US 121843

I'll run searches for the specific number as instructed.

Search results (what the databases actually returned)

Caveat on disambiguation, stated literally as required: the six‑digit identifier 121843 maps to exactly one U.S. patent — the 1871 grant. Anything styled "US 12,184,3xx" or an 11‑digit modern number is a different document, and my searches surfaced no modern patent or 2026 appeal involving the literal number 121843.

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Bibliographic summary of US 121,843

Two data artifacts worth flagging rather than treating as substance: the Google Patents page tags this 1871 pump with the compound identifier GXCLVBGFBYZDAG‑UHFFFAOYSA‑N (an indole/tryptamine chemical) and lists a "Cited By" entry, US 2010/0088180 A1 (The Mechanical Zoo — online word‑of‑mouth marketing). Both are automated tagging/metadata noise, not technical content of the pump patent.

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The invention in plain language

The specification states the invention "relates to an improvement in that class of pumps which is designed chiefly for elevating malt liquors" — i.e., a beer/malt‑liquor pump. The OCR text is imperfect ("liuid" = liquid, "shut‑oiC"/"shut‑olf" = shut‑off C, "einbodying" = embodying). The components:

• Case A — cylindrical, screwed or rigidly attached to main cylinder E; has apertures and vertical slots on its periphery for liquid ingress; carries plate a, which supports the vertical shaft b (also steadied by a shoulder and a rotating socket at the bottom center).
• Buckets B — mounted on a metallic cap or disk e fixed near the apex of the bucket shaft; the disk has oblique slots into which the curved and oblique buckets are rigidly fastened, extending to within a few lines of the case bottom.
• Shut‑off C — rigidly attached immediately beneath the bottom of case A, on the same shaft as the buckets; its arms radiate outward and then turn vertically upward to near the case rim, within a few lines of the periphery. Rotating with the buckets, the arms contact sediment and keep it out of the case slots, and also agitate the malt liquor to "superinduce... a pleasing and desirable foam."
• Valve D — works in a metallic collar resting on and rigidly attached to the cylinder interior near its base. The pump outlet is threaded (female screw) to receive a conduit.
• Cylinder E / Piston F — main cylinder and a piston with a valve "as ordinarily obtains in the construction of malt‑liquor pumps." Valves D and F carry projecting points h h h h on the inner face of each wing, which prevent the wings from closing tightly together and keep them properly adjusted.

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Independent claims (both claims are independent — there are no dependent claims)

Claim 1 — Subcombination claim.
"The combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut‑off C, substantially as shown and described."
Plain language: a claim to the intake assembly itself — the slotted case, the bucket cluster on the rotating shaft, and the co‑rotating shut‑off arms beneath the case — as a combined and arranged unit.

Claim 2 — Combination claim, narrower in scope.
"The combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut‑off [C/G in OCR] with the main cylinder E and piston F, substantially as shown, and for the purpose described."
Plain language: the same three elements plus the pump body (cylinder E) and piston F — i.e., the complete pump, tied to the described purpose (elevating malt liquor).

Note on scope, offered as analysis not fact: both claims recite "combination and arrangement... substantially as shown and described," with no structural limitations spelled out in claim language. Under 1871 practice this "substantially as described" format ties the claim to the illustrated embodiment, which is why the specification's structural detail (arm geometry, obliquity of buckets, clearances) does the limiting work.

Uncertainty statement: apart from the authoritative full text and Google Patents bibliographic record for US 121,843, I found no independent corroborating source (no assignment record, no published filing date, no 2026 CAFC activity) for this number. Everything above not drawn from the provided text is flagged as unavailable rather than inferred.

I'll run targeted searches across litigation-tracking sources for this specific patent number.

Let me refine — the above hits are for different patents (e.g., the "7,917,843" and a "Surpass Tech" patent). Checking specifically for the 1871 patent number.

Bottom line

I found no litigation — historic or modern — involving U.S. Patent No. 121,843. No case (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, outcome) can be reported, because none appears in any source I could reach for that specific patent number.

What I searched, and what came back

False positives you should discount (these are different patents, not U.S. 121,843):

• A PTAB petition referring to "the '843 Patent" litigated in Surpass Tech Innovation LLC v. Sharp Corporation et al., Case No. 1:14-cv-00338-LPS (D. Del.). That shorthand refers to a patent in the multi-million-number range assigned to Surpass Tech Innovation LLC — not to US 121,843.
• Arendi S.A.R.L. v. Google briefing referencing "U.S. Patent No. 7,917,843" — again a different patent (the '843 there is 7,917,843).

Google Patents also lists one "Cited By" document (US 2010/0088180 A1, The Mechanical Zoo, Inc.). That is a citation on the face of an unrelated 2010 application, not litigation, and it is not evidence of any enforcement activity.

Why this is what you'd expect

Per the Google Patents record (fetched 2026-09-24 from https://patents.google.com/patent/US121843/en):

• Title: "Improvement in pumps." Inventor: Henry E. Braunfeld, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Granted December 12, 1871; legal status listed as "Expired – Lifetime."
• Anticipated expiration: 1888-12-12 (17-year term, the then-governing rule).

Two consequences follow:

1. No enforceable rights exist. The patent lapsed in 1888. It cannot support a present-day infringement action, and no AIA-era proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) is possible against an 1871 patent — the PTAB's jurisdiction and the IPR regime postdate it by more than a century.
2. No docket coverage exists for that era. PACER coverage begins in the late 1980s/1990s; the USPTO's own Patent Litigation Dataset begins with the first patent case logged in PACER (with hand-coded patent numbers only for complaints filed 2003–2016). No modern litigation database extends to the 1870s–1880s.

Explicit limits on my confidence

• I can state that no litigation appears in the sources I searched; I cannot prove a universal negative, particularly for 19th-century suits that would only exist in contemporaneous print reporters (e.g., Federal Cases, Official Gazette notices, circuit court reports). I did not obtain results from those archives, and I won't fabricate a case to fill the gap.
• A single planned search — unifiedpatents.com litigation "121843" — did not complete. Given that Unified Patents' litigation portal is a modern (post-2012) docket aggregator, it would not cover an 1871 patent, so the omission is unlikely to change the answer, but I'm flagging it rather than implying full coverage.
• Any suggestion of separate, correctly-cited 19th-century case law would require archival (non-docket) research, which I have not performed.

If you need to pursue this further

For a patent of this vintage the productive sources are print/archival, not PACER: the Official Gazette's statutory notices of patent suits, circuit and district court reporters for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (Braunfeld's home forum), and Federal Cases (which collected pre-1880 federal decisions). I can search those angles if you'd like, but I'd expect any surviving dispute to be an 1870s–80s equity suit with no bearing on current freedom-to-operate or enforceability analysis.

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

PTAB / AIA Trial Report — U.S. Patent No. 121,843

Patent: U.S. Patent No. 121,843 — "Improvement in Pumps"
Inventor / Patent Owner: Henry E. Braunfeld, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Granted / Publication date: 1871-12-12
Term expired (per Google Patents "Legal Events"): 1888-12-12
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US121843](/patent/US121843)/en

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (zero). No IPR, PGR, or CBM has ever been filed against U.S. Patent No. 121,843 — no petitioner, no institution decision, no FWD, no settlement, no appeal — and this is not a near-miss: the patent's statutory term expired on 1888-12-12, roughly 124 years before the Leahy–Smith America Invents Act (Pub. L. 112-29, signed 2011-09-16) even created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and the AIA trial regimes. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "hardened" or "invalidated" — it is moot. The patent is public-domain prior art, and any demand letter or infringement allegation citing claims 1 or 2 of this patent is baseless on its face: there can be no liability for practicing an 1871 patent after 1888.

There are consequently no proceeding entries to rank "most-impactful first." Nothing can be quoted from an FWD because no FWD exists. Anything you have seen that purports to be a PTAB outcome for "121843" is almost certainly a different patent — see the false-positive check below.

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False-positive check (important — this is the real risk in this docket)

My searches surfaced one genuine AIA proceeding whose number looks similar but whose patent is not this one:

• IPR petition directed to U.S. Patent No. 7,961,843 (a Varian Medical Systems / radiation-therapy patent on dynamic multileaf-collimator arc delivery). Petition papers are on the USPTO PTAB petitions portal at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1482534](/patent/1482534)/ — the grounds there involve § 102/§ 103 over the Varian "DBDToolbox" manual and a § 112 indefiniteness challenge to claim 7. This is a different patent with a different owner, different art, and different claims. Do not conflate it with U.S. 121,843. A docket search on the string "843" or "121843" will pull it up and it has nothing to do with Braunfeld's pump.
• Similarly, WO 2015/121843, JP WO2011/121843, and DE 121843 C are unrelated foreign documents that appear in string-match searches. None is an AIA trial, and none is the US patent at issue.

On the patent page itself, the Google Patents "Cited By (1)" entry — US 2010/0088180 A1 (The Mechanical Zoo, Inc., online word-of-mouth marketing) — is a citation artifact in the automated citation graph, not a PTAB proceeding and not an adversarial reference. The "Similar Documents" list (US 106,433; US 59,364; US 120,973; US 98,503; US 103,239; etc.) reflects nineteenth-century pump/sand-chamber art that the examiner-era classification clusters together; it is not a list of instituted trials or of IPR prior art. The patent's own classification, F04B 47/00 and F04B 47/005 ("Sand trap arrangements" for deep-well pumps), is consistent with the specification's stated purpose — the rotating shut-off C was designed to keep sediment out of the case apertures.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. U.S. 121,843 has exactly two claims, both combination claims, and neither has ever been adjudicated in any forum I can find. Claim 1 recites "the combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut-off C, substantially as shown and described." Claim 2 recites "the combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut-off [C] with the main cylinder E and piston F, substantially as shown, and for the purpose described." Because no IPR, PGR, or CBM was ever filed, no claim is CANCELED, none is SUSTAINED-as-adjudicated, and both are effectively UNTESTED — but that framing understates the position: the claims were never tested because the patent stopped being enforceable in 1888, long before any adversarial validity mechanism resembling an AIA trial existed. Note also that a 17-year term from an 1871-12-12 grant under the law then in force ran to 1888-12-12, as Google Patents' legal-events record reflects.

Estoppel landscape. There is no estoppel of any kind to analyze. 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estops a petitioner (and its real parties in interest and privies) only after an IPR "results in a final written decision under section 318(a)"; § 325(e)(2) does the same for PGR. With zero FWDs, no party is barred from raising any ground in a district court or ITC action. That cuts both ways and ultimately is academic here: because the patent expired in 1888, there is no live infringement theory to defend against, so the absence of estoppel is not an exploitable affirmative benefit — it is simply a consequence of there having been nothing to try.

Pattern signals. None of the usual patterns are present, because none can be. No serial petitioner (no Unified Patents, RPX, or other defensive aggregator involvement — nothing to aggregate), no patent-owner appeal practice (Braunfeld's estate has no PTAB or Federal Circuit history that I could find), no parallel district court campaign, and no related-patent family to sweep in. The case history this patent does have is historical rather than adversarial: it sits in the F04B 47/005 sand-trap cluster alongside contemporaneous well-pump patents like US 98,503 and US 103,239.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant. Say it plainly and in writing to whoever sent the demand: there is no PTAB activity on this patent, and more fundamentally there can be none — U.S. 121,843 issued 1871-12-12 and expired 1888-12-12, more than a century before the AIA created IPRs (2012-09-16 onward). A demand letter citing claims 1 or 2 of this patent asserts a right that lapsed under a Grover Cleveland-era patent term. Ask the sender to identify the actual patent and the actual claim numbers they mean; if the letter is instead about U.S. 7,961,843 or a foreign document numbered 121843, the assertion has simply been mis-cited and you should demand a corrected identification before responding on the merits.

If you are investigating proactively. The useful output of this review is a negative one, and I want to be explicit about my confidence level: the USPTO ODP structured block reports no AIA proceedings, and targeted web searches for a PTAB or Federal Circuit proceeding involving Braunfeld or U.S. 121,843 returned nothing. I cannot rule out that some very old or non-electronic record exists outside those sources, but for an 1888-expired patent, institutional review is not available and the premise of an IPR-based defense does not arise.

On the "absence is itself a signal" heuristic. It does not apply here. The usual inference — that a well-asserted patent eventually attracts IPRs — presumes a patent in force during the AIA era. This one predates the PTAB by 141 years, so the absence of proceedings is not evidence that the patent is strong, or weak, or anything else. It is evidence only that the patent's enforceable life ended in the nineteenth century. Do not treat this as a hard target that deterred challengers.

Do not quote a final written decision, institution decision, or judge panel for this patent — none exists, and any citation you produce claiming otherwise would be a fabricated record that opposing counsel will use against you.

I'll check the assignment databases and related sources before writing anything.

Inventors

• Only one named inventor. No joint inventors, so no "all inventors departed the original assignee" pattern can be assessed — there was no original assignee of record on the face of the patent to depart from.
• I ran targeted searches for Braunfeld as a Philadelphia pump/malt-liquor-equipment maker and found no corroborating source (no company, no successor, no product literature). I will not infer an employer. This is unavailable data, not a negative finding.
• No continuation, divisional, or family members: the Google Patents family record (ID 2191284) shows a single application, US121843D, and "Country Status (1) — US." There is no portfolio here to fire-sale.

Original assignee

None of record. US 121,843 was granted December 12, 1871, to Henry E. Braunfeld in his own name. The authoritative text contains no "assignor/assignee" field, no assignment recitation, and no corporate entity anywhere in the specification.

• Product embodying the claims: the specification describes the device as "designed chiefly for elevating malt liquors" — a brewery/tavern-scale beer pump. Whether Braunfeld or a licensee manufactured it is not determinable from any source I could reach. I have no evidence any commercial product shipped, and I equally have no evidence none did.
• Primary line of business: unknown; all that is established is that the invention was aimed at the malt-liquor trade.
• Current status: the patent expired December 12, 1888 (17-year term, listed by Google Patents as "Expired – Lifetime"; anticipated expiration 1888-12-12). The inventor's status is not established by the record; born ~1840s he would be long deceased, but I have no death date source and will not state one.

This is not an "original assignee still owns it" situation in the modern sense — it is a pre-corporate, individually-owned 19th-century grant.

Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for US 121,843 in the USPTO Assignment Center searchable database. Stated plainly, as required: no reel/frame entries exist to list, so per the task instruction the itemized timeline ends here.

Why the null result is structural, not a search failure:

1. Database coverage begins August 1980. The USPTO's own assignment-search training material states the searchable database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO Assignment Database Webinar deck); the USPTO Open Data Portal harvest record for the Patent Assignment Search API gives the same coverage window, 1980-08-01/2025-12-31 (data.gov harvest record). A patent that expired in 1888 cannot appear.
2. Pre-1957 patent assignment records are held by NARA, not USPTO. Under 37 CFR § 1.12(a)(2): "All records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957, are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)" (Cornell LII, GovInfo CFR 2002). A pre-1957 patent assignment would be cited by liber and page, not reel/frame. Any Braunfeld-era transfer, if one exists, would have to be pulled from NARA — I did not retrieve and cannot certify such a record, so I do not assert that zero assignments ever occurred; I assert that zero are searchable at the source named in the task.
3. Tool churn caveat: the two URLs named in the task now resolve to the same new application — USPTO replaced legacy Patent Assignment Search and Assignments on the Web with a single Assignment Search inside Assignment Center on September 27, 2025 (USPTO bulletin). Both surface identical records, so the null result is not an artifact of a deprecated endpoint.
4. Google Patents legal events corroborate. The record's legal events show only: Application granted (1871-12-12), Publication of US121843A, and Anticipated expiration (1888-12-12). No Assignment, Security Agreement, Merger, or Change of Name events. Google Patents legal events carry no correspondent field.

Correspondent of record: none exists — there is no recording attorney to capture, and therefore no repeat-player correspondent to flag. This is a genuine null, not an unfound field.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 121843
    1871 : Patent granted to Henry E Braunfeld
         : No assignee named on patent
    1888 : Patent term expires
         : No post issuance assignment records

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is assessed against the same fact: there is no post-issuance transfer record at all, and none is possible to record against an expired patent. A signal that requires a reel/frame cannot be "present."

Verdict

Insufficient data — driven by the absence of any record, not by ambiguity in what exists.

There is no reel/frame entry in the USPTO Assignment Center for US 121,843, because that database reaches back only to August 1980 and any pre-1957 patent assignment documents reside with NARA under 37 CFR § 1.12(a)(2). The only ownership facts of record are: granted to Henry E. Braunfeld, December 12, 1871, with no assignee named, and expired December 12, 1888. With no post-issuance transfer and an expired term, no NPE signal can be supported by evidence, and the modern NPE taxonomy the task asks me to apply is simply inapplicable to an 1871 grant.

Two explicit non-findings, stated so they are not mistaken for data: (a) I do not conclude the patent was never assigned — only that no assignable record is retrievable from the named source; (b) the GXCLVBGFBYZDAG-UHFFFAOYSA-N chemical-compound identifier and the US 2010/0088180 A1 "Cited By" entry on the Google Patents page are automated tagging artifacts, and neither is an ownership event.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center search — search patent number 121843. Expect zero results; the absence is the finding.

I'll run targeted searches on the literal number and on its citation record.

Prior-Art Analysis for US Patent 121,843

1. The threshold finding: US 121,843 has no citations of record

I searched the USPTO/Google Patents record for the literal number 121843 and inspected the citation apparatus of the US 121,843 A record (Braunfeld, Improvement in Pumps, granted December 12, 1871).

The record contains no backward citation. There is no "Patent Citations / References Cited" field at all. The only citation relationship present is a single forward citation ("Cited By (1)").

This is expected, not an anomaly. Patents granted under the Patent Act of 1870 were printed as a specification plus claims; they did not carry a printed list of references considered by the examiner. The practice of printing cited references on the face of a U.S. patent began decades later. I am not certain of the exact year that practice became uniform, so I state the point only as "1871 grants did not carry them" — which the record for this patent confirms directly.

Consequence for your question: the instruction "look at each patent citation for 121843" resolves to a set of zero prior-art citations of record. There is nothing in the patent's own citation apparatus to analyze. Everything below is therefore either (a) the one forward citation, or (b) Google's algorithmic "Similar Documents" list, which I explicitly flag as not citations.

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2. Forward citation (the only citation of record)

§ 102 analysis: it cannot anticipate, on any reading. This reference post-dates US 121,843 by 139 years and post-dates the patent's anticipated expiration (December 12, 1888) by 121 years. Prior art must predate the critical date of the patent under analysis; this reference is later than the patent's entire term. It discloses no case, buckets, shut-off, valve, cylinder, or piston. It does not anticipate or render obvious Claim 1 or Claim 2, and it is not even in the same field of art.

Characterization: metadata noise. The citation is an artifact of automated full-text/classification linking, not a technical citation. (This is the same class of artifact as the record's spurious chemical-structure identifier and the "Soy Sauces and Products Related Thereto" landscape tag noted in the earlier bibliographic section — see cross-reference there; I will not repeat it.)

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3. "Similar Documents" — not citations, but the closest technical analogs

Google Patents lists 25 "Similar Documents" for US 121,843. I state plainly: these are similarity-ranked by algorithm, they are not citations made by or to this patent, and no examiner considered them. They are nonetheless the only defensible candidate prior art in the record, so I analyze them below on their dates. Full text was not retrieved for each; the descriptions are drawn from the titles and dates as listed, and I flag where I am inferring rather than quoting.

3a. Pre-date references (issued before 1871-12-12) — the only candidates that could matter

3b. The two references I would rank highest as technically relevant

If the question is "what was the most relevant art as of 1871," my answer, on the facially available information:

1. US 36,588 A (1862-09-30, Improvement in rotary pumps) and US 106,061 A (1870-08-02, Improvement in rotary pumps) — the rotary-pump family is the natural anticipating art for Claim 1's rotating bucket-and-shut-off subcombination.
2. US 103,239 A (1870-05-17, sand and air chamber for tubular wells) and US 98,503 A (1870-01-04, sand-chambers for well-pumps) — these are the field-wide art on the specific problem shut-off C solves (keeping sediment out of the intake). Note that Google Patents' own classification of US 121,843 is F04B 47/005 — "Sand trap arrangements," which confirms the sediment trap is treated as the patent's core technical contribution, and that US 103,239/98,503 are the same class of art.

Caveat I must state: I did not retrieve and read the specifications of US 36,588, US 106,061, US 103,239, or US 98,503. I cannot represent what they disclose element-by-element, and therefore I cannot assert that any of them anticipates Claim 1 or Claim 2. Ranking them as "most relevant" is a classification-and-title-level judgment only.

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4. The § 102 framework problem you should be aware of

Two structural obstacles make any rigorous § 102 analysis of this patent indeterminate:

(a) No filing date, therefore no critical date. The record gives only "prior art date / application granted 1871-12-12." Pre-1874 printed patents generally do not carry a filing date, and there is no application number on the record. Under the governing statute — the Patent Act of 1870, § 24 — anticipation turned on whether the invention was "known or used by others in this country," or "patented or described in any printed publication," before the applicant's invention or discovery thereof. Without the filing date, and absent any evidence of Braunfeld's actual date of invention, the critical date cannot be fixed. I will not infer one. I note that the 1870 Act also carried a public-use/on-sale bar keyed to the date of application; I am not fully certain of its exact terms and therefore will not quote it as authority.

(b) The claims are functional-substantive hybrids, which changes what "anticipation" means. Both claims read:

• Claim 1 — "The combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut-off C, substantially as shown and described."
• Claim 2 — "The combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut-off [C/G] with the main cylinder E and piston F, substantially as shown, and for the purpose described."

(OCR renders "shut-off C" variously as "shut-oiC," "shut-olf," and "shut-off G"; the substance is shut-off C.)

Because neither claim recites express structural limitations, anticipation would require a reference disclosing the illustrated geometry the specification supplies: the perforated/slotted peripheral case; curved oblique buckets fastened into oblique slots of cap/disk e; and shut-off arms radiating outward then turning vertically upward, mounted on the same shaft immediately beneath the case bottom, with the stated clearances ("within a few lines"). A reference showing only a generic pump or a generic rotary pump would not read on Claim 1 as so construed. So my § 102 exposure column above for the "Improvement in pumps" references should be read as "could bear on Claim 2 only if it shows the full five-element combination" — not as an assertion of anticipation.

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5. Summary answer to your three required fields

For each of the record's actual citation entries, per your requested format:

Bottom line: US 121,843 cites nothing, and nothing cited against it is prior art to it. The single citation of record runs in the wrong direction in time and in subject matter. The genuinely probative candidate art is not in the citation record at all; on titles and dates, the rotary-pump patents (US 36,588 A, US 106,061 A) and the well-pump sand-chamber patents (US 103,239 A, US 98,503 A) are the closest, and reading their specifications would be the necessary next step before any anticipation position could be asserted.

Uncertainty statement: beyond the provided full text and bibliographic record for US 121,843, I found no assignment record, no filing date, no printed reference list, and no litigation. Where I have ranked references by relevance I have labeled it as title/classification-level inference, not document review.

I'll ground this in the actual prior-art material on the page. Let me pull the "Similar Documents" records, since those are the only prior-art-adjacent references the page surfaces.

Now the closest-technology references — the rotary pumps and sand-exclusion devices in the same list.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 121,843 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Threshold caveats that must precede the analysis

Three points, because getting these wrong would make everything below misleading.

(a) § 103 did not exist when this patent issued. US 121,843 was granted December 12, 1871 under the Patent Act of 1870 (16 Stat. 198). Section 103 was enacted in 1952 (35 U.S.C. § 103, ch. 950, 66 Stat. 798). The pre-1871/1870 functional ancestor is the judicial "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851) — the case KSR itself identifies as the origin of § 103. Applying § 103 to an 1871 grant is therefore a retrospective hypothetical, not a live invalidity question. I will run it anyway because you asked, but the legal frame must be stated.

(b) The pre-AIA or AIA text? Because the grant predates both, the analysis is conventionally run under the pre-AIA text ("at the time the invention was made") rather than the AIA-amended version (Pub. L. 112-29 § 3, "before the effective filing date"). I use the pre-AIA framing.

(c) The claims are in "substantially as shown and described" format, and the drawings control. Both claims read:

"1. The combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut-olf [C], substantially as shown and described.
2. The combination and arrangement of case A, buckets B, and shut-off G with the main cylinder E and piston F, substantially as shown, and for the purpose described."

The structural limitations live in Figures 1–3, which the page supplies only as images — the fetched text contains no OCR of the figures. I cannot read the drawings, and for this claim format the drawings are the claim. Any § 103 conclusion below is therefore hedged on that gap, and I flag it as a genuine limitation, not a formality.

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1. What on this page actually qualifies as prior art

This is where the page's "Prior Art" section misleads if taken at face value. It contains four different things, only one of which is prior art under § 102.

One reference on the page's list must be excluded outright on date:

• US 226,019 A — "Submerged pump," 1880-03-30 — postdates US 121,843 by nine years. It cannot be § 102 prior art against a December 1871 date regardless of how similar Google's algorithm found it. Its presence in the "Similar Documents" table is an artifact of undated-era similarity ranking and should not be relied on.

One reference is date-marginal:

• US 120,973 A — "Improvement in pumps," 1871-11-14 — only 28 days before the grant. It is prior art only if Braunfeld's invention date is on/after Nov. 14, 1871, and only as to its publication date. Under the 1870 Act the patentee could potentially swear behind it in interference practice. Do not build a primary-reference argument on it.

Critical date: the record gives no filing date and no application number (pre-1874 prints commonly lack them), and Google's "Prior art date 1871-12-12" is simply normalized from the grant date. Absent other evidence I use December 12, 1871 as the critical date, which means 23 of the 24 similar documents predate it.

Prior art I actually opened and verified

I retrieved full text for three of the page's listed documents before hitting the tool-call cap:

I did not retrieve text for the remaining listed references, including the two clusters that matter most — I flag this explicitly rather than characterizing them:

• Rotary-pump cluster: US 36,588 A (1862-09-30) and US 106,061 A (1870-08-02), both titled "Improvement in rotary pumps."
• Sand cluster: US 98,503 A (1870-01-04) "sand-chambers for well-pumps."
• Valve cluster: US RE 4,356 E (1871-04-25) "Improvement in pump-valves"; US 93,029 A (1869-07-27) "detachable foot-valves and seats for pumps."
• Water-wheel: US 85,683 A (1869-01-05).

Prior art that surfaced incidentally (not on the page's list)

These appeared in my searches and are usable, but I mark them as outside the page's own prior-art section: US 33,643 A (Hamilton, rotary pump, 1861-11-05) — piston and blades attached to a cap "which revolves with the driving-shaft C," with induction/eduction apertures J, D "nearly or quite radially opposite"; US 35,829 A (McPherson, 1862-07-08) — pump with chambers E and L formed "to catch all sand and foreign substances which have a greater specific gravity than water… these chambers effectually prevent the pump, or rather its valves, from becoming choked or clogged with sand"; US 72,001 A (Doyle & Martin, 1867-12-10); US 56,380 A (Crawford, 1866-07-17); US 101,304 A (Orton, 1870-03-29); US 108,365 A (Knecht, 1870-10-18) — force-pump with a valve in the piston; US 110,177 A (Ward, 1870-12-13).

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2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (Graham factor 3)

A PHOSITA as of December 1871: a pumpmaker or millwright able to design and adjust cast-iron/brass cylinders and valve collars, flap/wing check valves, leather or india-rubber buckets, and plungers, and to fit screw joints and packings — without inventive effort. Supporting evidence from the record itself:

• The volume of the art: the page's own similarity list contains roughly two dozen liquid-elevation pump patents issued between 1838 and 1871, several within months of each other. This is a crowded, incremental art, not a nascent one.
• The Witherell testimony in the 1870s–80s bucket litigation reported in my searches describes routine, repeated, non-experimental variation of pump-bucket geometry (Exhibits A and B) across dozens of wells. Bucket construction was ordinary workshop practice.
• The applicant's own admission: "the piston F is constructed with a valve therein, as ordinarily obtains in the construction of malt-liquor pumps." That is an express concession that valved pistons in malt-liquor pumps were conventional.

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3. Scope and content of the prior art, and the differences (Graham factors 1 and 2)

Taking the specification's own description of the claimed combination as the element list:

Summary of the differences: two of the three elements of claim 1's combination — the slotted rotating-bucket intake, and the shut-off wiper — are the genuine differences. Everything downstream of the case (valve D, collar, cylinder E, valved piston F, valve-wing points) is either squarely in the verified prior art or admitted conventional by the applicant.

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4. The obviousness combinations

Combination A — Claim 2 (the complete pump): admitted prior art + US 59,364 + US 106,433

Rationale. Claim 2 adds only "main cylinder E and piston F" to the claim 1 combination. The specification concedes that a valved piston in a malt-liquor pump is what "ordinarily obtains." Under the admitted-prior-art doctrine, an applicant's own characterization of what is conventional can be treated as prior art against him (In re Fout, 675 F.2d 297, 301 (CCPA 1982); Riverwood Int'l Corp. v. R.A. Jones & Co., 324 F.3d 1346, 1354–55 (Fed. Cir. 2003)). Conant & Brown US 59,364 supplies the collar-mounted base valve (element D) and the wing-guided valve with an anti-overlift projection — the closest verified analogue to the h h h h points. Van Keuren US 106,433 supplies the removable, screw-jointed valve base.

Motivation to combine. All three are pumps; all three address the same problem — valve obstruction by sand and foreign matter, and the difficulty of gaining access to clear it. Van Keuren states the problem in terms nearly identical to the field of use here ("the valves of the pump frequently become obstructed by sand"). Where references are in the same field of endeavor and address the same problem, they are analogous art (In re Bigio, 381 F.3d 1320, 1325 (Fed. Cir. 2004); In re Clay, 966 F.2d 656, 659 (Fed. Cir. 1992)), and KSR holds that "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious" (KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398, 417 (2007)).

Weakness. This combination gets you the pump body and valves, not the claim 1 intake assembly. Claim 2 is a combination claim that includes claim 1's elements, so Combination A only invalidates claim 2 if claim 1's elements are also obvious. It is not, by itself, sufficient.

Combination B — Claim 1: US 106,433 + US 103,239 + the rotary-pump art (US 36,588 / US 106,061)

Structurally: US 106,433 supplies the case-to-cylinder screw joint ("case A… screwed… to the main cylinder E") and the cleanability rationale. US 103,239 supplies a cylindrical pump case with gravity separation of sand from an upflowing current — i.e., the concept of interposing structure between the liquid source and the pump inlet to keep grit out. The rotary-pump references supply a rotating bucket/blade member turning within a casing having inlet and outlet apertures.

Motivations, stated with the KSR categories:

1. Same field, same problem — all three are positive-displacement liquid pumps; two of the three recite sand/obstruction as the problem to be solved. (Analogy; Bigio; Clay.)
2. Predictable result — mounting a rotating bucket element in a peripherally apertured casing, and screw-joining that casing to a cylinder, is the "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions" (KSR, 550 U.S. at 417).
3. Design incentive / market pressure — a malt-liquor pump had to be cleanable and had to present an appealing head of foam; KSR expressly lists "design incentives" and "market demand" as legitimate motivations, and In re Winslow, 365 F.2d 1017, 1020 (CCPA 1966) frames the question as what the inventor, with all the prior art before him, would have done.
4. Crowded, incremental art — several of the same elements (rotary pumps; sand chambers; detachable foot valves; valve reissues) had already been separately improved more than once. KSR at 418–21 (the "incremental" nature of much mechanical innovation; rejecting rigid TSM).

Combination C — the h h h h valve-wing points specifically

Even though not separately claimed, these are part of the described combination under the "substantially as described" format, so they matter to infringement scope and to any § 103 defense. Conant & Brown US 59,364's taper stem G — lengthened "to prevent the valve from being lifted wholly above the valve-seat" — is a projection on a valve that performs a stop/keeper function. Adding a similar projection to prevent wings closing tightly is a design choice / predictable variation among known ways of keeping a guided valve member in register. Ward US 110,177 and Orton US 101,304 show the era's routine resort to different valve-keeper geometries.

Combination D — the "within a few lines" clearances

The specification's limits ("to within a few lines of the bottom of the case"; "within a few lines of the periphery thereof") are unclaimed optimum dimensions. Optimizing a clearance to maximize swept volume and minimize lost space is a result of routine design, not invention: In re Rose, 220 F.2d 459, 465 (CCPA 1955); In re Fisher, 427 F.2d 833, 839 (CCPA 1970) (optimization of a variable is not patentable; advantage must be shown to be critical). Gardner v. TEC Systems, Inc., 725 F.2d 1338, 1345 (Fed. Cir. 1984). Here, the advantage is asserted, not demonstrated, and no criticality data exists anywhere in the specification. This is a proposition that cuts against the patentee, but it is only worth what the prior art is worth, because the clearances are not in the claims.

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5. The honest weak point: shut-off C

I want to be precise rather than perform a confident-sounding conclusion I cannot support.

The feature. Shut-off C is rigidly attached immediately beneath the bottom of case A, on the same shaft as buckets B. Its arms radiate outward and then project vertically upward to near the rim, within a few lines of the case periphery. It therefore (i) sits outboard of the case, sweeping the periphery, and (ii) rotates with the buckets, so it removes sediment before it can reach the peripheral slots, and agitates the liquid.

Why a § 103 challenger has a real argument. Multiple mechanisms were known for keeping grit out of pump inlets: settling (Robinson US 103,239), chambered trapping (McPherson US 35,829), and cleanable/accessible valve structures (Van Keuren US 106,433; Conant & Brown US 59,364). A PHOSITA faced with the specific disclosed problem — sediment entering peripheral inlet slots of a rotating intake — would canvass screening, settling, and wiping. KSR discourages requiring a specific hint in a reference where the solution is a predictable choice among a finite number of identified, predictable options. Further, on the specification's own account the rotor is flow-driven ("As the fluid is drawn into the pump the shut-off aforesaid is rapidly rotated"), and the page's own prior-art list includes US 85,683 A, "Improvement in water-wheels" (1869-01-05) — i.e., the very art of extracting rotation from a flowing stream. If that document (which I did not retrieve) shows a rotating member whose rotation is induced by water passing through or against it, then "flow-actuated rotor" is squarely old and the self-driving character of shut-off C loses any non-obviousness weight.

Why a § 103 challenger probably still loses on the present record. Two reasons:

1. No located reference discloses an outboard peripheral wiper co-rotating with an intake bucket cluster. The distinction is functional, not nominal: an outboard wiper acts by preventing approach to the inlet; an inboard one acts by clearing the aperture after ingress. None of the three references I verified, and no title on the page's list, suggests a wiper disposed outside the case bottom and reaching up past the rim.
2. Cooperation / combination rather than aggregation. Claim 1's three elements share a single shaft and a single drive, and produce a result none produces alone — grit exclusion and aeration. In the 19th-century idiom, claims of this format were sustained as combinations rather than rejected as aggregations on essentially these facts. Christman v. Rumsey, 5 F. Cas. 655 (C.C.N.D.N.Y. 1879) (No. 2,704) (Blatchford, C.J.) — which I found in the searches — upheld the grating + wire-gauze claim as "claims to combinations and not merely to aggregations of parts," while striking a second claim "void for want of novelty." That case is a fair weather vane for how a combination in a pump intake of this vintage would have been treated.

Counterpoint the challenger must anticipate. Braunfeld's asserted result — "superinduce, by the agitation of malt liquor, a pleasing and desirable foam" — is a newly discovered function of an otherwise ordinary agitator. Newly recognized function does not ordinarily confer patentability; aeration by whipping air into liquid is the predictable consequence of agitation, not an unpredictable one. So this argument helps the patentee little, but it does reinforce the cooperation narrative.

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6. Rebuttals the patent owner would raise, and assessment

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7. Bottom line

Claim 1 — Combination B (US 106,433 + US 103,239 + the rotary-pump cluster, e.g. US 36,588 / US 106,061) establishes obviousness of the case A / buckets B subportion and of the screw-joint and sand-handling rationale with a well-supported motivation. But it does not reach shut-off C, and shut-off C is a claimed element of claim 1's combination. On the record I actually verified, claim 1 is not clearly and convincingly obvious — the challenger's failing is evidentiary, not conceptual.

Claim 2 — Weaker than claim 1. It adds only cylinder E and piston F, which the specification admits are ordinary in malt-liquor pumps, plus the purpose statement. Combination A (US 59,364 + US 106,433 + the applicant's own admissions) makes a strong § 103 case on the added elements. But because claim 2 is a combination claim that includes all of claim 1's elements, it cannot fall below claim 1's floor.

The unclaimed valve-wing points and the "few lines" clearances — separately, both are weak: the points find a close analogue in Conant & Brown US 59,364, and the clearances are unclaimed optimization (Fisher, Rose). These would not save the patent if they were in the claims; they are not.

Overall: I would not expect a § 103 challenge on this record to invalidate claim 1 by clear and convincing evidence, principally because of one unlocated element and one unreadable set of drawings. I would expect a much closer question if the challenger produced the four documents I could not retrieve — US 98,503 A (sand-chambers for well-pumps), US 85,683 A (water-wheels), US 106,061 A and US 36,588 A (rotary pumps) — since those are precisely the four whose subject matter maps onto the two features I identified as the genuine differences.

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8. Explicit corrections, uncertainties, and limits

Correction to the earlier litigation section (flagged as required). That section states "no AIA-era proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) is possible against an 1871 patent — the PTAB's jurisdiction and the IPR regime postdate it by more than a century." That is overbroad and partly wrong:

• PGR is categorically unavailable — it requires a claim with an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013 (35 U.S.C. § 321(a)(1), AIA § 3(n)(1)). Correct as to PGR.
• CBM is categorically unavailable — it requires a "covered business method patent" in the financial-services field (AIA § 18(d)). Correct as to CBM.
• IPR is not categorically impossible. IPR requires only that the patent "has at least one claim" (35 U.S.C. § 311(a)). There is no age-based bar. An expired patent remains IPR-eligible. The practical reason no IPR would occur here is not statutory ineligibility but that the patent expired December 12, 1888, so no infringement action can be brought and no party has a real litigation-driven incentive to file. I flag this as a refinement rather than a material change to the earlier conclusion.

Other limits I will not paper over:

• I hit the tool-call limit and could not retrieve full text for 21 of the 24 "Similar Documents." Everything I say about US 36,588, US 106,061, US 98,503, US RE 4,356 E, US 93,029, US 85,683, US 120,973, US 111,961, US 89,892, US 93,990, US 103,738, US 109,955, US 99,521, US 84,355, US 105,162, US 109,057, US 113,503, US 110,334, US 114,206, US 625, and US 226,019 is based on title and date only and is labeled as such.
• I cannot read Figures 1–3. For claims in "substantially as shown and described" format, this is a material gap.
• The page's "Prior art date 1871-12-12" is Google's normalization of a record with no filing date and no application number. I have not inferred a filing date.
• The drive mechanism for buckets B is not stated in the text I have; the specification only says the shut-off "is rapidly rotated in conjunction with the buckets B" as fluid is drawn in. If the rotor is flow-driven rather than externally driven, that materially changes the § 103 analysis (see § 5), and it is resolved only in the drawings.
• Every case citation above is given because I am confident of it. Where a proposition rests on a specific reference's disclosure and I could not open that reference, I have said so rather than characterizing it.