US 142460

I'll run targeted searches for this specific number.

Search results for the identifier "142460"

Bottom line up front: The identifier resolves to US Patent No. 142,460 (US142460A), a granted US patent — not a court docket. My searches of the Federal Circuit's 2026 activity returned zero results for "142460," and no litigation, IPR, or appeal involving this number exists or plausibly could exist (see the "CAFC / litigation" section below for the technical reasons).

Two caveats on the record itself before the summary:

1. The Google Patents "title" field literally reads "William h." That is a metadata artifact (it appears to be a truncated/garbled rendering of the inventor's name), not the document's title. The title printed on the specification is "IMPROVEMENT IN PLANING-MACHINES." I am reporting both literally, per the instruction not to auto-correct identifiers.
2. The Google Patents "Prior art date" is shown as 1873-09-02, which is the grant date. The specification itself states the application was filed March 5, 1873. Where the two conflict, I follow the primary document text.

1. Bibliographic data (US142460A)

Uncertainty flags:

• Google Patents' record lists no assignee field. The assignee—Solomon A. Woods—appears only in the specification's heading ("WILLIAM H. GRAY... ASSIGNOR TO SOLOMON A. WOODS, OF SAME PLACE"). Whether the assignment was formally recorded at the Patent Office, and whether it was an outright assignment or a partial interest, is not something I can confirm. I would not assert the recorded assignee with high confidence beyond the specification's own statement. (Third-party histories indicate the business reorganized as the S. A. Woods Machine Co. in 1873, the same year—but that entity is not named on the face of this patent.)
• The modern CPC classification B27B1/00 (sawing) looks questionable for a planing/feed-roll patent (B27C is the planing subclass). This appears to be a machine-assigned classification, possibly erroneous, and I would not rely on it.
• The "Similar Documents" list on the Google Patents page (e.g., US398048A, US155431A, US339877A, US313885A, US117230A) is a similarity list, not a patent family and has no legal relationship to US142460A.

2. Summary of the specification (substitute for the absent abstract)

The patent is directed to a feed-roll mechanism for wood planing machines, specifically to the problem of keeping the upper (presser) roll parallel and applying uniform pressure across the full width of stock.

Problem identified by the patentee: In the conventional arrangement the upper roll's two journal boxes move independently. If stock enters off-center, the roll separates on that side while the weight on the opposite end presses down, producing an angular separation and unequal pressure across the lumber. The stated consequences are: (a) the lumber feeds angularly and away from the guide, so it is improperly presented to the tonguing/grooving/reducing cutters; and (b) unequal roll separation puts angular strain on the feed gearing teeth, which break. The specification states plainly that "[i]n the ordinary arrangement one box may move to, or nearly to, the extent of its capability of movement, while the other remains stationary."

Stated invention: Combining the presser-roll with a link, lever, or connecting mechanism so that both boxes of the presser roll have simultaneous and equal movement, giving the roll uniform pressure throughout its length.

Disclosed structure (all embodiments):

• Lower roll c in boxes d, adjustable by screws e; upper roll in vertically movable boxes h.
• Gearing: gears g on the lower roll drive intermediate gears f, which drive gears i on upper-roll gears k; intermediates i/f on shafts l in stationary bearings (so the rolls can separate without disturbing the gear mesh).
• Each box h is carried on slide-rods m sliding in stationary guide-boxes n, joined at the foot by a cross-bar o, connected to weighted levers p, p carrying weights q.
• Preferred equalizing linkage (Fig. 1): two levers t, t pivoted at center by a pin w; each connects to the box mechanism on its own side and rests on/pivots to the housing frame on the opposite side, so movement of either lever forces a coincident movement of the other. Withdrawing pin w allows the boxes to act independently.
• Adjustment of lowest position: screw-shafts e with bevel-pinions v meshing bevel-pinions 3 on cross-shaft z in stationary bearings.
• Fig. 4 modification: each screw connected to the horizontal arm of a three-armed lever p pivoted to a stationary frame projection, vertical arms of the two levers joined by crossing connecting-links.
• Fig. 5 modification: rocker-shaft with end arms joined by links to the weighted levers (levers t dispensed with; screws held by collars above and below a cross-plate).
• Pivotal screws j, j attach the boxes to the tops of the slide-rods and are located in the plane of the presser-roll axis — expressly to avoid strain/wear and loss of roll parallelism that result from placing bearings above the roll axis or rigidly connecting rods to the boxes.

3. Claims — plain-language overview

This patent has three claims, all independent and all in combination form; there are no dependent claims.

Claim 1 — The equalizing lever pair (the core of the invention).
"In combination with the presser-roll, supported by or upon independent boxes, the connecting-levers t t, to insure uniform pressure, substantially as described."
Plain language: When the upper presser roll is carried on two independently movable journal boxes, tie those two boxes together with the paired connecting levers t, t so the roll applies even pressure. This is the broadest claim of the patent and the one that reads directly on the patentee's stated "primarily" invention.

Claim 2 — Guide rods + weighted levers + link-connected rock shaft.
"The combination of rods for guiding and supporting the upper roll-boxes with weighted levers connected by links to a rock-shaft, substantially as and for the purpose described."
Plain language: A sub-combination covering the support/pressure hardware — vertical guide rods for the upper roll boxes, weighted levers that supply roll pressure, and a rocker-shaft joined to those levers by links so both sides are synchronized. This corresponds to the Fig. 5 arrangement (and is the structural family that keeps the linkage to the weights, rather than pivoting one lever onto the frame).

Claim 3 — The box-to-lever connection hardware.
"As a means for connecting each box h and its lever p, the combination of the rods m m, jointed to the box, the bar o, rods s s, screws v, and yoke r."
Plain language: A sub-combination on the interface between a roll box and its weighted lever — two jointed slide-rods m, m from the box down to a cross-bar o, rods s, s up to screws v held in a yoke r on the lever. Its point is articulated, not rigid, attachment of the box so the box stays free to move vertically in the plane of the rolls.

Note on scope: All three claims use the "substantially as described" / "as and for the purpose described" style typical of 1873 practice, tie the claims to the illustrated embodiments, and are limited to combinations of elements rather than a single element. Claim 1 is the claim that would be asserted against a competing equalizing mechanism; claims 2 and 3 are narrower structural fallbacks.

4. USPTO / CAFC 2026 docket search — result and explanation

• USPTO: The authoritative record is the granted patent above. Legal status is Expired – Lifetime with anticipated expiration 1890-09-02, i.e., expired for roughly 136 years. There is no live prosecution, no reissue, no reexamination, and no post-grant proceeding.
• CAFC 2026 dockets: No results for "142460" as a patent number or as a docket number. This is expected and not merely a search failure:
  • The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was established in 1982 (Federal Courts Improvement Act). It therefore has no historical docket reaching a patent that issued in 1873 and expired in 1890.
  • Appeals from 1873-era patent cases would have gone to the regional circuit courts and, ultimately, the Supreme Court — not to a Federal Circuit predecessor docket numbered "142460."
  • A 19th-century patent with a 17-year term expiring in 1890 cannot be the subject of a 2026 CAFC appeal: there is no live patent right, no ongoing infringement action, and no appealable judgment.
  • Separately, "142460" is a patent number, not a case number, so even a literal docket search would not be expected to return a matching appeal.

5. Explicit statement of uncertainty

• I have high confidence in the number, inventor, filing date (March 5, 1873), issue date (September 2, 1873), the three claims, and the substance of the disclosure, because these come from the full specification text itself.
• I have lower confidence in (a) the formal recorded assignee/assignment chain (Solomon A. Woods, per the specification heading only); (b) the scraper-supplied classification B27B1/00, which appears mismatched to a planing-machine subject matter; and (c) any post-1873 chain of title into the S. A. Woods Machine Co.
• The scraped text contains substantial OCR corruption (e.g., "resser-roll," "prcsser-roll," "an" for "m," "It" for "h," "3" for "z," "00" for "v," "19" for "p," "11" for "p," "1;" for "v," "10" for "w"). I have interpreted these against context and flagged where the reading is an inference rather than a literal transcription. Where a claim-reference symbol is uncertain, I have given the symbol that is internally consistent with the description rather than the corrupted glyph.
• No abstract exists for this patent; the summary in Section 2 is my own, derived from the specification, and should not be cited as original document text.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 142460.

Litigation Search: US Patent 142,460

Result: No litigation found. I cannot identify any lawsuit — historical or modern — involving US Patent 142,460.

What I searched and what came back

Why the null result is expected here

I want to be explicit that this is a substantive explanation, not just an absence of hits:

1. The patent is 153 years old and long expired. Per the Google Patents record for US142460A, it issued 1873-09-02, with an anticipated expiration of 1890-09-02 under the then-applicable term. Its statutory term has been over for well over a century, so no infringement action could have been maintained at any point in the modern era.

2. The databases you named do not reach this period. The Unified Patents litigation portal and PACER contain federal docket data from the modern electronic-recording era (PACER from the late 1980s; Unified's district-court litigation database likewise covers recent decades). CAFC dockets begin with the court's 1982 creation. Any 1873–1890 enforcement activity would sit in 19th-century federal circuit/ district court records and Nisi Prius/equity reports, which are not indexed by these tools. A search returning "No data" in Unified's portal is therefore not evidence of no 19th-century suit — it is simply outside that tool's scope.

3. No modern case exists by definition. Because the patent expired in 1890, any case in a modern database would be an artifact of an ID mismatch, not a real assertion of this patent.

Caveats and limits on this answer

• This is not a certified negative search. A definitive historical check would require the Federal Cases reporter (West), the Federal Reporter for the era, the USPTO's own historical records of infringement suits (the Patent Office historically collected statistics on suits involving issued patents), and the archived docket books of the District of Massachusetts and the circuit courts for that district. I did not access those archival sources, and I have not done a full-text search of 19th-century case reporters.
• I did not verify an assignment/enforcement chain. The patent's front page (as fetched) shows the inventor as William H. Gray of Boston, Massachusetts, assignor to Solomon A. Woods, of the same place. A Woods-related enforcement campaign is plausible for a planing-machine patent of this era — the "Woods" name is associated with planing-machine manufacturing — but I have no evidence of any suit and will not assert one. Treat this as an unresolvable lead, not a finding.
• Per the operating rule on identifiers, I made no corrections: I searched exactly 142460 / 142,460 and did not accept results for other numbers. The one Unified caselist page that surfaced contained a different patent (106435460) and was excluded.

Bottom line

• Plaintiff(s): None identified.
• Defendant(s): None identified.
• Jurisdiction: N/A.
• Case number: N/A.
• Filing date: N/A.
• Outcome / status: N/A.

No known litigation involving US Patent 142,460 is identifiable from the sources searched. I recommend, if this matters, that the query be reframed as a targeted search of 19th-century federal reporters and the National Archives case files for the District of Massachusetts (1873–1890) rather than modern patent-litigation databases.

PTAB Proceedings — US Patent 142,460

Canonical source check: The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block provided in this prompt is empty — the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 142,460 as of the most recent ingest. I ran independent web searches (patent number + "IPR," "PTAB," "Inter Partes Review," "petition," petitioner/owner names) and surfaced nothing. No proceeding numbers are reported below because none exist to report; I am not supplying any.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 142,460: 0 — zero active, zero with claims invalidated, zero with claims sustained, zero settled, zero institution-denied. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "hardened by surviving IPR" but something far simpler and far stronger: this patent expired on 1890-09-02 and cannot support any IPR, any infringement claim, or any demand letter today. Any assertion of US 142,460 in 2026 is facially defective — the correct response is a paper, not a petition.

Why there are no proceedings (structural, not incidental)

• The patent is 153 years old. Per the Google Patents record, US 142,460 was granted 1873-09-02 to William H. Gray of Boston, Massachusetts, assignor to Solomon A. Woods, and shows "Anticipated expiration: 1890-09-02" with status "Expired - Lifetime." Its 17-year term ran out in the 19th century.
• Statutory categories exclude it by design. PGR is available only for patents with effective filing dates on or after 2013-03-16 — 140 years too late here. CBM review was limited to pre-AIA "covered business method" patents and sunset on 2020-09-16. IPR is technically available against any issued patent regardless of age, but it is economically irrational against an expired patent: there is no prospective infringement to enjoin, and § 286 caps back damages at six years — which, for a patent expiring in 1890, yields zero recoverable period.
• No petitioner ever had standing-in-practice. The AIA trial regime did not exist until 2012-09-16, by which point this patent had been expired for 122 years. There is no window in which an IPR could have been filed against it that would have mattered.
• The "similar documents" list on the Google Patents page (US 155,431; US 313,885 "Planer presser-roll"; US 219,651; US 59,514 "Improvement in feed-rollers for planing-machines"; etc.) is a classification/prior-art similarity list, not a proceeding history. Do not mistake it for PTAB activity.

(Because there are no proceedings, the per-proceeding template — type, filed date, panel, grounds, institution, FWD, settlement, appeal, defensive value — has no rows to populate. I am deliberately not filling it with invented IPR numbers, petitioners, or APJ names.)

Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims untested at the PTAB — and untestable. US 142,460 as issued carries three claims: (1) the combination with the presser-roll, supported on independent boxes, of connecting-levers t t "to insure uniform pressure, substantially as described"; (2) the combination of rods for guiding and supporting the upper roll-boxes with weighted levers connected by links to a rock-shaft; and (3) as a means for connecting each box h and its lever p, the combination of rods m m, bar o, rods s s, screws t, and yoke r. No FWD has ever addressed these, no claim has been canceled, and no claim has been sustained. But "untested" here does not mean "live risk." The claims are unenforceable as a matter of law by expiration, not by adjudication. There is no such thing as a "surviving claim" of a patent whose term ended in 1890.

Estoppel landscape: § 315(e)(2) is inapplicable. IPR estoppel binds a petitioner that obtains an FWD; there is no petitioner and no FWD, so no estoppel attaches to anyone. That cuts both ways, but it doesn't matter: a defendant facing a 2026 demand letter on this patent does not need prior art at all. The complete defense is the expiration date, paired with § 286 (six-year damages lookback) and the absence of any prospective infringement. If, hypothetically, someone did want to attack the claims, the art is whatever was published before Gray's 1873-03-05 filing date — which includes the entirety of 20th- and 21st-century technology, an absurdly low bar that underscores how worthless the asset is.

Pattern signals: none, and that itself is dispositive. No serial petitioner, because no petitioner. No patent-owner appeal practice, because there was never an adverse FWD — and the Federal Circuit, which was not created until 1982, has no jurisdiction over an 1890 patent's prosecution. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, AST) involvement; these entities target asserted or assertable patents, and a long-expired planer feed-roll patent has no assertion value. The historical footnote here is assignment, not litigation: the patent issued to Solomon A. Woods, whose Boston concern became the S.A. Woods Machine Company, a major 19th-century woodworking-machinery maker. That is a chain of title of antiquarian interest, not a litigation chain.

Recommended next steps

• If no PTAB activity exists, say so plainly — and it does not. To the extent the "absence is itself a signal" heuristic applies, the signal is at its absolute maximum: a patent this old with zero proceedings does not mean a hardened patent that deterred challengers. It means an expired patent of purely historical significance that no rational challenger would ever need to attack.
• Do not file an IPR. Filing a petition against US 142,460 would be a waste of fees and would implicitly concede the patent is worth attacking. It is not. It expired 1890-09-02 (Google Patents record).
• If you have received a demand letter citing US 142,460, the response is a short letter, not a petition: (i) the patent expired on 1890-09-02, so there can be no infringing act and no prospective relief; (ii) § 286 bars recovery for any act more than six years before suit — a period that includes no part of the patent's term; (iii) demand a copy of the asserted claims and an infringement chart, which the sender will be unable to produce in any non-frivolous form. Consider whether the assertion itself warrants a Rule 11 / § 285 posture or a state-law unfair-assertion claim, depending on the jurisdiction.
• Verify before you respond. Confirm status directly against the USPTO Patent Public Search and the PTAB E2E / PTAB Center docket, and re-run a CourtListener search for "142,460" to confirm this writing reflects current records. My searches and the ODP feed both returned empty, but the verification is cheap and the confirmation belongs in your file.

Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB story on US 142,460 because there cannot be one. The patent expired in 1890. Any demand letter citing it is meritless on its face, and your defense is a date, not a petition.

I'll verify the source database coverage before reconstructing anything, since this patent predates the modern assignment record system.

Now let me check the pre-1980 record gap specifically, and whether this patent surface in any assertion/litigation context.

Confirmed the key database limitation. Two more checks on the inventor/assignee entity before I write up.

Coverage gate (must be stated before any chain reconstruction)

US 142,460 has no records in the USPTO Patent Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search, and no assignment in its history could be in it. The online database covers recorded patent assignments from August 1980 to the present; pre-1980 records are not in it:

• USPTO's own instruction: "Use Patent Assignment Search to search the database of all recorded Patent Assignment information from 1980 to the present (Patent Assignments recorded prior to 1980 are maintained at the National Archives and Records Administration)." (USPTO, archived)
• 37 C.F.R. § 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)." (govinfo, 2025 ed.)
• MPEP 301.01: "The historical database of assignments is maintained separate and apart from the database of assignments affecting title recorded since 1980." (summary with MPEP cites)

Source conflict, flagged: the regulation draws the USPTO/NARA line at 1957-05-01, while the USPTO's public help page draws it at 1980. Both are consistent that a 1873-issued, 1890-expired patent is outside the online system. Pre-1955 recordings were indexed by liber and page (bound volumes), not reel/frame (TMEP 503.08) — so even a NARA pull would not yield a reel/frame citation for this patent's 1873 transfer.

This is therefore a negative finding, and a structural one — not a search failure. It is also consistent with (not contradictory to) the earlier summary's note that Google Patents shows no assignee field and no legal events other than the 1890-09-02 expiration.

Inventors

Pattern flags:

• Single inventor, rights transferred at filing. The specification heading reads "WILLIAM H. GRAY, OF BOSTON … ASSIGNOR TO SOLOMON A. WOODS, OF SAME PLACE," and the document is executed by Gray alone. So Gray did not retain title; this is an assignment-on-filing, not a later sale.
• No multi-inventor departure pattern is observable — there is only one named inventor, so the "all inventors leave within 12 months" heuristic cannot be evaluated. Employment-agreement/secondment data for 1873 Boston machinists is not available in the sources I retrieved.
• Do not conflate two different Grays. Vintage Machinery records that Woods' business partner in the firm Gray & Woods (c. 1854–1859) was Solomon S. Gray, credited with the original planer design (Gray & Woods history; S. A. Woods Machine Co. history). US 142,460 names William H. Gray — a different given name. Whether they were related, or whether W. H. Gray was a Woods-shop draftsman/engineer, is not established by anything I found; I will not assert it.

Original assignee

Entity on the issued patent: Solomon A. Woods, individually, of Boston, Massachusetts — a natural person, not a corporation, at the date of grant (1873-09-02).

• Primary line of business: manufacture and sale of industrial woodworking machinery — planers, planer-matchers and molders. Woods began making machines in 1852, erected a South Boston factory in 1865 to build the Woodbury planer under exclusive license, and kept branch houses in New York and Chicago (Vintage Machinery, S. A. Woods).
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? The business unquestionably manufactured and shipped wood-planing machines (surviving examples exist, e.g. an 1890 S. A. Woods planer-matcher at the Denmark Historical Society, Maine). However, I found no source that documents a specific surviving machine as containing the claim-1 equalizing link pair t t. Treat "product embodying the claims" as highly likely but not documented.
• Corporate status — long dissolved by absorption. The 1873 reorganization produced S. A. Woods Machine Co. ($300,000 capital, Woods president), the same year as this patent. Later: 1958 — became a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Industrial Syndicate, Inc. (UIS); 1960 — merged with two UIS subsidiaries into GKB Company, Incorporated (UIS formed a new shell "S. A. Woods Machine Company" to preserve use of the name); end of 1961 — GKB merged into UIS; 1961 — Yates-American purchased the woodworking-machinery business, trademarks and trade names and moved it to Roscoe, Illinois (Yates-American history).
• Litigation context (not an assignment): a 1990 judgment addressed UIS's liability for a 1949 S. A. Woods molder — product-liability, not a patent sale, and not a chain-of-title event for US 142,460. Historic planing-machine patent litigation of the 1860s–1880s centred on the Woodbury patents (Woods "led the fight against the Woodbury Patent Planing-Machine Co.'s attempts to charge royalties for using pressure bars in planers"), a separate patent family. I found no case naming US 142,460, and I will not assert one.

Assignment timeline

Plainly: the USPTO Assignment Center has NO records for US 142,460.

Searching patent number 142460 at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (or https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) returns nothing, and nothing is retrievable by reel/frame, because:

1. The online database begins 1980; this patent's rights terminated 1890-09-02, ninety years earlier.
2. The single transfer that does exist — Gray → Solomon A. Woods, evidenced on the face of the patent — was executed on or before the 1873-03-05 filing, and pre-1957 patent assignment records sit at NARA, indexed by liber and page, not reel/frame.

What can be stated about that one transfer (evidentiary basis: the printed patent, not an assignment record):

• Execution date: on or before 1873-03-05 (filing date). Exact date unknown.
• Recording date: unknown — cannot be retrieved from the online system.
• Reel/Frame: does not exist in the modern system.
• Conveyance type: assignment of inventor's interest (the standard "assignor to" pre-issue recordation).
• Assignor: William H. Gray, Boston, MA.
• Assignee: Solomon A. Woods, Boston, MA.
• Correspondent of record: cannot be determined. (The two names subscribed at the foot — "FRANCIS GOULD" and a second name rendered by the OCR as "FRornINGIIAM," plausibly "M. W. Frothingham" — are witnesses to the inventor's execution, not a recording correspondent, and the surname reading is OCR-uncertain. I am not treating either as a correspondent-of-record finding.)

Per the task instruction I stop the chain reconstruction here. The remaining mandated sections follow, but they can only report the absence of the evidence those signals require — I am not backfilling them with inference.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 142460
    1873 : Filed by William H Gray
         : Grant names Solomon A Woods as assignee
         : S A Woods Machine Co incorporated
    1890 : Patent term expires
    1958 : S A Woods becomes UIS subsidiary
    1960 : Merged into GKB Company
    1961 : Yates-American buys Woods business
    1980 : USPTO online assignment records begin

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Cross-checks that also returned nothing: Google Patents legal events show only grant (1873-09-02) and anticipated expiration (1890-09-02) — no reassignment, no reissue, no litigation entries. The "Similar Documents" list on that page (US398048A, US155431A, US339877A, US313885A, US117230A, etc.) is a similarity list, not a family and not a chain of title; none of those documents constitutes an assignment link.

Verdict

Insufficient data — with the sharpened qualification that this is categorically inapplicable rather than merely under-documented.

Justification: the only ownership transfer evidenced anywhere is the pre-issuance Gray → Solomon A. Woods assignment printed on the patent face, executed on or before 1873-03-05; the USPTO Assignment Center holds no records because its coverage begins in 1980 (37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2); MPEP 301.01), while this patent's term expired 1890-09-02. Because the right has been dead for roughly 136 years, the last ~87 years of recorded-assignment history is empty by definition, and the 1958/1960/1961 UIS–GKB–Yates-American events are operating-business consolidations, not NPE structuring. No shell entity, no known asserter, no correspondent recurrence, no pre-suit transfer, no fire-sale and no defensive-aggregator endpoint — every NPE signal is not present or not assessable, none is "present."

Verify the null result directly: USPTO Assignment Center → Patent Assignment Search → search Patent Number 142460 (mirror: assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Expect zero hits. For the 1873 transfer itself, the only route is a NARA pull of pre-1957 patent assignment records — and it would be cited by liber/page, not reel/frame.

I'll run targeted searches to locate the USPTO record and any citation/reference data for this specific number.

USPTO / prior-art search for US Patent No. 142,460 — results and analysis

A. Search execution and a contamination flag first

Before the substantive answer, the search record, per the strict-identifier rule:

Explicit exclusion: I am not treating US3698847A as a citation to, or prior art for, 142460. It is a different patent number that the search engine surfaced for unrelated reasons. Per the operating rule, I made no numeric corrections and I reject that hit as a false positive. It appears nowhere in the analysis below.

Honest limits on this search: I could not retrieve the USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search "References Cited" field, the printed front page image, or the original 1873 examiner's file wrapper. Web retrieval for this number returned essentially nothing beyond the already-supplied Google Patents scrape. Any statement below about the absence of citations reflects the record I have (the Google Patents mirror of the printed document), not a certified negative search of National Archives Record Group 241.

B. Direct answer: the count of patent citations is zero

US Patent 142,460 carries no patent citations on its face. There is no "References Cited," no "Cited By," and no examiner-citation field on the record. This is not an error or a gap in the scrape — it is the expected result for a document of this vintage:

1. Front-page "References Cited" is a 20th-century convention. The practice of printing cited references on the patent itself postdates this patent by decades. A document issued September 2, 1873 would not have carried such a section even if the examiner had consulted references during prosecution.
2. Google Patents shows no Citations section for this record. The page contains only "Prior art keywords" (the extracted terms roll, boxes, lever, rods, movement) and "Similar Documents." Neither is a citation list. (The earlier section of this analysis already flagged "Similar Documents" as a similarity ranking rather than a family; I extend that here — it is also not a citation list, and Google's own labels distinguish the two.)
3. Whatever the examiner cited in 1873 is not published. Mid-19th-century prosecution files were not printed. Those references, if any, would exist only in the original application file in the National Archives; they are not accessible to me here.

Consequence for the task as posed: there is no set of "patent citations for 142460" to walk through. Any § 102 analysis must therefore be built from (i) the specification's own admitted prior art, and (ii) contemporaneous third-party patents that predate the March 5, 1873 filing date — a reconstruction, not a citation review.

C. The one genuine prior-art statement inside the document: the applicant's admission

The only reference material actually in the record is the specification's description of the conventional arrangement, which functions as admitted prior art. Quoting the document (OCR cleaned only where the corruption is unambiguous):

"As the rolls are generally mounted and arranged the pressure of the upper roll is equal upon the stock, if the stock is entered at the center of the rolls; but if it enters at either side of the center the pressure is unequal… the result being an angular separation, and a consequent unequal bearing or pressure upon the respective parts of the lumber."

And:

"In the ordinary arrangement one box may move to, or nearly to, the extent of its capability of movement, while the other remains stationary…"

What the admitted prior art discloses:

• two feed rolls, upper roll journalled in independently movable boxes;
• weighted levers pressing the upper roll down, pressure regulable by moving the weights (stated as conventional);
• geared feed rolls with intermediate connecting gears on stationary-bearing shafts (expressly described as the conventional gearing: "the connecting-gears being placed upon shafts mounted in stationarybearings, while the shafts or gudgeons of the feedrolls rotate in movable… bearings").

§ 102 mapping — admitted prior art:

This is the correct and important result: the applicant's own admission cannot anticipate any claim, because the specification's entire premise is that the conventional arrangement lacks the equalizing connection. It is at most a § 103-style starting point (a teaching away is arguably present, since the spec describes the prior-art failure mode in detail), not a § 102 reference. Note also that admitted prior art is generally usable as prior art for anticipation only where it discloses the claimed subject matter; here it does not.

D. Candidate third-party prior art — filtered by the date bar, and flagged as unverified

The only other candidate references available to me are the entries in the Google Patents "Similar Documents" table. I must be blunt about their status: I could not retrieve any of their specifications, drawings, or claims. Google's similarity ranking is derived from text/classification overlap, not from legal relevance. I therefore cannot certify that any of them discloses the claimed combinations. The § 102 assessments below are provisional screens based on number, date, and title only — they are leads for verification, not findings.

Critical legal filter. The governing novelty statute in 1873 was R.S. § 4886 (from the Act of July 8, 1870), not 35 U.S.C. § 102 — § 102 as written postdates this patent by 79 years. Applying § 102 as a modern proxy, and applying the 1870 Act's two-year bar, the cutoff dates are:

• Before March 5, 1871 (more than two years pre-filing): absolute statutory bar — prior patent or printed publication.
• March 5, 1871 – March 5, 1873: prior art if it is a patent or publication by another (or, under the 1870 Act, prior knowledge/use by others in the U.S.).
• On or after March 5, 1873: cannot be prior art to this patent.

Pre-filing candidates (potentially qualifying):

Post-filing references — legally disqualified as § 102 prior art to this patent:

US155431A (Improvement in planing-machines, 1874‑09‑29), US219651A (1879), US218355A (1879), USRE9574E (1881‑02‑15, reissue — see caveat), US265927A (1882), US305240A (1884), US313885A (Planer presser-roll, 1885‑03‑17), US325601A (1885), US339877A (Planing-machine, 1886), US390829A (1888), US391616A (1888), US398048A (1889), US404088A (1889), US508516A (1893), US557806A (1896), US649085A (1900), US936659A (Feed-roll-controlling mechanism for wood-planers, 1909), US1275167A (1918).

Each of these postdates the filing by a minimum of ~18 months, so none can anticipate or render obvious any claim of 142460 under any version of § 102. They are useful only as evidence of the ordinary level of skill and of the subsequent development of the art (e.g., US313885A, "Planer presser-roll"; US936659A, "Feed-roll-controlling mechanism," suggest the equalization problem persisted and was worked on for decades afterward). Caveat on USRE9574E: a reissue is ordinarily effective as of its original patent's date for subject matter carried over from the original. I do not know the original patent number or date behind RE9574E, so I cannot determine whether it legally qualifies as pre-1873 art. Do not treat the 1881 date as conclusive either way.

E. Bottom line, claim by claim

There are no patent citations of record for US 142,460, and no reference for which I can substantiate anticipation of any of claims 1–3. The single most relevant prior-art disclosure is the patent's own description of the conventional independently-suspended presser-roll arrangement — which, by design, is missing the characterizing element of every claim.

F. Uncertainty and what would actually be needed

• High confidence: that US 142,460 has no citations on its face, and no Citations/Cited-By field on the Google Patents record; that the specification's admitted prior art cannot anticipate any claim.
• Lower confidence / expressly unverified: the substance of every "Similar Documents" reference. I retrieved none of them; my § 102 rankings for US59514A, US117230A, US31508A, US53771A, and US134596A are date-and-title screens only.
• Cannot verify at all: whether the 1873 examiner cited any references in the application file, and whether any recorded assignment exists (a point raised and left open in the earlier summary).
• Anachronism flag: the task asks for § 102 anticipation, but § 102 did not exist in 1873. The applicable statute was R.S. § 4886 (prior knowledge/use in the U.S.; prior patent or printed publication anywhere; two-year bar) with defenses under R.S. § 4920. A defensible 1873-era analysis must be run on that statute, not on § 102(a)/(b) as enacted in 1952.
• Recommended next steps for a real search: pull the full texts of US59514A, US117230A, US31508A, and US134596A; search period printed publications — the Scientific American planing-machine columns, the Commissioner's Annual Report volumes, and woodworking trade catalogs, 1860–1873 — since the 1870 Act's bar extends to printed publications; and obtain the original application file from National Archives RG 241 to determine what, if anything, the examiner cited.

I'll pull the prior-art references listed on the patent page and verify their dates and subject matter before running the § 103 analysis.

Strong hit on the primary reference. Let me verify the remaining pre-1873 candidates and the post-dating ones.

Obviousness Analysis — US 142,460 (Gray, "Improvement in Planing-Machines"), 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Two threshold caveats before the analysis

(a) The statute is being applied anachronistically — deliberately. US 142,460 issued September 2, 1873, 79 years before § 103 was enacted. The 1870 Patent Act under which it was granted provided only for novelty. The non-obviousness requirement existed judicially as the "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1850), which § 103 codified in 1952. So the correct historical ground for attacking this patent is "want of invention"; the modern equivalent is § 103 with Graham/KSR. I run the modern test below because that is what was asked, and because § 103 governs whenever this patent is now examined — e.g., as prior art art itself, or in a validity challenge to a later patent claiming the same subject matter. A useful contemporary illustration of how the era's courts policed the "mere mechanical skill" line (though involving an unrelated patent, Clapp's sewer grating, No. 134,978) is Palmer v. Corning, 156 U.S. 342 (1895): https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/156/342/

(b) The prior-art cutoff is March 5, 1873 — not the date Google Patents displays. The scraped record shows "Prior art date 1873-09-02," which is the issue date. The specification states the application was filed March 5, 1873. Any reference published after that date is not prior art. This matters enormously here, because most of the "Similar Documents" list post-dates the patent.

1. What actually constitutes "the Prior Art section" of this record

Three distinct things appear on the page, and they carry very different legal weight:

Critical point: there is no "Citations" or "Cited By" field on this record. No examiner-cited art exists to work from, because 1873 patents carried no front-page references and the file history is not digitized. Any § 103 case here must be constructed, not quoted. I will not present the similarity list as though it were the examiner's art.

Admitted prior art in the specification itself

The specification concedes, as the state of the art: feed-rolls "geared to run together by gears at one or both ends"; connecting gears "placed upon shafts mounted in stationary bearings"; roll gudgeons in relatively movable bearings; and "the boxes of the upper roll being preferably connected with weighted levers, by means of which the pressure is brought to bear upon the upper roll, which pressure may be regulated by movement of the weights." Every structural element of claims 2 and 3's environment is admitted prior art. That admission is dispositive ammunition for a § 103 rejection of the narrow claims.

2. Verified prior-art inventory (pre-filing only)

Post-dating and therefore unusable as prior art: US 155,431 A (1874-09-29), 219,651 (1879), 218,355 (1879), RE 9,574 E (1881), 265,927 (1882), 305,240 (1884), 313,885 (1885), 325,601 (1885), 339,877 (1886), 390,829 (1888), 391,616 (1888), 393,948 (1888), 398,048 (1889), 404,088 (1889), 508,516 (1893), 557,806 (1896), 649,085 (1900), 936,659 (1909). Thematically the closest of these — US 313,885 A, "Planer Presser-Roll" (1885) and US 936,659 A, "Feed-Roll-Controlling Mechanism for Wood-Planers" (1909) — are directly on point but 6 and 36 years too late. I flag US 155,431 A explicitly: if its underlying application were filed before March 5, 1873 it could qualify, and I could not retrieve its filing date; treat it as an unresolved 30-day-tool-budget item rather than a negative.

3. Level of ordinary skill (Graham factor 2)

A journeyman planing-machine mechanic in the Boston/Worcester woodworking-machinery trade, ca. 1873 — competent in feed-roll mounting, gear trains, and weight-and-lever pressure systems, without formal engineering training. This is an electromechanical-arts mechanic standard, which is a high-skill baseline relative to the invention's simplicity and therefore favors obviousness.

4. Claim-by-claim analysis

Claim 3 — the box-to-lever connection hardware. Obvious.

Claim 3 claims "[a]s a means for connecting each box h and its lever p, the combination of the rods m m, jointed to the box, the bar o, rods s s, screws v, and yoke r."

• US 59,514 A (Plummer, 1866) discloses the bearings/boxes of the upper feed-roll "connected to the lower ends of rods E E by means of hinged joints b b"; a common cross-piece G through which both cylinders F F pass and on which it rests via nuts; weight-rods g g with heads/nuts; yokes j resting on the weight-rods; and levers M fulcrumed to their respective yokes, weighted at their long ends. Functionally this is Gray's chain: articulated rod from box → cross-member → rod/screw → yoke on the weighted lever.
• US 117,230 A (Woods, 1871) supplies the missing screw element precisely: "adjusting screw-shafts have provision for free vertical play in their bearings, and each passes through and is fastened by suitable nuts to a bar s, through the opposite ends of which pass two arms t of a yoke u," with a stirrup at the yoke's bottom through which the weighted lever passes.
• Admitted prior art supplies the weighted-lever-over-boxes environment.

Motivation to combine: same field (planing-machine feed rolls), same problem (press the upper roll down while leaving it free to rise on thick stock), same era, same geographic trade cluster. Both references are adjustable articulated link trains between a roll box and a weighted lever; substituting one known articulation form for another in the same combination is "a combination of familiar elements according to known methods" yielding a predictable result — the KSR core holding. No element of claim 3 is missing from the combination.

Claim 2 — guide rods + weighted levers + links to a rock-shaft. Obvious.

• Guide rods for the upper boxes: US 117,230 A ("the boxes of the rolls slide between vertical ways or guide-posts"); US 59,514 A (rods E E and cross-piece projections f f "operate as guides to the piece G").
• Weighted levers: both references.
• A rock-shaft with end arms joined by links — this is elementary, ubiquitous mechanical synchronization (crank arms and connecting links). Gray provides no structural detail beyond that, and critically he describes it as one of several interchangeable options, stating that "the supporting mechanism for the opposite boxes may be otherwise connected to produce the uniform movement and pressure of the roll; but I prefer the organization substantially as shown," and offering Figs. 1, 4, and 5 as three different mechanisms for the identical function.
• US 117,230 A already discloses a common, cross-machine force-transmitting member: a cross-bar s to which both screw-shafts are fastened, and a cross-shaft in bearings with a bevel gear p simultaneously adjusting both sides.

Motivation: the patentee's own statement that the connecting mechanism "may be otherwise connected" is an admission that the specific geometry is a design choice among a finite number of known equalizing linkages, not the inventive contribution. Where the patentee identifies the alternatives as equivalent for the stated purpose, § 103 is satisfied as to the choice among them.

Claim 1 — connecting levers t t tying the two boxes. Close call; likely obvious, but this is the defensible claim.

Claim 1 is the actual point of novelty and the only claim with a real § 103 argument in its favor. Verified references show two independently suspended, independently weighted roll-box sides — Plummer's lever M is "hinged to a projection k upon the inside of each upright plate C, and... fulcrumed to the center of its respective yoke j"; Woods' lever is "pivoted at y and borne down by a suitable weight z." Neither reference expressly cross-connects the two sides to force equal travel.

The obviousness case rests on three legs:

1. Known equalizer principle. A pivoted lever (or short link train) that divides a single force equally between two spaced points and forces them to travel together — the evener/whiffletree/equalizing-bar family — is ancient, pre-1800 mechanical art. "[I]f 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 v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398, 417 (2007).
2. The problem was known and articulated in the field. Gray does not discover the unequal-pressure problem; he describes it as inherent in "the ordinary arrangement," and the record's own "Definitions" section is that admitted description. Where the problem is known to the whole field and the fix is a known technique applied to it, the "motivation" prong is satisfied by the reference itself plus common sense.
3. Plummer's common cross-piece G is already a partial equalizer. As retrieved, the weights N hang from a single rigid cross-piece G spanning both screw-cylinders F F, resting on the nuts e e. That is a common bridge distributing load to both sides — structurally the germ of Gray's equalizing linkage. Converting a load-distributing bridge into a box-travel-equalizing linkage is an exercise of ordinary mechanical skill, not invention.

Motivation, stated affirmatively: a mechanic observing that off-center stock makes the roll separate angularly — causing lumber to feed away from the guide (defective product) and putting angular strain on the feed-gear teeth (broken teeth, downtime) — has an express, articulated reason to couple the two sides. The result (uniform pressure) is exactly the result one would predict; nothing is unexpected.

Pro-patentee counterarguments (genuine, not token):

• No reference in the record teaches equalization of presser-roll boxes specifically. A pre-KSR court could hold the absence of any suggestion in the art sufficient to sustain the claim.
• Gray's center pin w is deliberately withdrawable so the boxes may act independently — a claimed-specific design awareness that argues against treating the coupling as a trivial afterthought.
• Gray identifies a non-obvious secondary consequence (elimination of angular strain on gear teeth) not previously addressed by the art.

5. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

6. Bottom line

Because all three claims are combination claims closing with "substantially as described," they would today be construed narrowly to the illustrated structures (Phillips). That cuts both ways: it improves the patentee's position on claim 1's literal scope, but it also means claim 1 covers little more than the specific lever pair of Fig. 1 — a specific form the patentee elsewhere concedes is interchangeable.

7. Explicit uncertainty and what would change this analysis

• I could not retrieve the full text of US 31,508 A, US 134,596 A, or US 155,431 A. I rely on their titles/dates only where stated, and I do not treat any of them as establishing a disclosure. US 155,431 A is the highest-value outstanding item: if its filing predates March 5, 1873, it becomes prior art and is the most topically similar reference in the entire list.
• No file history exists in digitized form; there are no examiner citations. The "Similar Documents" list is machine similarity, not a legal prior-art citation, and I have not treated it as one.
• The US 59,514 A text I retrieved is partial OCR (the excerpt is truncated mid-sentence). My account of the common cross-piece G and its load path is drawn from the retrieved text and is internally consistent, but it is a reading of an incomplete document; if a full copy shows G to be non-load-bearing or non-common, leg 3 of the claim 1 argument weakens.
• The US 117,230 A inventor-naming is inferred. The DATAMP company listing shows "S.A. Woods, G.E. …" for 117,230 and the Google Patents PDF opens "SOLOMON A." — consistent with Solomon A. Woods being a named inventor and with his being the assignee of US 142,460. I flag this as strongly indicated but not confirmed from a complete face-of-document check.
• This is not a validity opinion. No claim chart has been prepared against full reference texts, and claim 1 in particular turns on how narrowly "substantially as described" is construed.