US 134256

I'll search for this specific patent number across the sources you named.

Let me check for any litigation/docket references and confirm the bibliographic details.

Sourcing note first

The only authoritative full text I could retrieve for US 134256 is the patent itself (Google Patents, US134256A, fetched 2026‑09‑24; https://patents.google.com/patent/US134256/en). My searches did not surface a USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter record page or any CAFC docket entry. Two search hits are near‑miss ID collisions I did not treat as this patent:

• WO 2015/134256 A1 — a PCT publication ("Combinatorial Libraries," E. I. du Pont de Nemours), a PCT number, not US Patent 134256.
• US134256D — an application‑number alias that Google Patents maps to the same US134256A document, not a separate patent.

No CAFC 2026 docket for "134256" appeared in my search results. That is expected: US patent numbering was in the 130,000s in 1872, whereas current US grant numbers are in the ~12.4 million range, so any 2026‑era docket number, IPR, or district‑court case citing bare "134256" is almost certainly a different identifier. I found no litigation, assignment, or maintenance record for this patent.

Bibliographic summary

Abstract / statement of invention (verbatim)

"My invention has relation to fences; and it consists in the construction and novel arrangement of brackets supporting the horizontal fence‑bars, said brackets being provided with pivoted blocks, upon which the bars rest, and which are designed to allow the bars to be conveniently raised and lowered, substantially as hereinafter described."

Structure as described (context for the claims)

• A — the horizontal bars of a fence panel.
• B — a post set in the ground or in a sill.
• C, C′ — the improved brackets, each made of a pair of boards (example dimensions given: 5 ft long, 6 in wide, 2 in thick) sandwiching rectangular pivoted blocks a spaced at equal distances apart.
• Bracket C is pivoted to post B by a pin or rod E through its upper end — i.e., a swinging bracket.
• Bracket C′ is secured to a stone or stationary block F.
• The hinged blocks a normally hold bars A horizontal when the panel is closed; when the bars are let down to pass livestock, the blocks rotate on their pivots and self‑adapt to the bars' inclination so the bars can be handled and stowed easily.
• The specification adds a mode-of-use note: with brackets C′ the ends should generally be let down, because pivoted bracket C will swing to allow the bars to be pushed back far enough to open a good‑sized gap.

The two claims, in plain language

Claim 1 — "The fence‑bracket C having the pivoted blocks a, in combination with the horizontal bars A, substantially as specified."
A fence bracket (C) that carries pivoted/rocking blocks (a), considered in combination with the horizontal fence bars (A) that rest on those blocks. The inventive point is the pairing of a multi‑block bracket with the fence bars so the blocks can tilt and let the bars be raised or lowered easily. Note the claim is written in the pre‑1952 combination style with "substantially as specified," so its scope is tied to the described structure rather than being a bare structural recital.

Claim 2 — "The bracket C pivoted to the post B, and holding the pivoted blocks a, substantially as specified."
The same bracket C, but now defined by two additional structural relationships: it is pivoted to the post B (the pin/rod E connection), and it carries the pivoted blocks a. This is the swinging‑bracket sub‑combination — the version that can swing aside to enlarge the opening when the bars are dropped.

Observations on claim scope. Both claims are written as two separate claims of progressively narrower structure; claim 2 adds the post‑pivot limitation. Notably, the second bracket variant C′ — described at length in the specification as the bracket secured to a stationary stone block F — is not claimed at all. The claim set therefore protects the pivoted‑to‑post bracket and the block‑bearing bracket‑plus‑bars combination, leaving the stationary form unprotected.

Confidence and uncertainty

• High confidence on title, inventor, residence, issue date, witnesses, the two claim texts, and the described structure — these come directly from the patent document provided as authoritative.
• Assignee: I found no assignee on the document, so I report "none named." I cannot rule out an unrecorded or separately recorded assignment in 19th‑century records I did not access.
• Filing date: genuinely unavailable from my sources; the printed patent does not include it.
• No abstract exists — anything presented as an "abstract" for this patent would be a modern editorial summary, and I have not invented one.
• No 2026 litigation/docket activity: I searched and found nothing, which is consistent with the patent's 1889 expiration. I am not asserting a definitive negative on any docket database I could not query directly.
• Separately, "US 134256" today is frequently a truncated or mis-transcribed reference; if your underlying task concerns a live patent, the correct identifier is probably in the 10‑million or 11‑million series and should be re‑verified literally.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 134256.

Let me try more targeted searches for litigation databases.

Let me do a few final targeted checks before concluding.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent 134,256

Bottom line: No litigation is known, and none is discoverable in the sources searched.

Patent identified (literal reading, not auto-corrected)

Litigation table

What I searched and what came back

1. Unified Patents litigation portal / Unified Patents filings (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — no hits referencing 134,256. Search results returned only unrelated Unified Patents matters (e.g., Unified Patents v. Uniloc, IPR2018‑00199; Unified Patents v. Savannah Licensing, IPR2022‑01026; Ideahub v. Unified Patents, CAFC No. 2024‑1684), none involving 134,256.
2. Federal Circuit / PACER-oriented queries — no orders, opinions, or docket entries referencing this patent number. Results returned were Federal Circuit cases on unrelated patents (e.g., 24‑1684, PGR2022‑00044) and unrelated district court opinions.
3. CourtListener — no document referencing 134,256 in an infringement/futility context. (Note: search hits on the "256" string resolved to 35 U.S.C. § 256 inventorship cases, which is a statute citation, not patent 134,256 — I am deliberately not treating those as hits.)
4. Name-based query on inventor "Pierson Cope" — zero results.
5. General web / docket aggregator queries — returned only similarly-numbered but unrelated documents: WO 2015/134256 A1 (E.I. du Pont de Nemours, "Combinatorial Libraries," PCT/US2015/017659) and PCT/CN2022/134256 (a Chinese polypeptide application published as WO 2024/108530 A1). Per your instruction to exclude similar numbers, none of these are germane to US 134,256.

Important caveats on this negative finding

• Why "none found" is not the same as "none ever existed." US 134,256 issued in 1872 and expired 1889-12-24. Any enforcement action would have had to occur in that window, in 19th-century federal circuit/district courts. Those records are largely not systematically digitized, and they predate the coverage of PACER, Unified Patents, Docket Alarm, and CourtListener by more than a century. A complete negative would require manual archival research (e.g., NARA federal court records for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the Federal Cases reporter volumes (1789–1880), and contemporaneous regional legal periodicals).
• Modern litigation is a legal impossibility, not merely absent. The patent expired in 1889. Under 35 U.S.C. § 271, an expired patent cannot be infringed, and there is no post-expiry enforcement mechanism. Therefore no post-1889 case can exist against this patent's claims.
• No IPR/PGR/CBM is possible either. AIA post-grant proceedings (2001 Act, effective 2012) cannot be brought against a patent that lapsed in 1889.
• Confidence level. High confidence that no modern (post-1989 docketed) litigation exists — this is affirmatively verified across the databases queried. I cannot state with complete certainty that no 19th-century suit was ever filed, because those records are outside the queried databases; I have no evidence either way, and I will not fabricate a finding.

If you need a definitive archival answer

I'd recommend running these directly rather than relying on web search:

• NARA — Records of District Courts of the United States, Western District of Pennsylvania (Record Group 21), civil case files, 1872–1889.
• Federal Cases (West, 30 vols., 1789–1880) and Federal Reporter (vols. 1–40, 1880–1890) under "Cope" as plaintiff.
• HeinOnline – U.S. Federal Legislative History / Early American Case Law libraries for the 1873–1890 period.

I did not obtain search results from those archival sources, so treat that portion as a research recommendation, not a verified finding.

I'll verify the structured data against any public records before writing this up.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 134,256: zero. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings, and targeted web searches surfaced no PTAB filings, no institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, and no Federal Circuit appeals involving this patent. Status breakdown therefore reads: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The bottom-line defensive posture is unusual and worth stating plainly: this is not a "hardened" patent in the IPR sense — it is an expired 1872 patent (granted 1872-12-24, anticipated expiration 1889-12-24, "Expired - Lifetime" per the ODP record) whose claims 1 and 2 have never been tested because, for well over a century, there has been no economically rational reason to test them. If you receive a demand letter citing US 134,256 — "Improvement in brackets for fence-bars," Pierson Cope, of Perryopolis, Pennsylvania — the absence of PTAB activity is not the interesting fact. The interesting fact is that the patent lapsed before Grover Cleveland's first term.

No proceedings to report

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to populate here. I will not manufacture one. The canonical structured list is empty and independent searching did not disturb it.

For completeness, here is what my searches did surface, so the record shows I checked and did not silently conflate false positives:

• WO 2015/134256 A1 (E.I. du Pont de Nemours, "Combinatorial Libraries") and WO 2012/134256 A1 (a Spanish-language baby-carrier PCT application) — unrelated PCT publications that happen to contain the digit string "134256." Neither is a US patent, neither is a PTAB exhibit, neither has anything to do with fencing.
• An IPR petition excerpt discussing a '782 patent, Guoshi (CN 103280164A), Tucker (US 6,813,853), and Apple v. Fintiv — a modern electronics-display dispute with no connection to this patent.
• US 134,624 A ("Improvement in adjustable picket-fences," 1873-01-07) appears in the "Similar Documents" list on the Google Patents page for 134,256. That is a citation-graph neighbor, not a proceeding. Do not confuse it with a PTAB matter.

Strategic summary

Claim status: claims 1 and 2 are UNTESTED — and that category is misleading here. Claim 1 covers "the fence-bracket C having the pivoted blocks a, in combination with the horizontal bars A." Claim 2 covers "the bracket C pivoted to the post B, and holding the pivoted blocks a." Both were granted; neither was ever canceled or confirmed, because no AIA trial has ever been filed. That is not a sign of claim strength. It is a consequence of the patent's legal and commercial death: it issued in 1872, and the ODP record shows an anticipated term expiration of 1889-12-24. An expired patent cannot be infringed, cannot support a damages claim for post-expiration conduct, and cannot support injunctive relief. Anyone asserting it today is either describing conduct in the 1870s–1880s or is mistaken about the number.

Estoppel landscape: none exists, and that cuts against the patent owner, not the defendant. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only after an IPR is instituted and an FWD issues. With zero proceedings, there is no petitioner estopped, no privy estopped, and no ground "raised or reasonably could have been raised" that is now off the table. A defendant facing an actual assertion would have the entire universe of prior art available — but the more efficient answer is a threshold non-infringement/expiration argument, not a § 102/§ 103 fight over 1870s fence hardware. I would also flag the procedural reality that IPR is technically available against an expired patent, so the absence of filings is a choice, not a jurisdictional bar.

Pattern signals: none. No repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner at all). No patent owner appellate activity — the patent predates the Federal Circuit by roughly a century, and there is no CAFC docket to check. No defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents appears in the chain; the family is a single US application (US134256D) with a single-country status record. The "similar documents" list is populated entirely by other 19th- and early-20th-century fencing, gate, scaffold, and hammock patents — the ordinary citation neighborhood of a pre-1900 mechanical patent, not evidence of a litigation campaign.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant: the governing fact is expiration, not invalidity. Link the Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US134256A](/patent/US134256A)/en), which states the prior art date and publication date as 1872-12-24 and the "Anticipated expiration" as 1889-12-24, and the USPTO PatentCenter entry (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) for the same. There is no FWD to quote and I will not pretend otherwise — the disposition section of a non-existent decision cannot be excerpted.
• If you are evaluating a demand letter citing this patent: treat it as a red flag about the sender. A well-constructed assertion campaign does not lead with a patent that expired during the Harrison administration. Verify the number the sender intended — the likely candidates are a modern patent whose digits were transposed or truncated.
• If you simply wanted the PTAB posture confirmed: it is confirmed. There is no PTAB activity on file for US 134,256. No institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing date, and no statutory one-year FWD deadline to track, because no petition has ever been filed. As your own framing notes, absence of PTAB activity is normally a signal that a patent has not been worth asserting; in this case the absence is total and permanent, and the reason is the 1889 expiration rather than a string of defense wins.

Sources checked: USPTO Open Data Portal (canonical proceedings list, empty), USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ — no matters), Google Patents US134256A, and general web search for proceeding numbers. No PTAB Final Written Decision and no Federal Circuit opinion exists for this patent, so no opinion link is available.

I'll run targeted searches against the assignment sources before writing anything.

Assignment-chain analysis — US Patent 134,256 ("Improvement in brackets for fence-bars," Pierson Cope, issued 1872-12-24)

Threshold finding before anything else

The USPTO Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center contains no records for this patent — and structurally cannot. Assignment Center indexes recorded assignments from August 1980 forward. US 134,256 issued 1872-12-24 and its term ran out 1889-12-24 — 91 years before the searchable window opens.

Per MPEP 301.01 and 37 CFR 1.12(a):

• "The historical database of assignments is maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980." (MPEP 301.01; noted at https://blueironip.com/ufaqs/how-are-historical-patent-assignment-records-maintained/)
• "All records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957, are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)... Assignment records from before 1837 are not available." (37 CFR 1.12(a)(2), https://bitlaw.com/source/37cfr/1-12-(pre-AIA).html)
• Practitioner confirmation that the online tool's floor is August 1980: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/12067

The only pre-1980 assignment materials for this era are NARA Record Group 241 — "Digests relating to assignments of patent property rights, 1837–1905, with indexes, 1837–1923" (https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/241.html). Those are paper/microfilm, on-site at the Washington National Records Center (Suitland, MD) and the National Archives at College Park. I did not query NARA, and I do not have a NARA-derived record for this patent. I therefore cannot assert an absolute negative on a 19th-century assignment; I can assert that nothing is retrievable through the sources named in this task.

Google Patents' legal-events panel for US134256A (fetched 2026-09-24, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US134256](/patent/US134256)/en) likewise shows only three events — Application granted 1872-12-24, Publication of US134256A 1872-12-24, Anticipated expiration 1889-12-24 — and no reassignment, security-interest, merger, or change-of-name entry at any point. No assignment landscape events are staged on the page.

Note that under the task rules this is the point to stop ("If the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, say so plainly and stop after this section"). I have flagged that rule and am continuing only because the output specification also demands exactly one verdict and a diagram; the extra sections below are explicitly bounded by the negative finding above. No reel/frame number appears anywhere in this report, because none exists.

Inventors

• Sole named inventor. No co-inventors. The specification is signed by Cope individually, with witnesses Josiah Kurtz and John Kurtz — consistent with a local, individually prosecuted 1872 filing via a local agent, not a corporate patent department.
• Employer: unknown, and I will not guess. The document names no company, no shop, no mill, and no co-assignee. Perryopolis was a Fayette County coal-and-coke town on the Youghiogheny, but nothing in the patent record ties Cope to a mine, to a manufacturer, or to any employer — so "miner" or "farmer-inventor" would be speculation, not a finding.
• Unusual-pattern check — inventor departure preceding a portfolio fire-sale: not applicable / not present. That pattern requires a corporate assignee with a named inventor roster. There is no corporate assignee here (see next section), so there is no roster to depart from and no portfolio to sell. There is no portfolio at all: US 134,256 is a solitary patent, with a single-member family (Family ID 2203672, one application, one publication).
• Do not confuse with modern "Cope" or "Pierson" records. Searches for "Pierson Cope" Perryopolis returned nothing on point; the near-hits (e.g., Edward D. Pierson / Miner Machine Co., US 3,134,476) are unrelated 20th-century documents caught by string overlap, not by identity.

Original assignee

Entity named on the issued patent: none.

• The patent was granted directly to, and remained with, Pierson Cope, individually. There is no assignee block, no assignor recital, no "assignors to ___" language, and no company name anywhere in the document.
• Primary line of business / product embodying the claims: not applicable. An individual patentee is not an entity with a "line of business" to report, and there is no corporate successor identified in any source.
• Shipped-product question: unresolvable and, as a practical matter, moot. The specification gives what read like production dimensions — each bracket a pair of boards "of, say, five feet in length, six inches in width, and two inches in thickness" — which suggests Cope built and possibly sold the bracket himself. But that is an inference from dimensioning, not documented evidence of commerce. I have no catalog, advertisement, or sale record.
• Current status: The patent is Expired – Lifetime; Google Patents records anticipated expiration 1889-12-24, consistent with the 17-year term then in effect. The property has been unenforceable for roughly 137 years. Status of the inventor as a legal person today is unknown; I have no death date, estate record, or probate filing and will not invent one.

Assignment timeline

No recorded assignments. None.

There is no chronological list to render, because there are zero recorded assignment events for US 134,256 in any searchable system:

• USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) — search key 134256: no result; database floor is August 1980.
• USPTO Patent Assignment Search (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) — same underlying records, same negative.
• Google Patents legal events (https://patents.google.com/patent/US134256/en) — grant, publication, expiration only; no reassignment entries.
• SEC EDGAR — not applicable; no public-company assignor or assignee exists to file a 10-K/8-K ownership disclosure. Nothing to cross-reference.
• RPX / Unified Patents asserter directories — no entry for this patent; nothing to cross-reference.
• PEDS / ODP — the patent has no live file wrapper; prosecution ended in 1872 and the property lapsed in 1889.
• NARA Record Group 241 (pre-1957 assignments, 1837–1905) — the only place a 19th-century assignment could be found, and not queried by me. Flagged as a residual gap, not as a finding.

Per the task rule, an absence of recorded post-issuance assignments is itself the finding: the original patentee held the property throughout its term, and it lapsed in his hands in 1889 without a recorded transfer of title.

Timeline diagram

The diagram is included for format completeness only. It depicts grant and lapse, not an ownership chain — there is no chain to depict.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 134256
    1872 : Patent issued to Pierson Cope
         : No assignee named on the document
    1889 : Patent term expired
    1980 : USPTO online assignment index begins
    2026 : No recorded assignments exist

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Read this column with the caveat in mind: signals 1 through 8 are all predicated on a recorded transfer, and no transfer exists. "Not present" below therefore means the structural precondition is absent, and in most cases the pattern is also chronologically impossible — an 1872 patent that expired in 1889 cannot be asserted, cannot be transferred to a licensing vehicle today, and cannot be pulled into a modern campaign. Where I could not see a record (NARA), I say so rather than converting the gap into a finding.

Residual uncertainty, stated honestly. If a NARA Record Group 241 search were commissioned, a pre-1957 assignment (e.g., Cope assigning to a local manufacturer) could conceivably appear. That would change the historical ownership story. It would not change the NPE analysis: any such transfer would necessarily predate 1957, and the property has been dead since 1889, so signals 1–8 would remain "not present" regardless of what NARA holds.

Verdict

Insufficient data.

There is no assignment chain to assess. USPTO Assignment Center and the legacy Patent Assignment Search index only from August 1980, and US 134,256 issued 1872-12-24 and expired 1889-12-24 (Google Patents legal events, https://patents.google.com/patent/US134256/en) — so the databases named in this task return zero records, as expected. The patent was granted to Pierson Cope individually with no assignee named and no family members in its patent family (Family ID 2203672), and it lapsed in his hands; the only unfilled gap is NARA Record Group 241, which I did not query. No reel/frame entry, no correspondent, and no NPE-era transfer exists, so any NPE, privateering, or shell-entity verdict here would be fabricated rather than evidenced.

Verify the negative directly: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 134256) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

Cross-reference against the earlier sections: this analysis is consistent with the prior summary's "Assignee: none named" and "No 2026 litigation/docket activity." One clarification, not a contradiction: the prior summary noted the auto-assigned CPC class E04F 11/181 (balustrades) — that is a modern reclassification of an 1872 fence bracket and carries no ownership significance. Nothing in the present search contradicts any earlier finding.

I'll verify the USPTO record and hunt for any citation references before analyzing prior art.

The USPTO direct lookup returned only navigational documents, so let me characterize the actual candidate references around this patent's date.

Bottom line first

US 134,256 has no cited prior-art references. I could not find a single patent citation, and I could not retrieve the requested USPTO record page either.

Two independent reasons, both verifiable from the source you provided:

1. The document itself contains no "References Cited" section. The full text you supplied goes from "Having fully described my invention" straight to the two claims, then the signature block — exactly as 1872 patents were printed. The USPTO only began printing cited references on patent faces in the late 19th/early 20th century, and mandatory citation blocks are a 20th-century convention. There is nothing on the face of this patent to cite.
2. Nothing cites it. The Google Patents record (US134256A, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US134256](/patent/US134256)/en) has a "Similar Documents" block but no "Cited By" block — meaning no later patent in the database cites US 134,256 as prior art. For an 1872 hay-fence bracket, that is unsurprising.

On the USPTO lookup: my searches returned only the Patent Center Quick Reference Guide (https://prod-web-alb-tg.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Patent_Center_public_doc_access.pdf) and unrelated office actions. No PatentCenter or Public Search record page for 134256 surfaced, so I am not asserting I retrieved the USPTO record — only that I did not contradict it.

One metadata flag: your task header gives the current date as April 26, 2026, while my system context says October 1, 2026, and the patent text was fetched 2026-09-24. I've used your date as the operative one and noted the discrepancy rather than silently reconciling it.

What "prior art for 134256" can actually mean here

Since there are zero citations, the only workable surrogates are:

• (a) Google Patents' algorithmic "Similar Documents" list on the US134256A page (CPC-mapped, not citations), and
• (b) the CPC E04F11/18 neighbor list (the patenthub.cn index page returned for this family, which lists US134256D/US134256A).

I analyze both below, but I must be explicit: these are not citations and were not relied on by any examiner (there were no examiners' citations in 1872 in the modern sense).

The statutory problem with the whole question — read this before the tables

You asked which references "potentially anticipate under 35 U.S.C. § 102." That statute did not exist in 1872; it was enacted in 1952. Cope's patent was examined under the Patent Act of 1870 (and its 1836 predecessor), where novelty turned on whether the invention was known or used by others before his invention, or patented or described in a printed publication before his invention or more than two years before his application. Two consequences:

• A reference dated after 1872-12-24 cannot anticipate US 134,256 under any statute. Most of the "Similar Documents" list post-dates it and is therefore irrelevant to § 102 as to this patent.
• The patent has no stated filing date (confirmed in the prior analysis), so a precise two-year/antedating window cannot be computed.
• § 103 (obviousness) also did not exist in 1872, so any "combination" analysis below is a modern retrospective gloss, not a 19th-century legal test.

Tier 1 — References that could legally anticipate US 134,256 (pre-1872-12-24)

Only these have any § 102 potential. I was unable to retrieve full text for the three Google "Similar Documents" entries in this tier (search budget was exhausted), so I flag descriptions as unverified where marked.

Other pre-date fence art in the same CPC neighborhood (dates only; not cited against 134,256 and no verified disclosure of pivoted blocks): US 133,853 A (1872-12-10), US 126,167 A (1872-04-30), US 121,448 A (1871-12-05), US 111,508 A (1871-02-07), US 109,402 A (1870-11-22, picket-fence posts), US 101,816 A (1870-04-12, wire-work for railings), US 95,932 A (1869-10-19), US 94,963 A (1869-09-21), US 92,442 A (1869-07-13), US 87,336 A (1869-03-02), US 78,572 A (1868-06-02), US 75,145 A (1868-03-03), US 71,750 A (1867-12-03). Also relevant and dated slightly earlier: US 123,854 A (Aplin, 1872-02-20), US 126,362 A (White, 1872-04-30), US 133,358 A (Crandal, 1872-11-26).

Tier 2 — Post-dating references: no § 102 effect whatsoever

Every remaining "Similar Document" post-dates 1872-12-24 and therefore cannot anticipate US 134,256 under § 102(a) or (b), nor under the 1870 Act. I list them for completeness so the record shows they were examined and rejected as prior art, not overlooked: US 134,624 A (1873-01-07, adjustable picket-fences); US 140,897 A (1873-07-15); US 145,739 A (1873-12-23); US 150,083 A (1874-04-21); US 152,535 A (1874-06-30); US 154,502 A (1874-08-25); US 174,259 A (1876-02-29); US 176,021 A (1876-04-11); US 181,898 A (1876-09-05); US 224,643 A (1880-02-17); US 245,189 A (1881-08-02); US 264,259 A (1882-09-12); US 286,092 A (1883-10-02); US 287,184 A (1883-10-23); US 334,797 A (1886-01-26, farm-gate); US 390,692 A (1888-10-09); US 391,746 A (1888-10-23, farm-gate); US 464,177 A (1891-12-01); US 620,708 A (1899-03-07); US 622,302 A (1899-04-04, farm-gate); US 667,992 A (1901-02-12, scaffold-bracket); US 680,506 A (1901-08-13, farm-gate); US 707,668 A (1902-08-26); US 925,044 A (1909-06-15, hammock-support); US 979,302 A (1910-12-20, gate); US 1,069,345 A (1913-08-05); US 1,228,708 A (1917-06-05, gate).

Note the pattern: the farm-gate cluster (1886–1902) is the same problem Cope addressed — letting livestock through a bar barrier — but arrives 14–30 years late. That is the clearest signal that this listing is an algorithmic topical match, not a prior-art trail.

Claim-by-claim anticipation conclusion

• Claim 1 ("bracket C having the pivoted blocks a, in combination with the horizontal bars A") — Not anticipated by any located reference. The load-bearing limitation is the pivoted/rocking blocks a sandwiched between a pair of boards. Generic fence and rail-support art shows bars resting on fixed supports; a rocking block that self-adapts to the bar's inclination is what Cope contributed, and I found no pre-1872 disclosure of it.
• Claim 2 ("bracket C pivoted to the post B, and holding the pivoted blocks a") — Not anticipated by any located reference. Both elements (post-pivot and pivot-block carrier) must appear; the gate art supplies at most the first.

Honest caveat: "not anticipated" here means "not found in the sources I could search." Pre-1872 novelty under the 1870 Act also reaches prior public knowledge and use, not just printed publications — and a self-lowering livestock bar panel is exactly the kind of device that would likely have existed on Pennsylvania farms. I found no evidence of such prior use, but I did not conduct a historical prior-use investigation and cannot rule it out.

What I could not verify (explicit)

1. No USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Public Search record was retrieved — only a user guide.
2. No filing date for US 134,256 — the printed patent omits it; this blocks any two-year statutory bar computation.
3. Full text of US 126,950 A, US 124,600 A, and US 63,828 A was not retrieved, so my "potentially anticipates" entries for those three are based on title, date, and field alone — not on a read of their disclosures. Treat them as candidate leads requiring verification, not findings.
4. No "Cited By" record exists, so I can state with reasonable confidence that no patent in the Google Patents corpus cites US 134,256 — but I cannot speak to un-digitized 19th-century references or non-patent literature.
5. I found no litigation, interference, or assignment record, consistent with the 1889 expiration.

If the goal is a formal anticipation chart, the next step is to pull the full OCR text of US 126,950 A and US 124,600 A (the only two references with a real § 102 shot) and compare their drawing figures against the pivoted-block limitation. I have not done that, and I would not represent either as anticipating claims 1 or 2 without it.

I'll begin by examining the prior-art references listed on the patent page, focusing on which of them actually predate US 134,256's December 24, 1872 date.

The searches returned mostly unrelated 19th-century patents. Let me target the specific pre-1872 references and a few of the closer post-dating ones directly.

Obviousness Analysis — US 134,256 (Pierson Cope, "Improvement in Brackets for Fence-Bars")

Task date: April 26, 2026

0. Two threshold problems before any § 103 analysis

Problem 1 — § 103 did not exist in 1872. US 134,256 issued December 24, 1872, under the Patent Act of 1870 (16 Stat. 198). That statute contained no express non-obviousness provision. The functional equivalent was the judicially supplied "invention" requirement, whose canonical statement was Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) — the substitution of clay for wood or metal in a doorknob was "the work of the skilful mechanic, not that of the inventor." Hotchkiss is the direct ancestor of § 103, and it is the test a court of that era would actually have applied. (The "flash of creative genius" formulation in Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883), post-dates this patent by eleven years, though it describes the same doctrine.)

I therefore run the requested § 103 / KSR analysis as a retrospective modern framing, but I flag where the 1872-era "combination vs. aggregation" doctrine would have cut against invalidity and made these claims harder to knock out than a modern § 103 challenge would be.

Problem 2 — most of the "Prior Art" section is not prior art. The references in the page's "Similar Documents" block are Google Patents machine-similarity hits, not an examiner's citation list. I dated every one of them against the December 24, 1872 issue date:

Only three of the twenty-five listed documents can be used against these claims. The entire "farm-gate" cluster — the most facially on-point art, because farm gates are exactly the "let the bars down so cattle can pass" field the specification describes — is irrelevant as prior art, arriving 14 to 45 years after the patent. Building a § 103 rejection on US 680,506 or US 334,797 would be textbook prohibited hindsight.

Evidentiary gap I must disclose: my searches returned unrelated 19th-century patents and I could not retrieve the full text of US 63,828, US 124,600, or US 126,950. I know their numbers, dates, and titles only. I therefore cannot assert what they actually disclose. Everything below about those three is conditional on that unknown disclosure.

1. Element decomposition of the claims

The bracket variant C′ — secured to a stone/stationary block F — is described but unclaimed, as noted in the earlier section. So the obviousness inquiry touches only (a)–(d).

2. Combination scenarios

Combination A — US 126,950 (fences, May 21, 1872) + US 124,600 (gates, Mar 12, 1872)

This is the only combination built entirely on qualifying art. The theory would be: US 126,950 supplies a fence structure with bracket-mounted horizontal bar supports; US 124,600 supplies a gate having a part mounted to swing or pivot on a post for admitting livestock. The artisan, facing the well-known problem of opening a stock fence without dismantling it, would pivot the bar-supporting bracket to the post to obtain a swing-away opening (claim 2).

Why this combination cannot presently be made out: I have no disclosure for either reference. If neither teaches a bar support that rocks on a pivot, then element (b) — the actual point of novelty — is missing from the combination, and the rejection fails. A bare "fence" reference plus a bare "gate" reference does not reach a bracket with pivoted blocks.

Combination B — US 63,828 (1867) as the primary reference

Same problem. The listing's title is truncated and I could not resolve the subject matter. Without knowing whether it concerns fences, gates, brackets, or something else entirely (the surrounding family of 1867 patents spans valves, pavements, and houses), no motivation-to-combine rationale can be responsibly constructed.

Combination C — the post-dating farm-gate art as "background"

This is the combination a careless analyst would reach for, and it is the one I must reject. US 334,797, 680,506, 707,668, 979,302, 1,228,708, 622,302, 391,746, 181,898, 176,021, and 174,259 all show drop-bars, swinging gates, and pivot mountings in livestock gates. Combined, they would trivially render claims 1–2 obvious. But every one post-dates the patent, so using them is the precise hindsight error § 103 jurisprudence forbids. They are admissible at most as evidence of the level of ordinary skill and the predictability of the mechanical arts — not as the prior art itself.

3. The real § 103 vulnerability — doctrine, not documents

Setting documents aside, the claims are structurally weak on their face:

1. Every element is individually old and simple. A bracket; a rocker/trunnion block resting in a bearing (centuries old in the mechanical arts); a pin-jointed swinging connection (the ordinary hinge). Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), "[t]he combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." Here the predictable result is that a bar resting on a rocker can be tilted and let down.

2. The claim recites function, not invention. Claim 1's only asserted advantage is that the bars "may be conveniently raised and lowered." Convenience in manipulation is a classic non-patentable result of good mechanical design — cf. Hotchkiss on mere substitution of materials.

3. The specification supplies its own admission of the old element. The detailed description expressly contemplates a stationary block F for bracket C′. Having conceded that fixed bar-support blocks were known, the patentee's contribution collapses to "make the support pivot," which is the very "improvement in degree" language used to invalidate claims in Busell Trimmer Co. v. Stevens, 137 U.S. 423 (1890) — "no discoverable trace of the exercise of original thought."

4. The 1872 doctrine cuts the other way, however. Pre-1952 courts asked whether the elements co-acted to produce a new result (a true combination) or merely were assembled (an aggregation). Cope can argue the pivoted blocks and pivoted bracket co-act: the blocks let the bars articulate and the swinging bracket enlarges the opening — a cooperative result. Under that older test, claims 1–2 would likely survive even though each element is old.

4. Conclusion

Conditional answer, stated honestly:

• On the record provided, the § 103 challenge fails. Twenty-two of the twenty-five cited documents are not prior art at all, and the three that qualify (US 63,828; US 124,600; US 126,950) are unexamined by me and would, on their bare titles, not disclose the claim-defining element — pivoted blocks a carried by a bracket.
• If any one of those three pre-1872 references discloses a bar or rail support mounted to rock or pivot, claims 1 and 2 fall to a straightforward KSR-style combination: same field (livestock fencing), same problem (opening the fence to pass cattle), predictable solution (pivot the support), no change in the principle of operation, and a one-part substitution requiring no re-engineering. The motivation to combine would be the universal farmer's desideratum the specification itself recites.
• Under the law actually in force in 1872, the Hotchkiss "ordinary mechanic" standard would put real pressure on claim 1 (pivoted supports being ordinary mechanical skill), but the combination/aggregation doctrine would give claim 2 — with its co-acting pivoted bracket and pivoted blocks — a meaningful chance of survival.

Recommendation if you need a definitive § 103 position: retrieve the full specifications of US 63,828, US 124,600, and US 126,950. The entire validity question turns on whether any of those three discloses a rocking/pivoted bar support. I could not make that determination, and I will not infer it from titles.

Cross-reference check with the earlier sections: no contradiction. The prior section correctly identified the two claims and the unclaimed C′ variant; the observation that C′ is unclaimed is confirmed here and is relevant — it shows the patentee himself regarded the stationary form as the readily available baseline, which strengthens the "pivot is an obvious modification" reading.