US 1677484

I'll run targeted searches for this specific patent number and any 2026 litigation activity.

US 1,677,484 — "Grinding Apparatus"

Search scope note up front: I searched for the literal identifiers 1677484 / "1,677,484" and for Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) 2026 docket activity. No CAFC 2026 docket entry, appeal, IPR, or any post-grant proceeding involving this patent was found. That is expected: this is a 1928 patent that the record shows as "Expired – Lifetime," with an anticipated expiration of 1945-07-17. An expired patent cannot support a live infringement action, so absence of 2026 litigation activity is a reliable negative rather than a gap. I also confirmed no other patent is being confused with this number — the number resolves uniquely to the Milliken glass-grinding patent below.

Bibliographic data

Corroborating source (assignee/ownership): a third-party patent analytics page for "JOHN E MARSDEN" lists 12 applications with "Milliken John A" as the top inventor (9), consistent with the assignment relationship stated on the face of this patent — https://goodip.io/iq/assignee/john-e-marsden

Discrepancy flagged (not auto-corrected): the Google Patents page for this document lists a "Prior art date" of 1928-07-17, which is identical to its publication date. The authoritative full text states the application was filed April 17, 1923 and issued July 17, 1928. I am reporting both literally rather than reconciling them.

Abstract

There is no abstract. US patents were not required to include one until the 1952 Patent Act, and the authoritative full text of US 1,677,484 contains none. Any "abstract" for this patent circulating elsewhere is a modern editorial summary, not part of the grant. I will not fabricate one.

Plain-language overview of the invention

The patent covers a rotary-table glass-cutting/ornamenting machine for drinking glasses, tumblers and the like. A movable table R carries the working mechanism around a stationary base T that holds circumferentially arranged cams. Between the table and base, two opposed grinding wheels (36) cut patterns into a glass article G held in a rotating chuck (53), whose axis is inclined to the cutter axes. The cams raise/lower vertical plungers to, in sequence: (a) swing the grinders out of and into engagement with the article, (b) index the chuck step-by-step about its axis via a pawl/bell-crank and notched wheel, and (c) release the finished article so a new one can be loaded. The machine also has a guard/depth-gage plate over each wheel and a bayonet-type glass chuck with rubber seating pads.

Independent claims — plain-language grouping

The 58 claims fall into five functional families. Most are independent; where claims are plainly dependent (e.g., 31–32 on 30; 20–21, 18 on 17; 41–42 on 38–39), that is noted.

(A) Grinder mounting, oscillation, and drive (claims 1–24, 48–55)

• 1 — Two spaced rotating grinders, a rotating work holder between them, a power shaft driving the grinders, and means to adjust each grinder relative to the power shaft and axially of the work axis.
• 2 — Rotatable grinders, a work holder, a power shaft, and a driving connection. (Text truncated in the source; see uncertainty note.)
• 3 — The driving connection of the preceding claim, with means keeping it engaged with the power shaft while the grinder oscillates.
• 4 — Grinder, work holder, power shaft, drive connection, oscillation means, means preserving the drive during oscillation, plus adjustment relative to the power shaft and axially of the holder.
• 5 — Work holder + a slidable support movable toward/away from it, a grinder carrier pivotally mounted on that support, and means for periodic oscillation.
• 6 — Two spaced slidable supports, each relatively adjustable to the holder and to each other, with pivotally mounted carriers oscillated in unison.
• 7 / 8 / 9 — Same architecture as 5, adding a driven grinder and a power-shaft connection maintained regardless of slidable-support position (7), and also during carrier oscillation (8); claim 9 recites the grinder itself as pivotally mounted.
• 10 / 11 — Slidable support with a pivotally mounted grinder and periodic oscillation (10); plus means for adjusting a grinder parallel to its axis, independently of support adjustment (11).
• 12 — Two pivoted supports with rotary cutters, a spring biasing them toward each other and the holder, means for step-by-step holder rotation, and means to pull the cutters away against the spring during each indexing step.
• 13–16 — Two pivoted supports with tools and a holder between them, plus: adjusting means limiting oscillation and gages on the supports to limit cut depth (13); adjusting the operative relation of the oscillation means (14); crank arms on the supports driven by a movable member, with an adjusting device and a depth gage (15); an adjustable connection that holds the tools spaced from the holder after the article is removed (16).
• 17–18 — A pivoted support/tool with a plunger for oscillation and an adjustable connection that doubles as a stop limiting tool travel toward the holder once the article is gone (17), plus a depth gage (18).
• 19–20 — Means independent of the work holder for limiting support travel toward the holder, plus article-engaging depth limiting (19); additionally, means for shifting the pivot point of the support toward and away from the holder (20).
• 21 — Oscillation about a pivot plus pivot-point shifting toward/away from the holder.
• 22–24 — Table-based combinations: a grinder support pivoting in a plane at right angles to the table, a rotating table-supported holder, and vertically reciprocable members (operated in predetermined relation) for the grinder support and the indexing member (22); the same framework extended to include releasing mechanism for the finished article and patterning (23); and vertical reciprocators that respectively shift the axial angularity of the holder, rotate it, and move the grinder (24).
• 48–50 — Two pivoted supports with tools and a holder, plus adjustable connections for independent adjustment (48), simultaneous adjustment (49), or both independent and simultaneous adjustment (50).
• 51 — As 48, plus independent adjustment of the cutting tools longitudinally of their axes.
• 52–53 — A rotating shaft/tool on an oscillatory support with a drive member mounted independently of the support and (52, and the paired claim 53) a universal joint between a common drive shaft and each of two cutter shafts.
• 54–55 — A rotary cutter and a rotary holder whose axis is inclined to the cutter axis, with an oscillatory cutter support, an arm on the support, and means for actuating the arm (54); the two-cutter, inclined-holder-axis version (55).

(B) Guard plate and depth gage (claims 25–29)

• 25 — A grinding-wheel guard with a movable depth gage running diametrically across one face, and means for rectilinear gage adjustment.
• 26 — As 25, where the guard has a curved portion concentric with and partially encircling the wheel, with adjusting means cooperating with that curved portion.
• 27 — As 25, where the guard has a rearwardly extended projection and the gage is moved by means cooperating with it.
• 28 — A concentric curved guard portion with a rearward projection, and a gage with a lug engaging the projection, plus cooperating adjustment means.
• 29 — A guard abutment with a threaded rearward projection, a gage lug engaging it, a spring between lug and guard, and a threaded adjusting nut bearing on the lug.

(C) Glass-article chuck / bayonet gripping (claims 30–47)

• 30 — Chuck for a glass article whose extension has a seating surface and a circumferentially incomplete lug: body, seat, axially movable gripping member, and a complementary incomplete lug engaging the rear side of the article's lug to hold it on the seat.
• 31 — As 30, where the lug engagement occurs when the article is pushed against the gripping member and turned about its axis, plus stop members limiting that turning. 32 depends on the same concept with multiple lugs.
• 33 — Body with a seat engaging the article's external surface intermediate its ends, an axially movable gripping member, and means preventing rotation of the gripping member relative to the body in one direction.
• 34 — Apparatus for a glass article with a seating surface and a lug: chuck body, seat, axially movable holding structure, and a rigidly secured lug engaging the article's lug.
• 35 — Chuck with an axially movable gripping member whose front end has an incomplete lug with a circumferentially disposed open-ended slot, forming a bayonet connection with a complementary article; plus axial-moving means.
• 36 / 37 — Chuck for an article having circumferentially spaced lugs and a circumferential seating surface: body, seat, axially movable gripping member, and lugs engaging the article's lugs (36); plus biasing means yieldingly holding the article on the seat (37).
• 38 / 39 — Holder for an article with circumferentially spaced lugs and a seating surface: chuck body, seat, gripping member with over-hanging lugs engaging the rear sides of the article's lugs, and means for relative axial movement to control article position (38); the single-lug, axial-offset variant (39).
• 40 / 41 / 42 — Versions of 38/39 where the seating surface and the lug/extension are spaced axially (40), where the seating surface is circumferentially disposed (41), and where the seating surface sits between the article bottom and the lugs (42).
• 43 — Chuck with a body seating surface and an axially movable gripping member forming a bayonet joint with a complementary article.
• 44 — Chuck with a seat, an axially movable article-engaging gripping member, and means preventing rotative movement of the gripping member relative to the body.
• 45 / 46 / 47 — Chuck with a yieldable article-engaging surface on the seat (45); with resilient pads on the seat (46); with circumferentially spaced pads (47). (In the drawing these are the rubber pads 53a of the chuck.)
• 56 / 57 / 58 — Indexing drive: a work holder on a support rotated by a pawl pivoted on the support acting on a toothed member secured to the holder, with oscillation means (56); a chuck (57) and a chuck structure (58) in which a bell crank pivoted on the supporting member has one arm engaging the teeth and the other serving as an actuating lever.

Express uncertainty / caveats

1. No abstract exists — the granted document has none, and I did not invent one.
2. OCR corruption in the source text. The full text supplied is a low-quality OCR capture. At least these passages are truncated or garbled and I have not reconstructed them beyond what is legible: claim 2 (ends at "a power shaft, and"), the transition into claim 3 (begins mid-word: "nect-ion having means…"), the boundary between claims 10 and 11, and the lead-in of claim 53 (begins "of said shafts, an oscillatory support for each…"). Claim-family assignments are given accordingly.
3. Dependency mapping is my reading, not an authoritative parsed claim set. Because of the corruption, I cannot certify with certainty which of claims 30–47 are independent versus dependent.
4. Assignee is John E. Marsden by assignment, not a corporate assignee — the face of the patent names no company. The OCR also renders the assignee's city variously ("AMBLEIIB., PENNSYLVANIA" for the inventor, i.e., Ambler, PA) and "JOHN E. / F PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA"; I report the names literally and note the OCR noise rather than silently correcting it.
5. No CAFC 2026 or USPTO post-grant activity located. If you need a definitive litigation negative, I would confirm against the USPTO Patent Public Search and CAFC/ PACER dockets directly, since this patent's term ended in 1945 and any 2026 record would be an anomaly worth double-checking.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 1677484.

Let me check the specialized litigation portals directly.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent 1677484

Patent under search: US 1,677,484 — "Grinding apparatus"

• Inventor: John A. Milliken (Amber, Pennsylvania)
• Assignee of record: John E. Marsden (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
• Application No. 632,749, filed April 17, 1923 (a division of Serial No. 481,501, filed June 30, 1921, "Glass working apparatus")
• Granted/Published: July 17, 1928
• Anticipated expiration: July 17, 1945
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime

Finding: No litigation located

I performed searches across the sources you specified (Unified Patents Portal litigation case list, general litigation/patent-suit queries, and CourtListener/PACER-style indexes) using the literal number 1677484 in combination with "litigation," "infringement," "case," and the inventor/assignee names. I found no district court litigation, CAFC appeal, PTAB proceeding, or ITC investigation involving US 1,677,484.

Results returned for the string "1677484" were exclusively unrelated foreign or application-number hits and must not be conflated with the patent:

• EP 1677484 A2 ([Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.)) cited in Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Palo Alto Networks, Inc., No. 2:21-cv-00137 (E.D. Va.) — this is a European publication number, not US 1,677,484, and appears only as a prior-art citation in a docket exhibit.
• JP-C-1677484 (a Japanese patent) cited in WO 1994/026564.
• EP 1677484 A2 again in EP 1988018 A2's citation list.
• US 1,677,484's own Google Patents page, which lists three later patents citing it (US 2,468,404; US 2,688,214; US 2,795,087) — these are forward citations, not litigation.

No party, case name, docket number, jurisdiction, filing date, or outcome can be reported, because none exists in the sources searched.

Important caveats on scope of the search

1. Databases searched are essentially post-1990s constructs. Unified Patents' district court database, PACER/RECAP, and CourtListener are populated predominantly (and in the Unified case, entirely) from electronically filed cases. They do not systematically contain 1920s–1940s federal dockets. US 1,677,484 issued in 1928 and expired in 1945 — precisely the period worst covered by these tools.
2. Therefore, the absence of hits is not affirmative proof that no suit was ever filed. Between 1928 and 1945 the patent was enforceable and could in principle have been asserted (the assignee, John E. Marsden, was an individual owner, and the specification itself notes the parent application Serial No. 481,501). Any such historic action would be documented only in paper-era sources: the N.D. Pa. / E.D. Pa. federal district court dockets and bound volumes, the Federal Reporter (F.2d), the Federal Supplement, and the USPTO's own assignment/reissue records. I did not have access to, and did not search, those archival indexes.
3. Post-expiration litigation is legally impossible. A US patent's term is 17 years from grant for grants pre-dating the 1995 URAA change (as here), so the last possible date of infringement assertable under this patent was July 17, 1945. Any "litigation" reported against patent number 1,677,484 in modern venues would be a misidentification.

Recommended next steps if you require a definitive answer

• Search Google Scholar / Caselaw Access Project (case.law) and HeinOnline full-text for the patent number and for "Milliken" + "Marsden" + glass-cutting in F.2d volumes 1928–1946.
• Pull the USPTO Patent Assignment Abstract of Title for US 1,677,484 on Patent Center to identify all owners and any recorded litigations/licensees; a change of ownership record often coincides with enforcement activity.
• Note the Interference/subsequent-history angle: the parent application (Ser. No. 481,501) is the more likely vehicle for any proceedings, so check the file wrapper for the parent and for any interference proceeding, which would appear in the USPTO records but not in court databases.

Bottom line: As of today's search, there is no known litigation involving US patent 1,677,484 in the available databases — which is unsurprising given that the patent expired on July 17, 1945, approximately 81 years ago. I cannot rule out unindexed pre-1946 federal litigation, and I am flagging that limitation rather than asserting a negative I have not fully proven.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" finding with targeted searches before writing anything.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 1,677,484: zero (0). Breakdown: 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. A defendant facing any assertion of this patent has nothing to work with at the PTAB — not because the patent was hardened by a prior defense, but because no AIA trial was ever available in practice and none was ever filed against a patent that expired on 1945-07-17; the correct defensive posture is not "the claims survived IPRs," it is "this patent has been dead for roughly 81 years and cannot be asserted at all." The absence of any IPR here is not the usual signal of a patent nobody bothered to challenge — it is a consequence of the patent's age and expired term.

This is corroborated, not merely assumed. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal) returns no AIA trial proceedings. My independent web searches for the literal number in combination with IPR/PGR/CBM terminology, proceeding-number prefixes (IPR2023-, IPR2024-, IPR2025-), and the inventor/assignee names returned no proceeding. Search hits for "1677484" were exclusively unrelated identifiers and must not be conflated with this patent:

• EP 1677484 A2 ([Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.)) — a European publication number, appearing only as a prior-art citation in docket exhibits (e.g., Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Palo Alto Networks, Inc., No. 2:21-cv-00137 (E.D. Va.)).
• JP-C-1677484 — a Japanese patent, cited in WO 1994/026564.
• US 2,468,404 (1949-04-26, Miller Pottery Engineering Co.), US 2,688,214 (1954-09-07, Libbey Owens Ford Glass Co.), and US 2,795,087 (1957-06-11, Walker Victor) — these are forward citations to US 1,677,484, i.e., later patents that cite it as prior art. A forward citation is a citation, not an IPR. No petitioner is named by any of them.

Why the count is structurally zero (jurisdictional analysis)

This matters for a defendant because it explains why the absence of PTAB activity here carries no negative inference:

1. IPR availability date. Inter partes review under 35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319 became available for petitions filed on or after 2012-09-16 (AIA § 6(c)(2)(A)). US 1,677,484 issued 1928-07-17 and its 17-year term expired 1945-07-17. A 67-year gap separates expiration from the first day an IPR petition could have been filed. The patent was unenforceable for the entire life of the IPR regime.
2. PGR is categorically unavailable. Post-grant review under § 321 applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. This patent's effective filing date is 1923-04-17 (application Ser. No. 632,749), a division of Ser. No. 481,501 filed 1921-06-30 — roughly nine decades too early.
3. CBM is unavailable. Covered business method review under AIA § 18 required a patent claiming a "financial product or service." A glass-grinding and chuck apparatus (IPC B24B19/03 — grinding grooves in glass workpieces) does not qualify on its face, and the CBM program sunset for petitions filed after 2020-09-16 in any event.
4. Expired patents can be IPR targets (the Board accepts them; e.g., Sony Corp. v. Network-1 Techs., Inc., IPR2013-00280, addressing an expired patent), so I am not resting this on a claim that the Board lacks jurisdiction over expired patents. The point is instead that an IPR against an expired patent is economically pointless absent a live district court case, and the litigation report found no litigation either. Nothing drives a petition.
5. Pre-AIA contested proceedings would not appear here. The relevant historical vehicle would have been an interference before the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (or its predecessors) on the parent application Ser. No. 481,501, or a pre-1946 district court action in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Those are paper-era records; I have not searched them and do not claim they do not exist. They are not "AIA trial proceedings" and would not be reported as PTAB AIA trials regardless.

Proceedings

None. There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, Final Written Decision, settlement, or Federal Circuit appeal to report for any AIA trial type. I have not constructed placeholder sections, and I have not invented proceeding numbers (e.g., no "IPR2013-xxxxx" has been assigned to this patent). The per-proceeding template in the task specification is inapplicable.

For completeness against the elements you asked me to source:

• Claim-level outcomes: none exist because there is no FWD. I cannot state that any claim of US 1,677,484 was canceled, confirmed, or held unpatentable in an AIA trial.
• Judge panels: none. No APJ has touched this patent in an AIA trial.
• Federal Circuit appeals: none from a PTAB FWD. CourtListener may be queried directly at https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%221%2C677%2C484%22 for any historic court decision; none materializes as a PTAB appeal, for the reasons in item 5 above.
• Estoppel: no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches, because § 315(e)(2) is triggered only by a petitioner's final written decision. There is no petitioner and no FWD, so no party is estopped as to any ground.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims UNTESTED. None canceled; none sustained. Claims 1–58 of US 1,677,484 have never been adjudicated in an AIA trial, so there is no "surviving claim" list to hand a defendant and no canceled-claim list to hand a plaintiff. Every claim — from claim 1 (spaced rotatable grinders, rotatable work holder interposed between them, power shaft, and axial adjustment) through the chuck claims 30–47 and the indexing/pawl claims 56–58 — is formally intact on the printed patent and would be "presumed valid" under § 282 in the abstract. That presumption is legally meaningless here: for a patent to matter, there must be an enforceable term and an assertable act of infringement. Per the prior litigation section, the term ran out 1945-07-17. Damages cannot accrue, injunctions cannot issue, and 35 U.S.C. § 271 liability cannot attach to conduct occurring after that date. The practical meaning of "all claims untested" for this particular patent is irrelevance, not strength. Do not let anyone — an AI chatbot, a demand letter, or a portfolio broker's marketing sheet — invert that into "the patent has never been invalidated, so it must be good."

Estoppel landscape: no estoppel exists, but the point is academic. Because no petitioner obtained an FWD, no § 315(e)(2) bar blocks any prior art. For a hypothetical defendant, the entire prior-art universe remains theoretically available — including the three forward-citing patents (US 2,468,404; US 2,688,214; US 2,795,087), the sibling glass-cutting art in Google Patents' "Similar Documents" list (e.g., US 1,502,990, "Glass-cutting machine," 1924-07-29; US 1,615,978, 1927-02-01; US 1,650,345, "Glass-cutting apparatus," 1927-11-22), and the admitted prior art in the specification itself, which states at the outset that the invention "is shown in the drawings as adapted for use in connection with a rotatable table, driving mechanism therefor, and stationary cam members, such as shown for example in my application for patent above referred to" — i.e., the parent Ser. No. 481,501 is itself cited by the patentee as supplying the table, drive, and cam environment. But note the asymmetry: § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a litigation doctrine, and there is no litigation. A party served with a demand resting on US 1,677,484 does not need prior art at all; invalidity is the second line of defense behind non-infringement-by-impossibility.

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones fire. There is no serial petitioner (no petitioner at all), no patent-owner appeal practice at the CAFC from this patent, and no defensive aggregator in the chain. The patent's recorded ownership history is thin and old: granted to John A. Milliken of Ambler, Pennsylvania, and assigned to John E. Marsden of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — an individual, not a corporate monetization vehicle. There is no Unified Patents or RPX-style entity anywhere near it. A patent that never attracted a single IPR in 14 years of AIA availability, and that expired 67 years before IPR existed, is not a patent anyone is practicing — it is an artifact of the 1920s glass-cutting industry.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant (or advising one) and have received a communication citing US 1,677,484:

1. Stop. This is a records-integrity problem, not an invalidity problem. Confirm the patent's status directly on Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1677484A](/patent/US1677484A)/en), which states verbatim: "Anticipated expiration 1945-07-17" and "Status: Expired - Lifetime." An expired patent asserted as live is either (a) a misidentification of the patent number — very plausible given the recurring confusion with EP 1677484 A2 and JP-C-1677484 documented above — or (b) a bad-faith demand. In case (b), the appropriate response is a written demand for withdrawal and a warning under 35 U.S.C. § 285 / state unfair-competition and barratry theories, not a PTAB petition.
2. Verify ownership, not validity. Pull the USPTO Patent Assignment Abstract of Title for US 1,677,484 on Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) to identify the current record owner. Any party purporting to license or assert it should be matched against that record. An expired patent assigned to a long-defunct individual interest (John E. Marsden, Philadelphia) has essentially no assertion capacity.
3. If you nonetheless want the invalidity record, the cleanest citation is not an IPR (impossible) but the patent's own admission and the 1920s glass-cutting art. Start from the Google Patents "Similar Documents" list and the three forward citations (US 2,468,404; US 2,688,214; US 2,795,087), which collectively show the field was crowded well before and after the 1928 grant.
4. Cite the disposition precisely. There is no FWD to link and quote. The citable disposition is the term itself: granted 1928-07-17; anticipated expiration 1945-07-17. I will not manufacture a link to a PTAB E2E document that does not exist. If you need a primary-source URL, use the Google Patents page above and the PTAB's own search at https://ptab.uspto.gov/ (PTAB E2E / Patent Trial & Appeal Board) — a query on "1677484" there returns no AIA trial.

If you are auditing a portfolio that lists this patent as an active or enforceable asset: flag it. It is expired, was never the subject of an AIA trial, and — per the litigation section generated earlier — has no located litigation in the modern indexed sources. Any valuation model that includes US 1,677,484 as enforceable revenue-generating IP is wrong on the face of the record.

If you need a definitive answer on 1920s–1940s contested proceedings: search the Case Law Access Project (https://case.law) and HeinOnline full-text for the patent number and for "Milliken" + "Marsden" + glass in F.2d volumes covering 1928–1946, and pull the file wrapper for parent application Ser. No. 481,501 for interference records. Those are the only places a pre-AIA contest on this family would surface, and — as flagged above — I did not have access to them.

One explicit limitation. I cannot prove a universal negative. What I can state with confidence is (i) the USPTO structured data contains no AIA trial proceeding for this patent, (ii) my independent searches found none, and (iii) the statutory availability windows for IPR, PGR, and CBM are inconsistent with this patent having been challenged in an AIA trial. I am not asserting that no pre-AIA interference or pre-1946 court action ever existed — only that if one did, it would not be an AIA trial proceeding and would not appear in the sources you specified.

I'll research the assignment and ownership history for US 1,677,484 across the available sources.

Let me dig into the inventor, the assignee, and the GoodIP records.

Inventors

John A. Milliken — sole named inventor, of Ambler, Pennsylvania (the printed patent face reads "AMBLEIIB.,'1E:FINNSYLVAINIA," an OCR corruption of "Ambler, Pennsylvania"). GoodIP indexes him variously as "Milliken John A" and "Miliken John A."

• Employer at the time of filing: not determinable from the record. The chain here is an inventor-to-individual assignment, not inventor-to-corporation. There is no corporate employer of record on the face of the patent or in any indexed source I could reach. Milliken's filing output (nine US patents assigned to the same individual, per GoodIP) marks him as a professional glass-machinery inventor who worked under assignment to a private owner rather than a company invention-rights agreement.
• Timing pattern: the application itself is a division of Serial No. 481,501, filed June 30, 1921, "Glass working apparatus," so the inventive activity long predates the April 17, 1923 filing of the divisional. Milliken assigned to the same assignee (Marsden) repeatedly from at least 1916–1923, so there is no "inventor departs within 12 months" signal — the relationship was continuous, not transient.

Source: US 1,677,484 face and specification (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1677484A](/patent/US1677484A)/en); GoodIP assignee profile (https://goodip.io/iq/assignee/john-e-marsden).

Original assignee

John E. Marsden, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — an individual, not a company. The face of the issued patent reads "JOHN A. MILLIKEN … ASSIGNOR TO JOHN E. MARSDEN, OF PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA."

• Primary line of business: On the record, Marsden is a private patent proprietor / individual financier of glass-machinery inventions, not an operating manufacturer with a detectable trade identity. GoodIP credits "JOHN E MARSDEN" with 12 filings (9 US, 3 Canadian), first publication 1916, of which 10 are attributed to John A. Milliken as inventor. The portfolio is thematically homogeneous — glass cutting, glass grinding, glass blowing, glassware molding, glass ornamenting (US 1,650,375; US 1,635,491; US 1,741,708; US 1,482,760; US 1,503,962; US 1,396,691; CA 242,683; CA 237,657; CA 242,171).
• Did the assignee ship a product embodying the claims? Not determinable and unlikely as a corporate matter. The named owner is a natural person in Philadelphia; I found no company, brand, or catalog tying John E. Marsden to a shipping glassware line. Whether his patented machines were built and operated under license by a glassworks is not documented in the sources I could reach.
• Current status: As to the patent, expired July 17, 1945 — no current owner exists in any legally meaningful sense. As to the individual, no corporate-status history (acquisition, dissolution, bankruptcy) applies to a natural person; the pre-1928 records are paper-era and outside modern corporate registries.

Note on OCR/entity confusion: GoodIP's "main competitors … LIBBEYOWENS FORD GLASS COMPANY, FAIRMOUNT GLASS WORKS INC and MAUL TECHNOLOGY CORP" is an algorithmic citation-similarity inference, not evidence of Marsden's business or litigation. Do not treat it as a competitive-relationship finding.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Center has no records for US 1,677,484.

This is the expected and correct result, not a search failure, for three reasons:

1. Database coverage boundary. The Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO's own statement of coverage). US 1,677,484 issued July 17, 1928 and expired July 17, 1945 — its entire enforceable life and the events of record lie decades before the database's coverage window.
2. The only assignment of record is the face-of-patent transfer. The conveyance that matters — John A. Milliken → John E. Marsden — was executed pre-issuance and recorded with the USPTO in the 1920s, on the paper/microfilm system that predates and is not indexed by the electronic Assignment Center. Accordingly no reel/frame number, execution date, recording date, or correspondent of record is exposed in the online system. I will not invent a reel/frame.
3. Google Patents legal events are silent on ownership. The Google Patents legal-events set for US 1,677,484 shows only the grant and the "Expired – Lifetime" status (anticipated expiration 1945-07-17) — no assignment, security-agreement, merger, or change-of-name events. Google's ownership fields simply mirror the face-of-patent assignee (Marsden).

Per the task's stop rule, I am stopping here. Because there is no Assignment Center record, there is no reel/frame chain, no correspondent to test for recurrence, and no dated transfer sequence from which to build the Mermaid timeline or score the eight NPE/troll signals. Producing those sections would require inventing data. The residual questions (any 1928–1945 assignment, reissue, or interference recorded only on paper) belong in the USPTO paper assignment indexes, the parent's file wrapper (Ser. No. 481,501), and the Official Gazette 1928–1945 — archival sources I did not have access to in this session.

Verification link

USPTO Patent Assignment Center (search by patent number 1677484): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — legacy/indexed equivalent: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

Contradictions flagged

• Inventor residence: the previously generated "Litigation summary" states the inventor was "of Amber, Pennsylvania." The patent face OCR ("AMBLEIIB") resolves to Ambler, Pennsylvania, a real Montgomery County borough; "Amber, Pennsylvania" does not correspond to the record. Ambler is correct; the prior section should be read as containing a transcription error.
• Assignee characterization: the prior section correctly identified "Assignee of record: John E. Marsden (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)," which is consistent with the patent face. No contradiction there.
• No conflict with the prior section's core finding that no litigation exists: an unlitigated patent owned throughout by an individual, expired in 1945, and absent from a post-1980 database is internally consistent.

I'll search the USPTO and related patent databases for the literal number 1677484 and for the references actually cited in it.

Prior-Art Search Report — US 1,677,484 ("Grinding Apparatus")

Scope note: I was asked to search USPTO for the literal number 1677484 and to walk "each patent citation" for it. I want to give you the honest structural answer first, because it materially changes the report: US 1,677,484 has no prior-art patent citations in its USPTO record. Everything that Google Patents and the USPTO display around this number runs the other direction. I explain below, then give the §102 analysis for the candidates that do exist.

1. What searching "1677484" actually returns

The number resolves uniquely to:

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1677484A](/patent/US1677484A)/en

There is nothing else at that number. The other "1677484" hits that appear in search are different artifacts and must not be conflated: EP 1677484 A2 (Microsoft), JP-C-1677484, and an unrelated application number. None is US 1,677,484.

2. The critical finding: there is no "References Cited" section

In the authoritative full text of US 1,677,484 supplied above — which reproduces the grant including its claim list — there is no examiner-cited prior-art list ("References Cited") and no "Patent References" table. US patents of 1928 frequently went to issue with an empty or nominal citation list, and this one is consistent with that. Accordingly:

There are zero references on the face of US 1,677,484 that can be analyzed as §102 prior art. I will not manufacture a citation list to fill the gap.

3. The only reference cited in the specification itself

The single reference to earlier matter in this patent is made by the inventor in the specification, not by the examiner:

§102 / §103 exposure: This is the closest thing to a prior-art reference, but its status is legally delicate and I cannot resolve it from the data available:

• If Ser. No. 481,501 matured into a patent with a grant date more than one year before April 17, 1923 (i.e., before April 17, 1922), the resulting patent would be a §102(b) printed publication / patent as to the common disclosure, and would also raise obviousness-type double patenting since the two share an inventor and an assignee (Marsden). A patent issuing from 481,501 in 1923–1926 would fall inside the co-pendency overlap window and would be a §102(a)/§102(g) / ODP issue rather than §102(b).
• Which claims it touches: potentially 22, 23, 24 (the table + vertically-reciprocable-cam-member combination), and by environment, the cam-actuated cycling of claims 12–16 and 48–51.

I could not confirm the patent number that issued from Ser. No. 481,501 in the sources available to me, so I am not asserting one. Flagging this as the highest-value open item: retrieve the 481,501 file wrapper / issue patent via USPTO Patent Public Search before relying on any §102 theory keyed to the parent.

4. The three "Cited By" patents — these are NOT prior art

The Google Patents page shows a "Cited By (3)" table. Read the direction carefully: these are patents whose own prosecution cited US 1,677,484 as prior art against them. They post-date US 1,677,484 (1928), so they are legally incapable of anticipating it:

Corroboration for the middle row — FreePatentsOnline's US 2,688,214 lists "1677484 | … | 1928-07-17" in its US Patent References — https://FreePatentsOnline.com/[2688214](/patent/2688214).html

§102 analysis for these three: none applies. Under both pre-AIA §102(a) and §102(b), a reference must pre-date the applicant's invention or the critical date (April 17, 1922). All three are 1943–1953. They cannot anticipate any of claims 1–58. Their only value to you is as §102 prior art against later patents — the reverse of what was asked.

5. "Similar Documents" — algorithmic, explicitly not citations

The page also renders a "Similar Documents" list. I want to be blunt: this is a similarity ranking, not a citation set, and it is not an examiner or inventor citation. Treating it as "the prior art cited in 1677484" would be a factual error. That said, it is the only remaining source of potentially anticipatory art pre-dating the 1923 filing, so here is the subset with pre-1923 publication dates plus the glass/lens-grinding family, with §102 status:

On "which claim(s) it potentially anticipates" for these items: I am not going to assign claims to references I have not read and whose filing dates I have not verified. Doing so on a publication-date-only basis would be fabrication. What I can say with confidence is the bounding logic:

• Claims 25–29 (guard plate + depth gage) and claims 30–47 (bayonet glass chuck with rubber seating pads) are the most commercially distinctive and the most searchable families; the lens edge-grinding art (GB 151081 A; US 1527594 A; US 1657720 A) is where a §102 hit on the grinding-wheel geometry and depth-gaging concepts would most plausibly come from, and the US 1502990 A / US 1615978 A / US 1650345 A "Glass-cutting" trio is where a hit on the rotary-table/cam-indexing combination (claims 12–24) would most plausibly come from.
• Claims 36, 37, 45, 46, 47 (circumferentially spaced lugs; resilient pads / yieldable seating surface) are narrow, structure-specific claims — a §102 anticipation there requires a reference showing a bayonet lug and a compliant seat, which the lens and gear-grinding art above does not appear to do.
• The sheet-metal/machine-tool art (US 2300481, US 2056149) post-dates and is irrelevant.

6. What I could not determine — stated plainly

1. No examiner-cited prior art exists on this patent's face, per the full text I hold. If you have a USPTO image-PDF of the grant showing a "References Cited" block that the OCR dropped, that would override this — please supply it.
2. The issue patent for parent Ser. No. 481,501 is unidentified. This is the single most consequential gap. Given the shared inventor and assignee, it is the reference most likely to matter under §102(a)/(b) and double patenting.
3. Filing dates for the "Similar Documents" entries are unverified, so for all of them I could compute only the §102(b)/publication-date test, not the §102(a) invention-date test.
4. No post-grant or court proceeding involving US 1,677,484 was located, consistent with its 1945 expiration (see the litigation section, which I am not restating here).

Recommended next steps to close items 1–3

• Pull US 1,677,484 and Ser. No. 481,501 on USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter to obtain the certified "References Cited" block and the parent's issue number.
• Search Google Scholar / Caselaw Access Project (case.law) and F.2d/F. Supp. 1928–1946 for enforcement history, which often co-occurs with a reissue that would itself be a new §102 reference.

Bottom line: For US 1,677,484 the prior-art citation set is empty on the patent face; the only specification-cited reference is the inventor's own parent application Ser. No. 481,501; the three "Cited By" patents are later art that 1,677,484 anticipated them, not the reverse; and the only pre-1923 publications I can identify as qualifying under §102(b) are US 1,182,362 (1916) and GB 151,081 (1920) — neither of which I can presently tie to a specific claim of US 1,677,484 on the evidence available.

I'll ground this analysis by retrieving what I can on the specific references listed on the patent page, since the page itself gives only titles and dates.

Very useful. Let me pull filing dates for the remaining pre-1923 candidates, since filing date (not publication date) governs prior-art status here.

Obviousness Analysis — US 1,677,484 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Patent: US 1,677,484 — "Grinding Apparatus" (Milliken)
Filing date: April 17, 1923 (Ser. No. 632,749); parent Ser. No. 481,501 filed June 30, 1921
Granted: July 17, 1928 | Expired: July 17, 1945
Source page: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1677484/en

I. Three threshold problems that must be stated before any § 103 combination is built

This builds on the two prior sections (patent summary; litigation summary), which are incorporated and not repeated. Their "no CAFC 2026 activity" and "no litigation" negatives remain consistent with everything below. Three new threshold issues arise specifically for an obviousness analysis, and each materially changes the answer.

Problem 1 — § 103 did not exist when this patent was granted

US 1,677,484 issued July 17, 1928. Section 103 was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952, effective January 1, 1953. The governing standard in 1928 was the common-law "invention" requirement read into R.S. § 4886 — i.e., whether the variation from the prior art required "more ingenuity and skill… than were possessed by an ordinary mechanic acquainted with the business" (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1851)), later tightened by Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941) ("flash of creative genius") and Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equipment Corp., 340 U.S. 147 (1950).

A modern § 103 analysis is therefore anachronistic as to this patent. It is not useless — courts have treated § 103 as a codification of Hotchkiss, so the two tests are usually congruent — but the label "§ 103" applied to a 1928 grant is retrospective. I am flagging it rather than silently rewriting the statutory history.

Problem 2 — the page contains no prior-art citations at all

The fetched page has a "Cited By (3)" section and a "Similar Documents" section, but no backward "Citations" section — no examiner-cited references, no front-page "References Cited." The only things labeled "prior art" on the page are:

• "Prior art keywords": article, work holder, supports, holder, support. These are Google's machine-extracted claim keywords, not references.
• "Prior art date 1928-07-17": the publication date, already flagged as anomalous in the earlier summary section.

So the "Prior Art section" the task directs me to use is, in substance, the Similar Documents list — a machine-generated similarity neighbor set — plus three forward citations. I am analyzing what is actually on the page and saying plainly that it is not an examiner's prior-art record.

Problem 3 — most of the "prior art" on the page is legally incapable of being prior art

The critical date is at latest June 30, 1921 (the parent filing; Milliken's invention date is necessarily no later than that). Under R.S. § 4886 as it then read, a reference patent or printed publication anticipates only if it pre-dates the applicant's invention; the two-year bar applied to public use/on-sale, not to publications. Applying that to the page's publication dates:

Result: of 28 documents on the page, only two qualify as prior art on the face of the record.

Corroboration for the two date-sensitive entries, drawn from live search:

• US 1,182,362 A: "US1182362A (en) * | 1915-03-23 | 1916-05-09 | William F Fischer | Grinding-machine" — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US4026073A](/patent/US4026073A)#4 ; full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1182362A/en
• US 1,615,978 A: "US1615978A (en) * | 1923-09-14 | 1927-02-01 | Greer James Boyd | Glass-cutting machine" — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US2700255A](/patent/US2700255A)/en#3
• US 1,650,345 A: "US1650345A (en) * | 1925-08-06 | 1927-11-22 | Greer Mfg Company | Glass-cutting apparatus" — same source.

The single most structurally similar document to US 1,677,484 — Greer's US 1,615,978 A — was filed September 14, 1923, five months after Milliken's own filing and more than two years after Milliken's parent filing. It is not prior art. It is a contemporary, later-filed competitor in the same art. That is the opposite of a § 103 attack vector; if anything it is evidence that Milliken's disclosure was early in this field.

II. The two references that do qualify, and what they teach

US 1,182,362 A — Fischer, "Grinding-machine," filed 1915-03-23, granted 1916-05-09. A grinding wheel with truing means plus a follower cooperating with forms to reproduce regular or irregular contours; a revoluble circular head/table (42′, 46) carrying a form and a second revoluble head/table carrying the article to be ground; rack-and-pinion and worm adjustment of table height. It is a form-controlled profile grinder with rotatable work support — relevant general art, but it discloses no opposed pair of cutters, no spring bias, no cam-sequence table indexing, and no glass-article chuck.

GB 151081 A — "machine for grinding the edges of lenses," published 1920-09-13. Lens-edge grinders of this vintage characteristically use a rotating work holder (lens chuck) presented to a rotating abrasive wheel on an adjustable carrier. Relevant for the "rotary holder + grinding wheel" sub-combination, but again discloses nothing about the claimed sequence-control architecture.

Neither of these references, alone or together, discloses the elements that carry the asserted novelty of the Milliken claims: the pair of spring-biased pivoted cutter-frame supports on a travelling table, the three vertical plungers actuated in predetermined sequence (cutter oscillation, holder indexing, article release), the plunger-to-support adjustable connection doubling as a stop, the pivot-point shifting mechanism, or the bayonet glass chuck with resilient seat pads.

III. Answer to the question as posed: the hypothetical combinations

The task asks me to identify combinations that would render the claims obvious and the motivation to combine. The honest answer is that on this record no valid § 103 combination exists, for the reasons in Part I. To be useful rather than merely negative, I set out below the combinations a challenger would have to build, marked clearly as hypothetical — each requires either (a) treating the post-dating Similar Documents as art, or (b) moving the critical date forward. Each is also stated with the reason it fails.

Combination H1 — Family A (claims 1–16, 22–24, 48–51, 54–55): US 1,615,978 A (Greer) as primary + US 1,182,362 A (Fischer).
Greer's own summary states the machine includes "a chuck carried upon an inclined chuck shaft and rotated intermittently…; pivoted frames carrying the cutting wheels and rocked simultaneously upon their pivots so as to move the cutting wheels toward and away from the chuck; a compensating device…; a throw-out device…; and a banding device." That maps with uncomfortable precision onto Milliken claims 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 54, 55 (inclined axis, two pivoted cutter frames, simultaneous oscillation, uniform-depth compensation, throw-out). Fischer would be cited for follower-controlled contour grinding on revoluble tables.
Motivation a challenger would assert: same field (abrasive machining of glass/contours), same problem (controlled-depth peripheral cutting on a rotating work support), and predictable combination of known mechanisms.
Why it fails here: Greer (1923-09-14) and its sibling US 1,650,345 A (1925-08-06, Greer Mfg. Co.) both post-date both critical dates. Fischer is far-field and supplies none of the claim-defining structure.

Combination H2 — claims 52–53 (universal-joint drive maintained through oscillation): H1 plus any universal-joint teaching.
The universal joint is 17th-century mechanical art (Hooke). A challenger would argue that maintaining drive across an oscillating pivot by interposing a universal joint (39) between a common power shaft and each cutter shaft is a known technique applied to a known problem — the classic KSR "known technique" rationale.
Why it fails here: no qualifying reference on the page discloses or suggests an oscillating cutter with a maintained drive; the combination presupposes H1, which itself fails.

Combination H3 — Family B (claims 25–29): Greer's guard/compensating plate + US 1,656,347 A "Sizing device for surface grinders" (1928-01-17).
A threaded rod (92) through a slotted lug (93), a spring (95) between lug and guard, and a thumb nut (96) is a textbook screw-and-spring adjustable stop. A challenger would call this a predictable arrangement of known elements with the predictable result of a settable depth limit.
Why it fails here: US 1,656,347 A post-dates by five years; and the guard-plus-diametrically-extending-gage sub-combination is not disclosed in either qualifying reference.

Combination H4 — Family C (claims 30–47): Greer's chuck figures (its Figs. 10–11 are a longitudinal section through the chuck with a tumbler in place, and an end view of the chuck) + notoriously old bayonet couplings (lamp sockets, firearm bayonets) + rubber-pad seating.
A challenger's argument: a bayonet joint is ancient; riveting resilient pads to a glass seat to avoid chipping is an ordinary expedient; ergo claims 30–47 are obvious.
Why it fails here: Greer's chuck disclosure post-dates; and "known expedient" arguments under § 103 still require a reference or an articulated reason. The circumferentially incomplete lug cooperating with stop pins 63/64 to limit rotation (claims 30–32, 43) is a specific, claimed geometry that the page's art does not supply.

Combination H5 — Family D (claims 56–58): Greer's "intermittent gears" + generic pawl-and-ratchet indexing.
Pawl-and-ratchet indexing is ubiquitous in machine tools, and claim 56/57/58 (pawl pivoted on the support, toothed member on the holder, bell crank with one arm engaging the teeth) reads on it.
Why it fails here: Greer post-dates; and no qualifying reference on the page is directed to work-holder indexing.

IV. Elements found in no reference on the page

These are the strongest non-obviousness features, and they are the reason even a generous combination analysis comes up short:

1. Claims 16–18 — the adjustable connection between plunger and support that doubles as a stop holding the tools spaced from the holder after the article is removed. This is a maintenance/safety function; nothing on the page teaches dual-function stop geometry.
2. Claims 20–21 — shifting the pivot point of the support toward and away from the holder (Milliken's slidable members 30 on pivot shafts 29, adjusted by screw 43 acting on abutment 44).
3. Claim 24 — three distinct vertically reciprocable members respectively shifting holder axial angularity, rotating the holder, and moving the grinder.
4. Claim 12 — spring 98 biasing the cutters into engagement with the article, with the cam acting against the spring to withdraw them. Greer has a "throw-out," which is functionally the reverse bias arrangement.
5. Claims 22–23 — "means for operating said reciprocable members in predetermined relation" to effect pattern cutting, cutter withdrawal, and release in sequence. This is the sequence-control concept, and no reference on the page discloses it.

V. Secondary considerations

None available on this record. Notably, the assignee of record is an individual, John E. Marsden of Philadelphia (not a corporation), and the litigation summary already establishes no located enforcement history. There is therefore no evidence of commercial success, licensing, copying, or industry praise that could be weighed for or against obviousness. I decline to infer any.

VI. Conclusion

Under § 103 as applied prospectively to a 1928 grant, the claims of US 1,677,484 are not rendered obvious by the prior art appearing on the patent page. The record supplies only two qualifying references — US 1,182,362 A (Fischer, 1916) and GB 151081 A (1920) — and neither discloses the claim-defining architecture (opposed spring-biased pivoted cutter frames on a travelling table; sequence-controlled vertical plungers; dual-function stop; pivot-shifting; bayonet glass chuck with resilient seats). The documents that would have made a § 103 case — principally Greer US 1,615,978 A (filed 1923-09-14) and US 1,650,345 A (filed 1925-08-06) — are legally unavailable: they were filed after Milliken and after his 1921 parent, making them later art in the same field rather than prior art.

Confidence and limits, stated explicitly:

• The page supplies only titles and publication dates for the Similar Documents; it does not supply their disclosures, and there is no examiner-cited prior-art list for this patent. My element-by-element analysis of the Greer and Fischer disclosures rests on the claim/abstract text surfaced in the searches cited above, not on full-text review of every reference. Full texts would need to be pulled before any combination were relied upon.
• I could not verify filing dates for US 1,452,803 A, US 1,502,990 A, US 1,527,594 A, US 1,561,214 A, US 1,629,910 A, US 1,651,225 A, US 1,656,347 A, US 1,657,720 A, US 1,756,646 A, or US 1,824,559 A; on publication date alone none of them qualifies, and several are lens-, gear-, or wheel-dressing art rather than glass-cutting art.
• A genuinely complete obviousness study would need: (i) the file wrapper of parent Ser. No. 481,501 for any interference or cited art; (ii) non-patent prior art — the 1910s–20s glass-decorating trade literature, catalogues of Milliken's and Greer's competitors, and the Glass Industry / American Glass Review trade press; and (iii) the pre-1952 printed-publication record, since pre-1952 law gave publications (not patent filing dates) their date of effect and Google Patents indexes patents only.
• The truncated claim passages flagged in the earlier summary (claim 2, the claim 2/3 boundary, the claim 10/11 boundary, the claim 53 lead-in) remain truncated; no claim mapping here depends on reconstructing them.