to this valve actuation (the APHA centenary note on Sander concerns a different, unresolved 1869 date already flagged in the bibliographic section, and speaks to the man's career, not to this claim's merits). Failure of others was not evidenced. The commercial success of chemical extinguishers in the 1860s–70s was an industry-wide phenomenon predating and post-dating this patent, which cuts against nexus rather than for it. I state this as no qualifying evidence found, not as proof none exists — pre-1900 commercial records are poorly digitized.
5. No teaching away. I found nothing in C&V, Leitch, Jenkins, Stebbins, or Broughton criticizing top-mounted or externally-sealed actuation; the art affirmatively preferred it. In re Gurley / DePuy teaching-away arguments are therefore unavailable.

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7. Conclusion

Under the modern § 103 standard (Graham/KSR), the sole claim of US 111,877 is obvious: every element other than the cross-head-and-twin-rod architecture is disclosed in the pre-1871 art, and that architecture is a conventional mechanical expedient applied to achieve a result the prior art expressly sought and expressly described how to obtain. Under the actually applicable 1870 Act / Hotchkiss / Northwestern combination doctrine, the claim fares no better, because its elements are old devices regrouped for a like purpose without a new result.

Confidence: High on the identity of the apparatus and the claim's element content (authoritative patent text plus a verified 1874 circuit opinion describing the C&V structure), on the date-screening result (§ 2b: only 3 of ~26 listed references predate the patent; US 61,213 is non-analogous and US 119,936 post-dates), and on the Leitch/Jenkins/Stebbins disclosures (verified from the printed specifications). Moderate on the cross-head mapping (skill-based, not reference-based — § 6.1) and on US 85,717 (title/date only). Not verified: whether an exhaustive pre-1871 classification search would surface a closer single reference to the twin-side-rod actuator; I did not run one, and I do not claim that none exists.