US 160727

I'll search for the specific patent number and check litigation dockets.

Now let me check litigation/docket records and any assignment data.

Search scope and negative results (important)

Before the summary, the two items you specifically asked me to check:

• USPTO / Google Patents record for 160,727 — found and confirmed. This is US 160,727 A, an 1875 patent (Publication No. US160727A; also indexed as US160727D). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US160727A/en and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/6b/03/773bb321132539/[US160727](/patent/US160727).pdf
• CAFC 2026 dockets for 160,727 — no results found. I ran targeted queries against Federal Circuit docket material and general infringement/appeal records and found nothing naming Patent No. 160,727. This is unsurprising and I want to be explicit rather than vague: the patent's term expired March 9, 1892 (17 years from the 1875 grant), and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was not created until 1982. A 2026 CAFC appeal involving this patent is effectively impossible, and I found no historical litigation either. I cannot represent that I performed a direct query of the CAFC's internal docket system or USPTO PatentCenter's assignment database — those require authenticated/structured access I don't have here. My "no results" is based on open web indexing, so treat it as a strong negative but not a certified one.
• I also confirmed no sibling/confusable hits were returned for the number itself; the surrounding results (US 4,712,374; US 5,062,756; etc.) are unrelated modern patents that surfaced only from generic keyword matches and are not US 160,727.

Per your strict rule, I have not auto-corrected any identifier below; where the OCR text is internally inconsistent, I flag it rather than silently fixing it.

Bibliographic summary — US 160,727

Claim count: exactly one claim, and it is the sole independent claim (there are no dependent claims).

Plain-language overview of the sole independent claim:

"In a pegging-jack, the lever C, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G, combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described."

In plain terms, the claim is a combination claim in classic 19th-century "improvement" format (preamble "In a pegging-jack…" signals that the unrecited jack structure is admitted prior art). It covers a pegging-jack — a bench stand used by a shoemaker to hold a boot or shoe last while driving wooden pegs into the sole — characterized by the joint presence and cooperative arrangement of five elements:

• Lever C — pivoted at its center on fulcrum J; the claim's core is the addition of this lever over the inventor's earlier jack.
• Rod D — slides freely through the head-stock and foot-stock; carries a screw a on one end with the crank-nut E threaded on it, and the lever C passes through a hole in the opposite end.
• Rod F — a sliding rod engaged with the upper end of lever C and passing through a hole near the top of the spring.
• Nuts H and E — H on the inner end of rod F, E as the crank-nut on rod D's screw.
• Spring G — the spring bearing on the last toggle/stud I.

The claimed function: turning the crank-nut E takes up on the screw and, through the pivoted lever C and the two rods D and F and the two nuts, varies and increases the spring pressure applied to the last toggle/stud, so that the required clamping force on the work can be maintained "at all times" — the stated problem being that in the earlier US 152,528 jack the spring "will not act with the proper force at all times upon the last toggle or stud I."

Scope note: because the claim is a single combination reciting all of C, D, F, H, E, and G operating together ("combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described"), it is narrow — omission of any one recited element would avoid literal infringement. It also includes the boilerplate functional closing phrase "substantially as and for the purpose described," which in that era was construed to import the specification's described operation. There is no separately claimed sub-combination (e.g., no claim to the lever alone or the rod-and-nut adjustment alone).

Uncertainties I am flagging rather than papering over

1. Element-letter inconsistencies in the source text. The scanned OCR is internally inconsistent, and I am reporting it as-is rather than correcting it:

   • The element list reads "A is the bed-piece; B, the head-stock; K, the boot-stock; D, the rod; C, the lever; E, the crank-nut; H, the spring, and I the last-stud." But the later paragraph refers to "the upper end of the spring G" and "the nut H," and the claim recites "nuts H E, and spring G." So the spring is designated H in the element list and G in the body/claim; and the lever appears as C in some OCR renderings and O in others (the Google Patents HTML transcription renders "lever O"). The claim as I quote it follows the PDF/patent-images rendering ("lever C … spring G"), but a certified copy of the original printed patent should be consulted if element letters matter to your analysis.
   • The OCR also garbles "the screw or" for what is clearly "the screw a," and "nuts H E" spacing.

2. The "for C.C. Shaw" fragment. One indexed rendering of the patent front page carries the line "Inventor John J. Stewart for C.C. Shaw." This does not appear in the specification or grant text, and I have no authoritative confirmation of what it signifies — it may be a later-sheet annotation, an agent/assignee notation, or an OCR/indexing artifact. I am therefore not reporting C.C. Shaw as an assignee. If an ownership record exists, it would be in the recorded assignment records for the 1875–1892 window, which I could not query directly.

3. No abstract, no assignee, no litigation — all three are genuine characteristics of an 1875 US patent, not gaps in my search. I state this explicitly so the absences aren't misread as missing data.

Sources:

• https://patents.google.com/patent/US160727A/en
• https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/6b/03/773bb321132539/US160727.pdf
• Referenced parent patent: US 152,528 (Stewart, June 30, 1874) — cited on the face of 160,727; I did not independently retrieve it in this session.
• Comparative pegging-jack art surfaced incidentally (not asserted as prior art against 160,727, and all predate/postdate it variously): US 29,434 (Harlow, 1860) and US 15,462 (Swingle, 1856).

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 160727 across the sources you mentioned.

The initial searches returned results for unrelated patents (US 7,582,727 and WO2017/160727). Let me refine with targeted queries.

Let me try a few more targeted queries, including possible historical litigation.

Result: No litigation found for US Patent 160,727

I searched for litigation specifically involving US Patent 160,727 — "Improvement in Pegging-Jacks," issued March 9, 1875 to John J. Stewart of Sargentville, Maine (application filed August 27, 1874). I found no litigation of any kind involving this patent.

Searches performed and what they returned

Every "727"-flavored hit pertains to a different patent number. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally, I did not treat US 7,582,727, WO2017/160727, or any other similar number as the patent at issue.

Why this is the expected result

US 160,727 is an 1875 shoe-manufacturing patent (a pegging-jack improvement, classified today under A43D 23/025 – "Last-supports"). According to its Google Patents record, its anticipated expiration date was March 9, 1892. The patentee himself described it as an improvement on his earlier Letters Patent No. 152,528, issued June 30, 1874.

Consequently:

• The patent has been expired for roughly 134 years, so no enforceable rights exist and no modern infringement action could be brought.
• Its only claim reads: "In a pegging-jack, the lever O, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G, combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described."
• It predates the existence of the modern litigation databases you asked me to check (Unified Patents Portal, PACER, and the Federal Circuit's online docket). Any hypothetical 19th-century dispute would not appear in those systems.

Caveat on completeness

I could not complete every search I intended — I exhausted my search budget partway through and was unable to run the final four queries aimed at (a) Unified Patents' portal filtered on this exact number, (b) the "Letters Patent No. 160,727" phrasing, and (c) 1880s-era court records. So I cannot claim an exhaustive, line-by-line negative across all possible historical archives.

However, based on everything I did retrieve — and given the patent's 1892 expiration — my answer is: no known litigation involves US Patent 160,727, and none is realistically possible today.

If you need a belt-and-suspenders confirmation, the definitive checks would be:

• Unified Patents litigation caselist — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (search the exact number 160727)
• PACER / CourtListener RECAP — exact-number docket search
• CAFC opinions & orders — https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders
• For the 19th-century window (1875–1892), historical federal case reporters such as Federal Cases or The Federal Reporter (vols. 1–50) would be the only places a suit on this patent could appear.

I'd rather flag this explicitly than fabricate a case name, docket number, or outcome.

PTAB proceedings on US160727 — "Improvement in pegging-jacks"

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (zero). Breakdown: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied. Per the structured ODP block in this prompt — which is the canonical source — the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent, and independent web search surfaced no PTAB, E2E, or Federal Circuit activity referencing US160727 (the only hits for "160,727" + IPR relate to unrelated, current-generation patents). The bottom-line defensive posture is unusual and stronger than any IPR outcome: this patent cannot be asserted at all. US160727 issued 1875-03-09, was filed 1874-08-27, and its term expired 1892-03-09 (17 years from grant, per the ODP legal-status record). It is also outside the reach of AIA trials in practice — IPR/PGR/CBM did not exist until 2012-09-16, 120 years after the patent lapsed. Any demand letter, cease-and-desist, or infringement theory citing US160727 is facially baseless, and the absence of PTAB activity is not a signal of a "hardened" patent but of a dead one.

No proceedings to report

There is no proceeding number to list, and I will not invent one. For completeness against each field the task asks for:

• Type: N/A — no IPR, PGR, or CBM was ever filed.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: The structured ODP data returns an empty proceeding set; the patent's own ODP legal status is "Expired - Lifetime," with a critical "Anticipated expiration" event dated 1892-03-09.
• Judge panel: N/A. No APJ panel has ever touched this patent.
• Petition grounds: N/A. (For the record, the patent carries a single claim — see below — so any hypothetical challenge would have been claim-level binary.)
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A. There is no FWD to quote, and I will not paraphrase or synthesize one.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: N/A — no FWD, therefore no CAFC appeal. Nothing on the Federal Circuit docket or CourtListener.
• Defensive value: Total. A defendant receiving an assertion letter on US160727 should treat it as a demand-letter defect, not a litigation threat: the claim has been in the public domain since 1892-03-09. If the letter cites "claims 1–5" or any multi-claim set, that is a further tell — this patent has one claim.

Note on the Google Patents "Similar Documents" list: the ~25 contemporaneous references shown there (e.g., US156066, US119658, US140404 vises; US52487, US162500 wrenches) are CPC/semantic neighbors surfaced by Google Patents, not prior-art-of-record or PTAB exhibits. They are not evidence of any proceeding and should not be cited as such.

Strategic summary

Claim status of US160727. The patent's entire scope is a single claim, in the original 1875 wording: "In a pegging-jack, the lever O, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G, combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described." There are no dependent claims, no independent-claim family, and no reissue in the record before me. So the CANCELED / SUSTAINED / UNTESTED taxonomy collapses to one entry: that sole claim is untested before the PTAB and unenforceable everywhere else by reason of expiration (1892-03-09). "Narrowed through IPR" does not apply — the patent was never narrowed; it simply lapsed. The specification describes the improvement over the patentee's own earlier Letters Patent No. 152,528 (issued to John J. Stewart 1874-06-30), with the stated object of making the spring "exert a greater pressure upon the last toggle or stud" via pivoted lever O, rods D/F, and nuts H/E — background only, with no litigation or PTAB consequence.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to map, because no petitioner ever instituted an IPR and no FWD ever issued. § 315(e)(2) estops a petitioner, real party in interest, or privy from raising in a civil action or ITC proceeding any ground raised or that reasonably could have been raised — but estoppel attaches only on a final written decision, and here there is none. Likewise, § 325(e)(2) is inapplicable. Practically, this means nothing constrains a defendant's prior-art arsenal as to this patent — but that freedom is academic, since 19th-century public-domain technology cannot be infringed. The correct defense is not an IPR petition but a status/expiration challenge to the assertion itself.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (there are no petitioners). No patent owner PTAB appeal activity — the patentee, John J. Stewart of Sargentville, Maine, predates the PTAB by well over a century. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) appears anywhere in the chain; aggregators challenge live, asserted patents, and a 1892-expired reference patent attracts nothing. The only "chain" of note is the intra-family relationship to US152,528, which is a specification antecedent, not a litigation lineage.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant being asserted on US160727: there is no FWD to link to and none exists. Your dispositive citation is the patent's own cover data: granted 1875-03-09, expired 1892-03-09, per the ODP legal-status record on the Google Patents page for US160727A. Demand an explanation of how a patent whose term ended in 1892 supplies a live infringement theory; if the demand cites multiple claims (>1), note that the patent has exactly one.
• Do not file an IPR. There is no live claim to invalidate, no statutory basis to institute against an expired patent of this vintage on these facts, and the filing fees and § 315(b)/standing analysis would be wasted. An AIA petition here would be the wrong instrument.
• If active proceedings are asserted to exist: they do not. Treat any claim of a pending IPR/PGR/CBM on US160727 as error. The ODP "PTAB proceedings on file" block governs, and it is empty.
• Procedural-timeline notes are not applicable. There is no institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing, and no statutory one-year FWD clock running, because no petition was ever filed. The 1892 "anticipated expiration" entry is the only critical date on the record.
• Absence of PTAB activity is not a hardening signal here. Although the usual heuristic is that well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs, that heuristic presupposes an enforceable patent. For US160727 the absence of proceedings reflects expiration, not survival — so do not read the empty docket as evidence of validity.

Confidence and sourcing note: I have high confidence in the zero-proceedings finding, because (a) the canonical ODP block returns none, (b) targeted web searches returned no PTAB or CAFC references to this patent, and (c) the patent expired in 1892, decades before the AIA created the trial vehicles in question. I could not verify anything at PTAB E2E or CourtListener directly, since there is no proceeding record to retrieve — I have not linked to E2E because fabricating a docket URL for a nonexistent proceeding would be misleading. All patent-specific facts above (inventor, town, filing date 1874-08-27, grant date 1875-03-09, prior patent 152,528, the single claim's exact wording) are taken verbatim from the full patent text supplied in this prompt.

I'll start by checking whether there are any recorded assignments for this patent in the USPTO Assignment Search and corroborating sources.

Let me check the assignment databases and any corroborating records for this patent family.

Inventors

Notes and patterns:

• Single inventor, no co-inventors. The specification reads "Be it known that I, JOHN J. STEWART... have invented," and the claim is signed by Stewart alone.
• No departing-employer pattern is detectable, because there is no employer of record. The classic "all inventors left the assignee within 12 months" precursor to a portfolio fire-sale requires an assignee entity. None exists here. This is a cottage/independent-mechanic filing typical of the New England boot-and-shoe tool trade, in which Sargentville (Hancock County, ME) was situated.
• Witnesses, not assignees: the two signature witnesses are Henry W. Sargent and Edward E. Philbrook. Witnesses on a 19th-century specification are attestors to execution — they are not assignees, and neither name should be treated as a link in an ownership chain. (The similarity of "Sargent" to the inventor's town, Sargentville, is a coincidence of local naming, not evidence of a transfer.)
• Self-referential prior art: the specification states the invention is an improvement on Letters Patent No. 152,528, issued to the same John J. Stewart on June 30, 1874 — i.e., the inventor's own earlier pegging-jack. This is an inventor-to-self improvement, not a corporate continuation-in-part. I did not independently verify the assignment record of US 152,528; do not assume it is clean.
• One OCR-ambiguous marginal notation. The Google Patents PDF of the drawing sheet carries an OCR line reading "for C.C." near the inventor's name (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/6b/03/773bb321132539/[US160727](/patent/US160727).pdf). I cannot resolve what this refers to — it may be a scan artifact, a draughtsman's notation, or an unindexed transfer annotation. It is not a recorded assignment and I am not treating it as one.

Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventor individually.

• Entity named on the issued patent: John J. Stewart, of Sargentville, Maine — a natural person, not a company. The front page and specification contain no "assignor to" recital and no corporate assignee.
• Product embodying the claims: The claim covers a lever/rod/nut/spring combination for a pegging-jack — a shoemaker's last-holding stand used in the hand-pegging of boots and shoes. Nothing in the record shows Stewart manufacturing at scale; no brand, no company, no trademark attached to the disclosure.
• Primary line of business: Not determinable from the record. No corporate entity is disclosed to have any line of business.
• Current status: Expired. Google Patents records only two application events for US160727A — Application granted 1875-03-09 and Anticipated expiration 1892-03-09 (the then-standard 17-year term). Legal status is listed as "Expired - Lifetime." The claimed subject matter has been in the public domain for 134 years. Any residual "asset" here is a historical document, not an enforceable right.

Data-quality caveat for downstream analysts: Google Patents attaches a "Landscapes" sidebar to this record listing Pharmaceuticals Containing Certain Organic and Inorganic Compounds, Orthopedics, Nursing, and Contraception, and Earth Drilling. These are algorithmic CPC-area rollups applied to a patent with a present-day classification of A43D23/025 (Last-supports). They are artifacts, not portfolio context. Likewise, the 25 "Similar Documents" (US464921A, US912277A, US140404A, etc.) are machine-similarity hits among 19th-century vise/wrench/jack patents — they are not citations, family members, or co-owned assets, and should not be read as an NPE family footprint.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Search has no recorded assignments for US 160,727. There is no chain to reconstruct.

Verification: search patent number 160727 at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (or https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Google Patents' legal-events block for US160727A likewise shows zero assignment, security-interest, merger, change-of-name, license, or release entries — only the 1875 grant and the 1892 expiration.

Two structural reasons this is expected, neither of which I am using as a substitute for an actual record search:

1. The automated assignment index's reliable online coverage begins in August 1980. Per USPTO's own Assignment Database training material (https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf): "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980." A hypothetical 1875–1955 conveyance would sit in the pre-reel Liber/volume recording system, and a 1955–1980 one in the microfilm reel collection — in either case outside the fully indexed online set and requiring a manual/paper search.
2. The patent expired in 1892, extinguishing the commercial motive for recordation and any residual enforcement value. There is no plausible post-expiration assignment activity.

Per the operating instruction for this role — "if the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, say so plainly" — the chronological chain, the reel/frame citations, and the correspondent-of-record analysis below have nothing to attach to. I am therefore rendering the remaining sections as explicit null findings rather than leaving them out, because the null is itself the deliverable for your tracking purposes. To be unambiguous: I have not fabricated any reel/frame number, assignor, assignee, execution date, recording date, or correspondent. No such data exists in the sources searched.

Assignment timeline — records table

Correspondent of record: none. The only attorneys/agents anywhere near this record are the two witnesses named in the 1875 specification — Henry W. Sargent and Edward E. Philbrook — and witnesses are not correspondents within the meaning of assignment practice. Neither name recurs anywhere in this chain, because there is no chain. Neither name surfaced in any NPE/asserter correspondent list I consulted.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 160727
    1874 : Filed by John J. Stewart
    1875 : Patent issued to Stewart personally
         : No corporate assignee of record
    1892 : Patent expired
         : No assignments ever recorded

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is assessed against a chain that is empty. An empty chain cannot produce a positive signal, so the honest result is a sweep of not present, with two unclear entries where the absence of data is a coverage limitation rather than affirmative evidence of absence.

Verdict

Insufficient data — and more precisely: no assignment chain exists, and the patent is long expired.

Justification: The USPTO Assignment Search index returns zero recorded assignments for US 160,727, and Google Patents' legal-events block for US160727A records only two events — Application granted 1875-03-09 and Anticipated expiration 1892-03-09 — with no assignment, security, merger, or license entries. Because the grant ran to John J. Stewart of Sargentville, Maine as a natural person with no corporate assignee (the specification recites only his name and two witnesses, Henry W. Sargent and Edward E. Philbrook), and because the 17-year term lapsed in 1892 with no litigation or assertion activity of record, the NPE/troll framework has no purchase: there is no reel/frame entry, no assignee LLC, and no correspondent to cite. The only non-null caveat is a coverage gap — pre-August-1980 recordation is not fully indexed online, so I flag unclear on that single point rather than claiming affirmative proof of a never-transferred title.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 160727. Mirror index: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. Patent text: https://patents.google.com/patent/US160727A/en.

Recommendation for your tracking pipeline: close this record as unassigned inventor-owned; expired 1892 and exclude it from NPE watchlists. It has no correspondent signature to cluster on, so it cannot contribute to a repeat-player attorney graph. If your scope requires negative assurance on the pre-1980 gap, that requires a manual reel search at the USPTO Assignment Branch — an automated lookup will not resolve it, and I would not spend the effort on a 134-year-expired shoemaker's tool.

I'll research the prior art for US 160,727 — including the reference the patentee himself cites and any earlier pegging-jack art.

Let me pull the text of the cited parent patent and search for other pegging-jack art.

I have the key reference. Let me verify a few additional pre-1875 pegging-jack references to build a complete prior-art picture.

I've gathered what's retrievable. Note upfront: I exhausted my search budget mid-task, so a couple of secondary references are cited from a single source each and are flagged as such.

Prior Art Analysis — US Patent 160,727

"Improvement in Pegging-Jacks" — John J. Stewart, Sargentville, Hancock County, Maine. Application filed August 27, 1874; Letters Patent dated March 9, 1875. Single claim. Classification today: A43D 23/025 (Last-supports).

1. A threshold finding: US 160,727 has no examiner-listed patent citations

This matters more than it sounds. When you ask me to "look at each patent citation for 160727," the literal answer is: there is no citation list to look at.

• The Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US160727](/patent/US160727)/en) contains no "Citations" or "Patent Citations" section. It shows only a "Similar Documents" block (US 464,921; US 912,277; US 140,404; US RE5,319; US 1,239,620; US 164,787; etc.) and a "Landscapes" block (Pharmaceuticals, Orthopedics, Earth Drilling — obviously algorithmic noise for a shoe jack).
• "Similar Documents" are text-similarity suggestions generated by Google's classifier, not prior-art citations of record. They are not §102 references and I have not treated them as such. That list is dominated by vises, wrenches, and pipe-wrenches — topically unrelated to a pegging-jack, and none of them is an antecedent of the claim elements.
• The reason there is no citation list: US 160,727 was examined in 1874 under the Patent Act of 1870. The practice of printing "References Cited" on the face of a patent is a 20th-century artifact. The 1875 face of this patent carries no such data, and nothing was retroactively added.
• The Google record also shows zero forward citations ("Publications (1)" is the patent itself).

So the "citations for 160,727" reduce to exactly one reference — and it is cited by the patentee inside his own specification, not by an examiner.

2. The one reference of record cited in the patent: US 152,528

What US 152,528 discloses (from its own specification, retrieved above): a vertically and laterally adjustable pegging-jack with a hinged bed-piece B secured by screw-crank L; a swiveling block A on nut-and-bolt a; head-stock G and foot-stock D; a rest F adjustable longitudinally in the head-stock via studs N and step H; a rest E in the foot-stock D "pivoted, or having a fulcrum near its center, so as to oscillate longitudinally"; a crank-shaft l screw-threaded and working in a nut in the step O, one end attached to the lower end of rest E; and, notably, the statement that "the rest E may be caused to press the last upon the rest F, as described, by means of a spring attached to the block A, and operating upon the lower end of the rest E; but I prefer to use the shaft l."

Does it anticipate the claim of 160,727? No. The claimed combination is "the lever C, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G, combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described." US 152,528 does not disclose:

• a lever centrally pivoted at J with a sliding rod F passing through a hole near the upper end of the spring G, or
• a rod D sliding freely in the head and foot stocks and carrying a crank-nut E on its threaded end.

It uses a pivoted rest (E) and a separate crank-shaft, with the spring noted only as a preference to be avoided. So 152,528 is not an anticipatory reference as to the whole combination.

But it is highly material in three other ways:

1. §102(b)-style "patented before" question. Stewart's own US 152,528 issued June 30, 1874 — only ~two months before the August 27, 1874 filing of 160,727. Under R.S. §4886 (successor to §24 of the 1870 Act), a prior patent or printed description barred a grant only if it predated the applicant's invention or occurred more than two years before the application. The two-month gap is well inside any grace period, and the subject matter differs, so 152,528 did not bar the grant. It is nonetheless the closest thing to a §102(b) reference this patent has, and worth stating expressly since a modern §102(a)(1) analysis would at least require checking the inventor's own earlier patent.
2. Claim construction / prosecution history. The specification's admission — "the spring corresponding with the spring G in the jack patented to me as aforesaid will not act with the proper force at all times upon the last toggle or stud I" — is a self-admission of the deficiency of the prior art, narrowing the claim to the specific lever/rod/nut linkage for amplifying spring pressure. Under the 1870 Act's requirement to "particularly point out and distinctly claim," this admission cabins the claim.
3. §103 obviousness baseline. Any obviousness analysis of the 160,727 claim must start from 152,528 as the primary reference.

3. Contextual/analogous prior art in the same field (pegging-jacks, 1852–1860)

These are not citations of record for 160,727. I retrieved them as the relevant field art and note them because a §102/§103 analysis of a jack claim cannot be done without them. Each is a real, verifiable pre-1874 US patent in the identical art (pegging-jacks / last-holders).

Analogy note: all of the above are from the same field of invention (Class A43D 23/025 — last-supports / pegging-jacks), so no In re Bigio/analogous-art dispute arises.

4. §102 anticipation mapping, claim by claim

US 160,727 has exactly one claim:

"In a pegging-jack, the lever C, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G, combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described."

This is a combination claim in the classic 1870s format. Anticipation therefore demands that a single reference disclose all elements — lever, both rods, both nuts, and spring — in the cooperating arrangement described. No reference I located does so.

Bottom line on §102: none of the located references, singly, anticipates the single combination claim of US 160,727. The realistic attack vector on this claim is §103 (or its 1870s equivalent, "want of invention"), using US 152,528 as the primary reference in view of US 15,462 (nut-and-spring adjustment) and US 29,434 (spring acting through a lever to press the last). Whether that combination would have been obvious to a skilled 1874 jack-maker is the crux — and, as noted in the earlier litigation section, the patent expired March 9, 1892, so the question is academic today.

5. Discrepancies and caveats I must flag

1. OCR contradiction in the patent text — reference characters. The Google Patents page text you supplied renders the lever as "O" and the spring as "H" in places ("The lever O has its fulcrum... the crank-nut E... H, the spring"), whereas the cleaner OCR of the original printed specification (from the patent PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/6b/03/773bb321132539/US160727.pdf) renders the lever as "C", the rod as "D", and the spring as "G". The claim is consistent in both: "the lever C, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G." I have used C / D / F / G / H / E throughout as the authoritative character set, because the claim controls. Anyone re-keying this patent should be aware of the OCR instability, since a mis-keyed character changes the antecedent basis.

2. No examiner citation list exists for this patent (Section 1). If a downstream task assumes one, that assumption is wrong for 1875 jurisprudence.

3. US 7,721 (Jenkins) — date and full text unverified; single secondary source. Do not rely on the "September 21, 1858" date without confirming it against the patent itself.

4. Dewitt 1852 — patent number unknown to me; I declined to invent one.

5. Search budget. I completed the citation/prior-art searches above but was cut off before running confirmatory queries on Jenkins and on the Dewitt number. The negative findings in Section 1 (no examiner citations, no forward citations) rest on the authoritative full patent record you supplied, which is the best evidence available.

6. Legal-regime framing. The instruction to map references to "35 U.S.C. § 102" is applied by analogy — the statute did not exist in that form in 1875. The operative provisions were §24 of the Act of July 8, 1870 (16 Stat. 198) and its codification at R.S. §4886. This is the same caveat raised in the earlier litigation summary and is not a contradiction, just a continuation of it.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis by verifying the key reference identified in the patent's own specification and the documents listed on the page.

Obviousness Analysis — US Patent 160,727 ("Improvement in Pegging-Jacks")

Analyst memo | Prepared 2026-10-01 | Grounded in the prior-art section of the US160727 record plus verified reference texts

1. Threshold correction: the statutory frame

US 160,727 was filed August 27, 1874 and granted March 9, 1875 — 77 years before the 1952 Act created 35 U.S.C. § 103. Strictly, the governing test was the "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851): patentability fails where the difference over the art is no more than "the work of the ordinary mechanic."

I run the analysis under § 103 as instructed, but I flag that the substantive inquiry is the same, and that the controlling precedents are contemporaneous with this patent — most usefully Hailes v. Van Wormer, 87 U.S. (20 Wall.) 353 (1874) (combination vs. mere aggregation) and Smith v. Nichols, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 112 (1874) ("a mere carrying forward … a change only in form, proportions or degree, the substitution of equivalents, doing substantially the same thing in the same way by substantially the same means with better results, is not such invention as will sustain a patent"). Smith v. Nichols is squarely on point here, because this patent claims "better results" in the form of greater spring pressure and nothing else.

Do not repeat the litigation finding here; it is cross-referenced, not restated.

2. The single claim, construed

"In a pegging-jack, the lever C, rods D F, nuts H E, and spring G, combined to operate substantially as and for the purpose described." (US160727, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US160727A](/patent/US160727A)/en)

• It is a single, five-element combination claim in Jepson-style "improvement" form. If any element is old-and-predictably-applied, the whole claim falls.
• The stated purpose is narrow and functional: make the spring exert a greater pressure on the last toggle/stud I, adjustable via crank-nut E ("any required degree of pressure may be exerted upon the toggle I by turning the crank E").
• Two source discrepancies I flag rather than silently fix: (a) the lever's reference letter is OCR'd as "C" in the patentimages PDF (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/6b/03/773bb321132539/US160727.pdf) but "O" on Google Patents; (b) the character H is used in the body for both the spring and a nut, and G is called "the spring G" later. That internal inconsistency is a real R.S. §4888 / §112(b) definiteness weakness, separate from obviousness. Per instruction, I treat identifiers literally and flag the ambiguity rather than harmonizing it.

3. Prior-art inventory (with availability screening)

Important caveat on the record. The Google Patents page has no "Patent Citations" section. The documents it lists are under "Similar Documents" — an algorithmic classification-similarity list, not examiner-cited art — and the "Prior art keywords" (improvement, pegging, jacks, spring, lever) are auto-generated tags, not prior art. I therefore screened every listed document for actual availability (pre-Aug. 27, 1874), and searched independently for same-field art.

Cross-reference check: the litigation section recorded the claim as "lever O" per the Google page. The patentimages OCR reads "lever C." No contradiction of substance — a source-OCR discrepancy in the reference character, noted above.

4. Graham / Hotchkiss factors

A. Scope and content of the art. The field is bench and bench-mounted devices for holding a lasted shoe for pegging. It is a small, dense, self-referential art: by 1874 it already contained (i) spring-loaded pivoted levers pressing a last against a rest (Harlow '434, Bailey '799); (ii) screw-and-nut compression of springs on rods in jacks (Swingle '462, Brown '993); and (iii) the same inventor's pivoted, centrally-fulcrumed member driven either by a threaded crank-shaft-and-nut or, in the alternative, by a spring (Stewart '528).

B. Differences between the claim and the art. Reduced to essentials, '727 differs from Stewart '528 only by:

1. substituting a separate pivoted lever C for the pivoted rest E as the force-transmitting member; and
2. adding a sliding rod F with nut H coupling the spring to the lever's upper end, so that crank-nut E regulates spring compression.

Both are taught: (1) by Harlow, in the identical field and for the identical purpose (spring-driven lever forcing a last onto a rest); (2) by Swingle and Brown, who adjust spring force by running a nut along a threaded rod. Nothing in the claim is new; only rearranged.

C. Level of ordinary skill (c. 1874). A mechanic of ordinary skill in shoemakers' jack manufacture, familiar with screw-and-nut pressure devices, toggle/lever linkages, and helical and plate spring tensioners — i.e., one who understands that compressing a spring further increases its reaction force and that a nut on a threaded rod is the standard way to do it adjustably.

D. Secondary considerations — null, and partly negative. The record discloses no commercial success, licensing, copying, praise, or long-felt need evidence. Two facts cut against patentability:

• Speed of the fix: '727 was filed ~4 months after '528 issued. The "difficulty" was identified and solved in one season — the antithesis of a long-felt, unmet need.
• The patentee's own admission of ordinariness: the specification states the arrangement works "as will be readily obvious to all conversant with such matters without a more explicit description." That is an applicant admission that the claimed subject matter lies within ordinary skill, and it undercuts any later argument that the arrangement was beyond the ordinary mechanic. This is the single most damaging evidentiary item in the four corners of the patent.

5. Obviousness combinations and the motivation to combine

Combination 1 (strongest): Stewart '528 + Harlow '29,434

• Primary reference: '528 supplies the entire environment and most of the mechanism — head/foot stocks, a last-engaging member pivoted at a central fulcrum to oscillate, a threaded crank-shaft working in a nut, and an admitted spring alternative acting on the lower end of that pivoted member.
• Secondary reference: Harlow supplies the spring-loaded pivoted lever forcing the last onto a rest in a pegging jack.
• Motivation: '528 itself tells the mechanic that its spring "will not act with the proper force at all times upon the last toggle or stud" (US160727, referencing US152528). The problem is expressly stated in the specification, and both references are in the same field addressing the same problem — press the last firmly onto its rest. Substituting Harlow's lever-mediated spring for '528's direct spring on the member's lower end is a substitution of known equivalents for the same purpose.
• Reasonable expectation of success: total. The force-transmitting behavior of a centrally-fulcrumed lever and the compression/tension relation of a coil spring were thoroughly established arts; the result (greater, better-directed spring pressure) is a predictable consequence, not an unpredictable one.

Combination 2: Stewart '528 + Swingle '15,462 and/or Brown '51,993

• Adds the specific adjustable-spring mechanism the claim recites: a spring compressed between an abutment and a nut on a threaded rod, adjustable by turning the nut/crank.
• Motivation: '727's stated object is adjustable pressure — "any required degree of pressure may be exerted upon the toggle I by turning the crank E." Swingle (nut G, handled, compressing helical spring e on pin F of a pegging jack) and Brown (nut L against spiral spring M on a shoe-jack, to hold the last with sufficient but releasable force) are directly pertinent to that object and supply the exact means. Combining an adjustable tensioner with a spring that is admittedly under-performing is the ordinary response of the ordinary mechanic.

Combination 3: Stewart '528 + vise/wrench screw-and-nut art (US 5,487; 11,9658; 126,506; 140,404; 153,418; RE 5,319)

• Even if the examiner treated the specific jack art (Harlow/Swingle/Brown) as too close or as raising double-patenting issues, the screw-and-nut crank remains recoverable from the general mechanical clamping art.
• Motivation / analogous art: these references are reasonably pertinent to the problem of adjustably clamping a workpiece by screw pressure — the very problem the claim addresses. Baylies '418 is especially apt: a screw used "only for the purpose of compression," actuated by an operating lever.
• KSR-style reasoning: turn a nut on a threaded rod to compress a spring and vary clamping force = "the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions." A person of ordinary skill would have had a strong, specific, and articulated motivation, not a vague "obvious to try" hunch.

Combination 4 (doctrine route — no third reference needed): Smith v. Nichols / aggregation

• The claim, read against '528, achieves only a greater degree of the same result ("the spring is caused to exert a greater pressure … than before"). Under Smith v. Nichols (1874), a change "only in form, proportions or degree … with better results" is not invention.
• In the alternative, if lever C, rods D/F, nuts E/H, and spring G each merely perform their own established function (lever transmits; rod D/crank-nut E adjusts; rod F/nut H loads the spring; spring stores energy) without a new cooperative mode of operation, the claim reads on an unpatentable aggregation under Hailes v. Van Wormer (1874).
• This framework is consistent with how courts of the era handled shoe-machinery cleverness. In Gallahue v. Butterfield (Fed. Cas. 9:1093) the court held a "making of the gauge adjustable" was not separately patentable because adjustability "was not novel," and "the mere application of it to a new use is not separately and independently patentable" (https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F.Cas/0009.f.cas/0009.f.cas.1093.3.pdf). And in the reported opinion comparing the 1876 Sturtevant & Bickford pegging-machine patent (No. 173,428) with the later Davey patent (https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[8880395](/patent/8880395).pdf), the court held claim 1 involved "no patentable invention," because it recited "only mechanical changes" and "no new function or mode of operation results." That is precisely the posture of '727 vis-à-vis '528.

6. Counterarguments a challenger would face (balanced view)

1. Not a bare duplication. '727's lever does more than reposition a spring: it converts spring force into a multiplied, directionally-controlled thrust on the toggle, and the crank-nut affords continuous adjustment. That is a genuine functional integration, which distinguishes it from a pure aggregation.
2. The claim is a combination claim, so invalidity requires every element to be found or suggested; a defendant who can only find the elements scattered across non-analogous arts (wrenches, vises, cotton-presses) has a weaker case. Combination 1 avoids that weakness because Harlow is same-field, same-purpose.
3. § 103's "motivation" is a modern overlay. A mid-19th-century tribunal would have asked only whether the change exceeded the "ordinary mechanic" — a lower bar for invalidity, not a higher one. So this counterargument does not help the patent owner.
4. Claim definiteness and the OCR/reference-letter confusion ("C"/"O"; H used for both spring and nut) may narrow or complicate construction, but narrowing construction narrows the claim toward the very '528 geometry, reinforcing obviousness.

Assessment: none of these outweighs the combination. The decisive structural facts are that (i) the primary reference is the patentee's own earlier patent and is admitted prior art; (ii) that reference already discloses a centrally-fulcrumed, spring-or-screw-driven last-engaging member; (iii) the same field already contained spring-driven pivoted levers (Harlow 1860) and nut-adjustable spring compression on a jack (Swingle 1856, Brown 1866); and (iv) the patentee conceded the arrangement was "readily obvious … without a more explicit description."

7. Conclusion

Claim 1 of US 160,727 is, more likely than not, invalid as obvious (equivalently, for want of "invention" under Hotchkiss). The strongest single challenge is Stewart US 152,528 in view of Harlow US 29,434, with Swingle US 15,462 and Brown US 51,993 supplying the recited nut-and-spring adjusting element and the vise/wrench art available as a fallback under the analogous-art doctrine. Independent of any combination, the claim's saving difference over '528 is a change in degree of an existing result — the classic Smith v. Nichols / aggregation failure mode.

Confidence: high as to the legal framework and the textual disclosure of '528, Harlow, Swingle, and Brown (all verified above from primary texts) — moderate-high as to the ultimate obviousness outcome, because (a) no examiner's citation record exists for this patent, (b) the drawing (Fig. 1) could not be inspected here and the element geometry depends heavily on it, and (c) I did not verify the filing dates of US 156,066 (granted Oct. 20, 1874) and US 162,500 (granted Apr. 27, 1875), which straddle the Aug. 27, 1874 filing date and are therefore of uncertain availability as prior art; I have excluded them from every combination above.

Caveat: this is a technical invalidity analysis of an expired patent. No live controversy attaches to US 160,727 (see the litigation section already generated; do not restate).