US 1697127

I'll run the requested searches for this specific identifier before summarizing.

Search results (as run)

Uncertainty / method limits: I could not run a live USPTO PatentCenter/PAIR or CAFC docket query with these tools; the summary below is grounded in the full authoritative text of US1697127A (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US1697127](/patent/US1697127)/en) together with the searches above. The absence of any CAFC 2026 activity is consistent with the record showing this patent expired in 1946. Note also that the bare string "1697127" is ambiguous across offices (EP/JP) — those matches are not this patent.

US 1,697,127 — bibliographic data

• Title: Automatic feeder for pickers, willows, etc.
• Patent number: US1697127A (granted/publication 1929‑01‑01)
• Application no.: US265733A — Serial No. 265,733
• Filing date: 1928‑03‑29 (priority 1928‑03‑29)
• Inventors: James E. Miller; James A. Cash
• Assignee: Fred Franke & Co., Louisville, Kentucky (stated in the printed grant as "a corporation of Kentucky"; Google's OCR of the assignment line is garbled — "FREEDI FRANKIE 85 (10;, JOE; LOUISVILLE, KENTU'GKY" — and Google itself flags listed assignees as possibly inaccurate)
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 1946‑01‑01
• Classification: D01G 23/00 (feeding fibres to machines; conveying fibres between machines)
• Abstract: None. The printed patent carries no abstract (US abstracts were not required for applications of this era). The closest thing is the specification's statement of objects, summarized below.
• Claims: 7 total; all seven are written as independent claims (no dependent claims).

Subject matter (from the specification): An automatic feeder/bale breaker for cotton pickers, willows and cleaning machines. Cotton from the bale is dumped in a hopper; a spiked endless apron (15) at the bottom pulls off small tufts. To relieve strain on that apron, a series (specifically eight) of spiked rollers is mounted transversely above/across the apron, the spikes of adjacent rollers intermeshing so the rollers tear the bale apart and bear the strain instead of the flexible apron, feeding the apron between each pair of rollers. A doffer (24) and a linked toothed element (30) knock back oversized lumps. Feed/output rate is regulated by a pivoted hopper wall (13) that slides along the row of rollers, cutting lower rollers out of effective contact and thereby reducing exposed picking area/capacity — addressing the stated problem that a conventional feeder delivers a fixed amount even when only some of the Garnett machines it serves are running.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 – Spiked-roller feeder/bale-breaker. A hopper with an upward-and-rearward extending endless spiked apron at the bottom, its lower end horizontal; rollers supporting the apron and means to drive it; plus an upward-and-rearward inclined series of spiked rollers parallel to and outward of the apron, with the spikes of one roller passing between the spikes of the adjacent roller, and means to drive those rollers.

Claim 2 – Drive/transmission combination. A hopper with a downward-and-forward inclined back wall and a horizontal lower wall; an apron parallel to both walls (so it has an inclined upper portion and a horizontal lower portion); a series of spiked rollers whose shafts are journalled in the hopper's lateral walls and spaced from the apron's upper flight; drive to one roller shaft and power transmission to the other roller shafts so all rotate in the same direction; and apron drive via sprockets on an apron roller shaft and a roller shaft joined by a chain.

Claim 3 – Output control by a movable hopper wall (broadest of the control claims). A hopper with picking mechanism along its bottom, plus a wall forming one hopper wall, pivoted to the hopper, movable lengthwise of the picking mechanism and adjustable in that direction to reduce or increase the exposed area of the picking mechanism.

Claim 4 – Claim 3 plus adjustment hardware. Same pivoted, lengthwise-adjustable wall, with adjusting means comprising a lever having an arm operatively connected to the wall and a latch for latching the lever in any adjusted position (in the disclosure: ratchet sector 43, lever 44, pawl 45, hand grip 46, shaft 40, arm 41, link 42).

Claim 5 – Geometry-specific control. Hopper with inclined bottom wall and horizontal lower wall; a series of picking rollers parallel to the rear wall; an endless spiked belt running parallel to the rear wall and then parallel to the bottom wall and beneath the lowest roller; a wall pivoted at its upper end to the hopper side walls with its lower end movable at right angles to the axes of the picking rollers to vary the exposed roller area; and means for shifting the wall inward/outward and holding it in position.

Claim 6 – Pivoted-at-top wall, lower-end motion. A hopper with picking mechanism along its bottom, and a wall constituting one hopper wall, pivoted at its upper end to the hopper, with its lower end movable toward or from the lower end of the picking mechanism to reduce or increase the exposed area of the picking mechanism.

Claim 7 – Feeder/opener with intermeshing rollers and common drive. A hopper with an upwardly and outwardly inclined wall; an endless spiked apron parallel and adjacent to that wall; a series of spiked rollers located between the apron and the hopper mouth, set so the spikes of one roller pass between those of an adjacent roller; and means for driving the rollers and simultaneously driving the apron.

Cautions on the source text

• The fetched text is OCR of a 1929 print: "doflier"/"dofter" = doffer; the spiked-roller reference numeral appears inconsistently as 31 and 21; and "FREEDI FRANKIE 85 (10;" is a garbling of Fred Franke & Co. I have not auto-corrected these in the interpretation, but flagged them, since the garbled numeral/assignee text cannot be treated as authoritative identifiers.
• Two internal inconsistencies exist in the description itself (claims 5 and 6 both speak of a "rear wall" while the wall described is elsewhere called the front/lower wall) — I report the claim language literally rather than harmonizing it.
• No CAFC 2026 docket entry, USPTO post‑grant proceeding, or 2026 live status update for this patent was found in the searches run; per the record, the patent expired in 1946 and any such 2026 activity is unlikely.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 1697127.

Let me search additional litigation databases.

Let me try a few more targeted searches on litigation-specific sources.

Litigation search results for US Patent 1,697,127

No litigation is known involving US Patent 1,697,127.

I searched litigation-focused sources (Unified Patents litigation/PTAB portals, CourtListener/PACER-indexed material, CAFC-related documents, and general web) for the specific number 1,697,127 and for the patent's identifying details. I found no case — district court, ITC, PTAB, or Federal Circuit — in which this patent was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue.

Important caveats on the hits I did get

Every apparent "match" was a false positive for a different identifier. I am not auto-correcting these — I am flagging them as unrelated to the patent you asked about:

• US 9,404,127 — an Arbutus/Genevant lipid-nanoparticle patent (IPR by Moderna; PTAB invalidation; Fed. Cir. affirmance in 2023). This is a 9,404,127 patent, not 1,697,127.
• "2018 WL 1697127" — a Westlaw citation in an Ameranth v. various brief, referring to Local Intelligence, LLC litigation. This is a Westlaw database number, not a patent number.
• CVE 1697127 — a Chilean corporate-notice identifier. Unrelated.
• Other results (Unified Patents NPE/PTAB material, Korean litigation surveys) merely happened to surface the Unified Patents litigation portal URLs cited in the prompt, not the patent.

Why no litigation is expected

For context, from the authoritative patent record itself:

• Patent: US 1,697,127 A, "Automatic feeder for pickers, willows, etc."
• Inventors: James E. Miller and James A. Cash
• Original/current assignee: Fred Franke & Co. (Louisville, Kentucky)
• Filing/priority date: March 29, 1928 (App. No. US 265,733)
• Grant/publication date: January 1, 1929
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration January 1, 1946 (per the Google Patents record)

Because the patent expired in 1946, any infringement action would have had to be filed in that ~17-year window (roughly 1929–1946). Such old cases, if any existed, would generally not appear in modern electronic litigation databases (Unified Patents, CourtListener, PACER, the CAFC docket), which cover the modern era. I cannot rule out a 1929–1946-era suit appearing only in print/archival sources (e.g., old Federal Reporter volumes, the Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents, or contemporaneous trade press), and I do not have high-confidence information about such archival records.

Bottom line

• Known litigation: none.
• Plaintiff/defendant/jurisdiction/case number/filing date/outcome: not applicable — no case identified.
• If you need to confirm the pre-1946 period, the appropriate sources would be historical print reporters and USPTO/trade archives rather than the modern portals specified; I cannot verify those with the tools available here.

I'll verify the structured block's "no proceedings" default with a quick search before writing up.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 1,697,127 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs, no derivation proceedings, no PTAB appeals — and none is legally or practically available, because the patent was filed 1928-03-29, granted 1929-01-01, and expired 1946-01-01, so any defendant receiving a demand letter citing it today holds a paper patent whose last enforceable day was over eighty years ago, not a "hardened" one.

The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest, current as of 2026-09-30) returns an empty proceedings list. My independent search corroborated that: no petition, institution decision, FWD, or CAFC appeal referencing US 1,697,127 surfaced. The absence here is not the usual "well-asserted patent that simply hasn't been hit yet" signal — it is a structural impossibility.

No proceedings to document

The per-proceeding template (proceeding number, petitioner, panel, grounds, FWD, settlement, appeal) does not apply, and I will not manufacture docket numbers to fill it. The reasons the list is empty are all determinative:

• The patent term ran out on 1946-01-01. Under the pre-URAA term rule (17 years from grant) applicable to a 1929 grant, US 1,697,127 expired 1946-01-01 — the same date Google Patents records as "Anticipated expiration." Google Patents' legal status is "Expired - Lifetime." Source: US1697127A on Google Patents.
• The AIA trial regime did not exist until 2012-09-16. IPR/PGR/CBM practice under §§ 311–329 postdates this patent's expiration by 66 years. There was no forum in which a "petitioner" could have been a party.
• Damages are time-barred. 35 U.S.C. § 286 bars recovery for infringement occurring more than six years before suit. The last six-year window closed in 1946 (i.e., roughly 1940–1946). Even setting aside expiration, no live damages theory survives.
• Standing to petition is therefore absent in practice. Although the PTAB has permitted IPRs to proceed against expired patents where live pre-expiration damages remained in play (the Sony v. Yissum line of cases, applying Phillips claim construction), that doctrine presupposes a pending assertion with recoverable damages. An expired-1946 patent with no § 286 window gives a would-be petitioner nothing to defend against.
• PGR and CBM are categorically unavailable. PGR requires an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16; CBM requires a covered financial-services business-method patent. US 1,697,127 is a cotton-feeder mechanical patent classified in D01G23/00 (Feeding fibres to machines) — neither fits.

Caveat on the OCR: the machine-readable text at Google Patents is heavily corrupted (the grantee prints as "FREEDI FRANKIE: 85 (10;" for Fred Franke & Co., Louisville, Kentucky; spiked rollers are referenced as both "31" and "21"; claim 4's number renders as "i."). The authoritative document is the 1929 printed grant itself (2 sheets of drawings, 7 claims), not the OCR string. Inventors of record: James E. Miller and James A. Cash; original and current assignee: Fred Franke & Co.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Nothing is canceled, sustained, or adjudicated — because nothing was ever challenged at the PTAB. All seven claims are untested before the Board, and that is precisely the wrong framing: they are also unenforceable-in-fact because the statutory term lapsed 1946-01-01. For completeness, the grant as OCR'd carries seven claims: claim 1 (spiked endless apron + inclined series of intermeshing spiked rollers driven in the same direction); claim 2 (the hopper/back-wall/apron drive combination with sprocket-and-chain power takeoff); claim 3 (pivoted hopper wall movable lengthwise of the picking mechanism to vary exposed picking area); claim 4 (claim 3 plus a lever/arm and latch for holding the wall in adjusted position); claim 5 (picking rollers plus a wall pivoted at its upper end, lower end movable at right angles to the roller axes); claim 6 (upper-pivoted wall with lower end movable toward or from the lower end of the picking mechanism); and claim 7 (spiked apron parallel to an upwardly and outwardly inclined hopper wall, with intermeshing spiked rollers between the apron and the hopper mouth). That which is patentable per the 1929 claims is one question; whether anyone can be stopped from practicing it today is another, and the answer to the second is no.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel on either side, because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted. That is a non-event rather than an advantage: estoppel only matters to a defendant who wants to know which invalidity grounds an actual petitioner has forfeited. Here, every prior-art ground that ever existed — including the 1928-era cotton-machinery references that would have been the natural IPR art, and the patent's own admission of the "devices of this kind known to us" in the specification — remains technically available in the sense that no one has forfeited it, but there is no live claim on which to deploy it. The operative statutory bar is § 286, not § 315.

Pattern signals. None of the usual tells are present. No repeat petitioner (there can be none), no patent owner appellate activity (no FWD to appeal, and no CAFC docket entry found), no defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents in the chain — the only entity in the chain is the original corporate assignee, Fred Franke & Co. of Louisville, Kentucky, a 1920s textile-machinery firm. Google Patents' "Similar Documents" list (e.g., US1407500A Cotton-preparing machinery, US1254148A Doffer-machine) is a citation-family artifact, not a litigation or PTAB history.

Recommended next steps

• If you received a demand letter or a complaint citing US 1,697,127: check the expiration date first and do not spend money on an invalidity study. The patent expired 1946-01-01. Pull the grant at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1697127/en and confirm the "Anticipated expiration" entry. A claim chart built on the corrupted OCR text is itself a warning sign about the quality of the assertion.
• If a plaintiff nevertheless sued: move to dismiss, pleading (a) expiration of the term on 1946-01-01, and (b) the § 286 six-year damages bar, which closed decades before any conceivable accused conduct. A Rule 11 / § 285 posture is worth evaluating against an assertion of a patent that lapsed before the plaintiff was likely incorporated.
• There is no PTAB path worth pursuing and no PTAB milestone to track. No institution decision deadline, no oral hearing, no statutory one-year FWD deadline exists — there is no trial. Do not budget for an IPR petition; the petition fee alone would exceed the entire defensive value of the exercise.
• Verify the negative directly if you need a clean record for a file. Confirm at PTAB E2E / USPTO PTAB Center and USPTO Patent Public Search (https://ppubs.uspto.gov/), and check the Federal Circuit side at CourtListener (search "1,697,127" or "Miller" / "Franke"). My search found no CAFC opinion, and no PTAB Final Written Decision exists to link because none was ever issued. I state that as a verified negative rather than an inference — but if a plaintiff's counsel represents otherwise, demand the proceeding number, since I found none and the ODP block is empty.

I'll verify the record before writing anything. Let me check the assignment database and the original assignee's history.

US 1697127 — Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction

Bottom line up front: I could not retrieve any recorded assignment for this patent, and none is expected. US 1697127 issued on 1929-01-01 and its term expired on 1946-01-01 — eighty years before any modern assignment-tracking infrastructure existed. There is no assignment chain to reconstruct, no NPE to profile, and the patent has been unenforceable for nearly eight decades.

Inventors

The patent front page (as rendered in the Patent Office record) names the assignee as the filing entity: "FRED FRANKE & CO., OF LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, A CORPORATION OF KENTUCKY" (the Google Patents OCR of this block is garbled — "FREEDI FRANKIE 85 (10;, JOE; LOUISVILLE, KENTU'GKY" — but the assignment-to-corporation language and the "Original Assignee: Fred Franke & Co" field are unambiguous). That the application was filed in the name of the corporation rather than the inventors is itself evidence that the inventor→company assignment executed contemporaneously with filing.

Unusual patterns: None detectable. I found no evidence that either inventor departed, that either filed independent later applications, or that either was party to a subsequent recorded transfer. Note, however, that employment status is inferred, not documented — I could not locate a 1928 Louisville city directory, corporate filing, or contemporaneous trade-press item confirming that Miller and Cash were Franke employees rather than outside consultants or co-developing customers.

Original assignee

Fred Franke & Co. — a corporation of the State of Kentucky, based in Louisville, KY.

• Line of business: textile-fiber processing machinery. The specification is explicit about the target market: "automatic feeders or bale breakers for cotton pickers, willows, cleaning machines, and the like." The stated commercial problem is plant-level throughput management — the patent notes that a single feeder typically supplies four Garnett machines, so when some are idled the feeder "overloads" the one still running. That is a real production-line problem described by someone who had stood on a mill floor.
• Product embodying the claims: The specification describes a fully specified, buildable machine — slatted spiked apron, eight spiked rollers in paired drive arrangement, doffer and lump-breaking rocker, and the sector-ratchet adjustable back wall. The level of mechanical detail (sprocket sizes, chain routing, bearing adjustment screws) is consistent with a shipping commercial product rather than a paper design. Direct documentary confirmation of shipments is absent, and I could not retrieve any advertising, catalog, or trade-journal evidence.
• Current status: Unknown; almost certainly dissolved. I could not find any corporate record, SEC filing, successor registration, or bankruptcy docket for Fred Franke & Co. in the sources I could reach. This is a privately held 1920s Kentucky machinery maker; there is no reason to expect a live entity, but I am flagging that I could not verify dissolution, acquisition, or a surviving successor rather than asserting it.
• Unexplained lead (do not rely on): a search hit surfaced a much later US patent, US 2,821,854 (Feb. 1958), inventor "Franke," class 73/296 (measuring/testing). This could indicate the Franke family or firm continued in fiber-testing instrumentation for another three decades, but I have not verified any corporate or familial link between that inventor and Fred Franke & Co. Treat it as a research pointer only.

Assignment timeline

No recorded assignments were found. I am stating that plainly rather than listing events I cannot source.

Specifics of what I did and did not establish:

1. USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and the legacy interface at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) is a JavaScript application that requires interactive query submission. I could not retrieve the result set for US 1697127 / Application 265,733 through the tools available to me. This is a verification gap on my side, not a finding that records exist. A human should run the patent-number query manually before treating this section as final.
2. Google Patents legal events — which mirror recorded USPTO assignment and prosecution events — list for US1697127A only: application filed 1928-03-29 (Fred Franke & Co.), priority to US265733A, granted 1929-01-01, publication 1929-01-01, and anticipated expiration 1946-01-01. There is no assignment event of any kind. The "Family Applications" table likewise shows a single member (US265733A) with no downstream chain.
3. Terminal event: the 17-year term of US 1697127 ran out on 1946-01-01. Any assignment recorded after that date would transfer an expired right with no residual value; none is expected, and a lapse for non-payment of maintenance fees is not even applicable (maintenance fees were not introduced until 1980).

Technical note on record format: if any pre-issue assignment from Miller and Cash to Fred Franke & Co. was recorded, it would appear as a Liber/Page (bound-volume) entry, not a modern Reel/Frame entry — the USPTO's microfilm reel/frame numbering system only begins in the mid-1950s. Anyone re-running this search should query the patent number and the application serial 265,733, and should expect a Liber/Page citation if anything surfaces. I have deliberately not invented a reel/frame number to fill this slot.

Timeline diagram

Rendering only events that are actually documented on the patent record.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 1697127
    1928 : Application filed by Fred Franke and Co
    1929 : Patent issued to Fred Franke and Co
    1946 : Patent term expired
    2026 : No assignments of record found

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is assessed against a chain that, on the evidence available, consists of exactly one entity with no recorded transfers. Context that governs all seven: the patent expired on 1946-01-01. It cannot be asserted, litigated, or licensed. NPE business models did not exist in a recognizable form during its enforceable life.

Note on signal 3: the correspondent-of-record tell is the sharpest tool in this framework, and I want to be clear that it produced nothing here — not because the correspondence was clean, but because there is no recorded instrument to inspect. A blank field in a 1929 patent's assignment history carries no evidentiary weight about anyone's litigation posture.

Verdict

Insufficient data — specifically the sub-case the framework defines as "no records, or only the original assignment." US 1697127 has no recorded post-issuance assignments in the sources I could reach; the only ownership fact established is that Fred Franke & Co. of Louisville, Kentucky was the original assignee at filing on 1928-03-29 and at issuance on 1929-01-01, and the patent reached its anticipated expiration on 1946-01-01 with no intervening transfer.

This is not a "quiet" NPE chain — it is an 87-year-old expired patent, which is a categorically different finding. No NPE analysis applies. Two cautions for the file: (a) my Assignment Center query was not successfully executed, so a human should re-run the patent-number and serial-number (265,733) searches to close that gap, expecting a Liber/Page citation rather than a reel/frame if anything surfaces; and (b) I could not confirm the current corporate status of Fred Franke & Co., which I have marked unknown rather than assumed dissolved.

Verify at:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 1697127 or application 265733)
• Legacy Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents record (legal events, family, classifications) — https://patents.google.com/patent/US1697127/en

I'll research this patent and its citation record.

Let me dig deeper for the specific citation record and front page of this patent.

Let me try to locate the original patent document image/PDF to check the face of the patent for a "References Cited" section.

Executive summary of findings

Two findings dominate, and both are counter to what the question presumes:

1. US 1,697,127 has no prior-art citation record. Neither the authoritative Google Patents full text you supplied nor any search result I retrieved shows a "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" table, an examiner citation, or an applicant disclosure for this patent. I could not find any USPTO-side citation listing either. There is therefore no list of patent citations for US 1,697,127 to analyze, and I will not invent one.
2. The only reference-like data in the record is Google's algorithmic "Similar Documents" list, which is not a citation of record and is not legally prior art. I analyze it below, but with explicit caveats.

I also flag a number-collision trap at the end (EP 1697127 B1 is an unrelated 2003-era application), which matters given your instruction to interpret identifiers literally.

1. Verification of the patent record

Searches for the patent number and title returned no USPTO PatentCenter / Global Dossier citation pane and no front-page "References Cited" section. The authoritative record you supplied (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-30) is the controlling source and contains no citation table.

Bibliographic data as it appears in that record (reported literally, not corrected):

Note that the source page renders the assignee line as FREEDI FRANKIE 85 (10;, JOE; LOUISVILLE, KENTU'GKY — this is corrupted OCR of "FRED FRANKE & CO., OF LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY." I am reporting the corruption rather than silently correcting the record, but the assignment line is not a citation and has no § 102 effect.

2. The claim set (for § 102 mapping purposes)

Because no citations exist, the only useful analytic work is to define the claim families that any hypothetical reference would have to meet:

• Claims 1, 2, 7 — the "spiked roller" family. Hopper; endless spiked apron mounted adjacent the bottom of the hopper with a horizontal lower run; an upwardly and rearwardly inclined series of spiked rollers disposed outward of and parallel to the apron, spikes of one roller passing between the spikes of an adjacent roller; drive means for the rollers and (claim 7) simultaneous drive of the apron.
• Claims 3, 4, 6 — the "movable hopper wall" family. A hopper wall pivoted to the hopper and movable lengthwise of the picking mechanism (in the spec: wall 13, pivoted at 14, moving "inward parallel to the series of rollers 31") to reduce or increase the exposed area of the picking mechanism; claim 4 adds a lever/arm-and-latch (ratchet 43, pawl 45) for holding any adjusted position.
• Claim 5 — the combination family. Series of picking rollers parallel to the rear wall + endless spiked belt extending parallel to the rear wall and then beneath the lower roller of the series + pivoted wall movable at right angles to the roller axes + shifting/holding means.

The disclosure's own stated points of novelty are the load transfer from the apron to the rollers ("the strain of tearing apart the cotton … is taken off the belt and is borne entirely by the spiked rollers") and the capacity regulation via the movable back wall (the "one feeder for four Garnett machines" problem).

3. What the record actually contains: Google "Similar Documents"

These are algorithmic similarity hits, not citations of record. Listing them literally as they appear:

Chronological screen (the only defensible § 102 filter without full texts):

• Documents published before 1928-03-29 are eligible to be prior art: US1407500A, US1254148A, US1321576A, US1438365A, US909576A, US457847A, US482194A, GB190808316A. US1664048A (1928-03-27) is two days earlier and could qualify under a pre-AIA § 102(a)-type "before the invention by the applicant" theory, but its subject matter (wrapper control for packaging machines) makes substantive relevance very unlikely.
• Everything dated 1929 or later is ineligible as § 102(a) prior art and would only be relevant, if at all, to obviousness-type reasoning or as evidence of the state of the art. Several are clearly outside the art entirely (manure spreaders, potato deviners, asparagus pickers, cornhusking).

Caveat — this is not an anticipation analysis. I retrieved titles and dates only; I did not retrieve the specifications, drawings, or claims of any of these references. A § 102 anticipation finding requires element-by-element correspondence with a claim, which I cannot assert here without fabricating content. I am explicitly declining to name a "reference that anticipates claim X."

4. The non-patent "Definitions" block is not prior art

The supplied record includes an auto-generated tag list — Salicaceae (species), Cotton (polymers), cysteamine (a chemical compound), plus tags for "cleaning," "construction," "controlling effect," "regulatory effect," "sensory perception of sound," etc. These are machine-generated topic annotations from the digitization pipeline (note the wildly off-topic "sensory perception of sound" and "cysteamine" tags). They are not citations, not the applicant's definitions section, and have no § 102 weight. The spec's actual "Definitions" heading is an OCR artifact of the drawing-sheet caption.

5. Identifier caution: do not conflate US 1,697,127 with EP 1697127

A search on the bare string 1697127 surfaced EP 1697127 B1, "Ultrasonic bonding of dissimilar materials" (a 2003-priority family: US 74322203 A, US 2004038341 W, BR PI0417977, KR 20067012345, MX PA06007064). That document is unrelated to US 1,697,127 — different jurisdiction, different number space, different subject matter, ~75 years later. Per your literal-interpretation rule, I am noting this rather than treating the numbers as interchangeable. Similarly, the numerous "Miller et al." hits (e.g., 7,172,520; 5,786,883) are unrelated modern patents sharing only the surname "Miller" with inventor James E. Miller.

6. Bottom line

• Full citation of the patent: US 1,697,127 A, "Automatic feeder for pickers, willows, etc," J. E. Miller and J. A. Cash, appl. no. US265733A, filed 1928-03-29, granted 1929-01-01, assignee Fred Franke & Co. Status: expired (anticipated expiration 1946-01-01).
• Patent citations of record: none found. No "References Cited" table appears in the authoritative record, and my searches (Google Patents full text, patent image/PDF sources, and general web) did not surface a USPTO citation listing. If a formal citation list exists in the USPTO file wrapper, it was not retrievable with the tools available to me, and I will not substitute a fabricated list.
• Most relevant candidate prior art by field and date — presented as candidates, not as citations of record and not as established § 102 anticipators: US 1,407,500 A (cotton-preparing machinery, 1922-02-21) for claims 1/2/7; US 1,254,148 A (doffer-machine, 1918-01-22) for the doffer aspect and claims 1/7; US 1,321,576 A (excelsior-pad machine, 1919-11-11) for spiked web handling. Claim mapping: claims 1, 2, 7 (spiked-roller family); claims 3, 4, 6 (pivoted lengthwise-movable hopper wall, plus lever-and-latch); claim 5 (spiked belt beneath series + right-angle movable wall). All three candidates pre-date the 1928-03-29 filing and are therefore eligible; none can be named as anticipating a specific claim without a full-text, element-by-element comparison that I have not performed.
• Not prior art at all: every "Similar Document" dated 1929 or later, and the whole auto-tag "Definitions" block.

If you can supply the reference PDFs (or the USPTO file-wrapper citation page), I will do the element-by-element § 102 mapping against claims 1–7 — and I would also need to confirm whether the applicable statute is pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b) or the pre-1952 novelty provision, since this patent was filed in 1928, well before the 1952 Act you cite.

I'll ground this analysis in the references listed in the "Similar Documents" (prior-art) section of the US1697127 page. Let me pull details on the pre-1928 references (i.e., those that can actually qualify as prior art) before reasoning.

Good grounding on two key pre-1928 references. Let me pull the remaining pre-1928 items (and check the garbled ones) to be precise about what each discloses.

Obviousness Analysis — US 1,697,127 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Patent: US 1,697,127 A, "Automatic feeder for pickers, willows, etc." — inventors James E. Miller and James A. Cash; assignee Fred Franke & Co.; filed 1928‑03‑29; granted 1929‑01‑01; statutorily expired 1946.
Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1697127/en

1. Threshold issue: most of the "Similar Documents" list is not prior art

The application was filed March 29, 1928, so this is a pre‑AIA case. Under pre‑AIA § 102(b), a reference must have been patented or published more than one year before filing — i.e., before March 29, 1927 — to be a statutory bar. References published between March 29, 1927 and the invention date are § 102(a) art only. Google's "Similar Documents" table is a machine-similarity list (driven by CPC class D01G 23/00 and shared keywords such as "rollers," "hopper," "apron"), not a prior-art list. Sorting it:

Consequence: a § 103 rejection can only be built on (i) the two verified pre‑1927 references (US909576, US1407500), (ii) the GB and 1918–1922 items if their contents are verified, and (iii) the applicant's own admitted prior art. The post‑1928 items are usable only as evidence of the later state of the art, not as § 102 art.

2. Admitted prior art in the specification (a primary reference)

The specification itself concedes the base machine: "In devices of this kind known to us, the cotton from the bale is thrown into a hopper, from which a spiked apron pulls away or bites off small pieces. There is considerable strain on this spiked apron…" An applicant's admission of what was known is treated as prior art for § 103. That admission supplies, without any external reference: the hopper, the upwardly/rearwardly extending spiked endless apron at the hopper bottom, its supporting rollers and drive, and the problem to be solved (apron strain / capacity). It does not supply the intermeshing spiked roller series or the adjustable wall.

3. Person of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

A mechanical engineer/machinist with several years' experience in cotton‑mill preparatory machinery (bale breakers, openers, pickers, willows) as of 1928, familiar with: spiked/lagged aprons and card‑clothed cylinders; intermeshing toothed drums and grid/bar beaters; sprocket‑and‑chain and bevel‑gear power take‑offs; and the practice of throttling the working face of a feed mechanism to match feeder output to downstream demand.

4. The two inventions in the claims

• Group A — breaking‑roller feed: claims 1, 2, 7.
• Group B — variable‑capacity hopper wall: claims 3, 4, 5, 6.

5. Group A (claims 1, 2, 7)

Claim 1 — element mapping

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US909576

Differences: claim 1 requires a plurality of spiked rollers arranged in a rising row, whereas Frost shows one spiked drum coacting with a stationary, pivoted spiked bar. Frost's bar is also a tearing member, not a roller.

Articulated reasoning (KSR-compliant):

1. Frost teaches the core functional concept the applicant claims credit for — intermeshing spiked members that bite material out of a mass so a single conveyor is not overloaded, plus rotation of the spiked member opposite to the feed direction (Frost claim 7).
2. The applicant's own stated problem supplies the motivation: relieving apron strain and increasing capacity. A person of skill seeking both would predictably increase the number of breaking elements and distribute the "bite" among them rather than concentrating it on one drum plus one fixed bar.
3. Replacing one large breaking member with a series of smaller parallel rollers along the same feed path is a predictable mechanical variation in the number/size of known elements; it changes the degree, not the principle, of operation. That is precisely the "combination of familiar elements according to known methods… yield[ing] predictable results" situation of KSR v. Teleflex.
4. Support (claim 2) and drive (claim 2) for each roller on shafts journaled in the hopper side walls is admitted to be the ordinary way to mount rotary elements (the specification argues the point expressly: a shaft‑mounted roller "can more fully support the stress and strain… than can a flexible belt or apron").

Conclusion on claim 1: not anticipated by any single reference on the list, but obvious over Frost US909576 in view of the admitted prior art. The case is strengthened if a reference showing a series of spaced parallel spiked rollers/beaters is added — the candidates on the page (US1321576 "Excelsior‑pad machine," US1254148 "Doffer‑machine," US1438365) are all of the right generic type, but I could not verify their disclosures and would not rely on them without pulling the facsimiles.

Claim 2 — additional elements

Adds: hopper with downwardly/forwardly inclined back wall plus a horizontal lower wall; apron parallel to both, giving inclined and horizontal runs; roller shafts mounted in the lateral walls; power transmitted from one roller shaft to the others so they all rotate the same direction; and a specific sprocket‑on‑conveyor‑shaft + sprocket‑on‑roller‑shaft + chain drive.

• Frost supplies the whole drive architecture: motor 34 → belt 38 → pulley 37 on cross‑shaft 39 → sprockets 40, 41 → chains 42 (elevator shaft 9), 44 (spiked drum shaft 24) and 46/47 (apron shaft 23), plus bevel gears 49–53 to the discharge conveyor. A single power source distributing to a spiked cylinder, two apron shafts and a third conveyor by sprocket‑and‑chain is exactly claim 2's "means for transmitting power… comprising a sprocket wheel mounted upon one of the shafts… and a chain engaging said sprocket wheels."
• Frost's apron 19 runs "slightly inclined upwardly in a forward direction" and passes beneath the spiked drum — an inclined run feeding a lower, more horizontal run is disclosed in substance.
• Making all rollers rotate the same direction is a routine design selection: Frost's own claim 7 states the alternative (opposite directions) as a known option, so selecting same‑direction rotation for a series of intermeshing bite‑off rollers is an obvious choice among two known possibilities (In re Kuhle‑type situation).
• Motivation: uniform, same‑direction take‑away avoids bucking the feed and is the natural expedient once the roller series of claim 1 is adopted.

Conclusion on claim 2: obvious over Frost + admitted prior art; the claim adds only conventional drive detail. (Note a drafting defect, relevant to litigation but not to § 103: the last clause refers to "said endless conveyor" although the claim body calls the element an "apron" — an antecedent‑basis problem that also narrows what must be shown.)

Claim 7

Claim 7 is claim 1 with an "upwardly and outwardly inclined wall," the apron parallel to that wall, and the spiked rollers located between the apron and the mouth of the hopper, plus a single drive for rollers and apron. Frost places the spiked drum directly above the feed apron and below/behind the material inlet, with the discharge conveyor forming the bottom of the casing, which is the same relative arrangement. The inclined‑wall recitation is the hopper geometry dictated by the apron's upward/rearward trajectory. Claim 7 is obvious for the same reasons as claim 1, and is arguably the broadest of the three Group A claims because it omits the requirement that the apron's lower end lie in a horizontal plane.

6. Group B (claims 3, 4, 5, 6) — the adjustable wall

Claim 3 / claim 6 — the core limitation

Common elements: hopper; a picking mechanism extending along the hopper bottom; and output control by a wall that constitutes one wall of the hopper, is pivoted to the hopper, is movable lengthwise of the picking mechanism, and is adjustable to reduce or increase the exposed area of the picking mechanism (claim 6: pivoted at its upper end; lower end movable toward/from the lower end of the picking mechanism).

What the page's prior art shows:

• Frost (US909576): a member pivotally supported at its top (bar 26 at pivot 27) that hangs down into the working region of a rotating spiked element and whose spikes interleave with the drum — structurally the same "top‑pivoted, lower‑end‑free member inside the hopper" that claims 5 and 6 recite for the wall. Frost also teaches adjusting hopper geometry (screw 18/nut for raising and lowering the elevator). Frost does not disclose moving that member along the length of the picking mechanism to blank off part of it.
• Thomas (US1407500): in the same art and the same problem space — cotton‑preparing machinery where a bale‑breaker feeds a series of feeder‑hoppers — Thomas expressly solves the identical problem the present patent recites ("when a factory is using one feeder for four Garnett machines… should one, two or three… be shut down, the feeder overloads for the one machine which is running"). Thomas regulates delivery by a variable‑speed drive for the bale‑breaker, controlled by a feeler/rake 14 hung on a shaft 14a "mounted in bearings… of the upper portions of the opposite sides of the hopper" — i.e., a member pivoted at its upper end to the hopper side walls, swinging about a horizontal axis within the hopper.
  Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1407500

Articulated reasoning for claims 3/6: Thomas supplies (i) the recognition that a bale‑breaker/feeder in this art needs a feed‑regulating device to match output to downstream demand, and (ii) the structural teaching of a hopper‑mounted, top‑pivoted member. Frost supplies a top‑pivoted member in the hopper working region plus adjustability of hopper geometry, and the admitted prior art supplies the spiked‑apron picking mechanism whose working face can be shortened. Choosing to regulate feed by closing off part of the picking mechanism with a movable wall rather than by varying drive speed (Thomas) or by interposing a spiked bar (Frost) is a predictable alternative that achieves the same result by the same mechanism — reduced exposure of the picking elements to the mass. The answer to the patentee's expected argument ("neither reference teaches a wall as the regulating element") is that (a) Thomas' pivoted hopper‑mounted member is a hopper wall in the sense claimed (it defines part of the hopper's operative boundary), and (b) the result — less material reaching the apron — is the expected result of blanking off part of the picking mechanism, not a new mode of operation.

Claim 4 — lever, arm and latch

Claim 4 adds "a lever having an arm operatively connected to the wall, and a latch for latching said lever in any adjusted position." Thomas shows exactly this kind of mechanism in the same art and for the same regulating purpose: an upright lever 15 pivoted at 15a, a rod 15b connecting the lever to the controlled member, double pawl 15c pivoted on the lever, a toothed segment 15e with opposite teeth 15f/15f′, and a spring‑pressed plunger 15k with a V‑shaped end cooperating with a V‑shaped abutment 15m to hold the pawl in its working positions relative to the segment teeth. Frost's screw 18/nut is an alternative "hold in adjusted position" expedient. Claim 4's adjusting means is therefore the conventional lever‑arm‑and‑pawl arrangement applied to a new actuator, obvious over Thomas (and Frost) in view of the admitted prior art.

Claim 5 — the most specific geometry

Claim 5 recites the inclined bottom wall + horizontal lower wall, picking rollers parallel to the rear wall, an endless spiked belt running parallel to the rear wall and then parallel to the bottom wall beneath the lower roller of the series, and a wall pivoted at its upper end to the side walls with its lower end movable at right angles to the roller axes. Frost's apron 19 passes under the spiked drum 25 with the discharge conveyor 28 forming the bottom of the casing, and Thomas' hopper‑hung rake 14 is pivoted to the hopper side walls at its upper end. Claim 5 is the strongest Group B claim (specificity), but each recitation is a geometric consequence of (a) the inclined‑apron feeder of the admitted prior art and (b) the top‑pivoted hopper member of Thomas/Frost. It remains obvious, though with a somewhat thinner record.

7. Where the patentee would push back, and secondary considerations

• Best non-obviousness argument: the page's art does not disclose a hopper wall that is itself the output‑regulating element, still less one whose travel "cuts out from effective action one or more of the lower rollers" (spec.). That is a genuine gap in the "Similar Documents" list; the primary case on claims 3/4/6 would rest on the combination of Frost + Thomas, and the patentee would characterize that as hindsight reconstruction from the patent's own disclosure.
• Rebuttal: there is no teaching away; both references are in the same field; and the commercial problem stated in the patent is stated verbatim in Thomas. Under KSR, the motivation may come from the problem itself and from ordinary design incentives.
• Secondary considerations of record: none. The specification asserts only expected advantages (less strain on the apron, higher capacity, adjustable output). No evidence of commercial success, long‑felt need, failure of others, copying or licensing appears in the document, and any such evidence would need a nexus to the specific claimed combination.

8. Bottom line

9. Caveats I will not paper over

1. US 1,697,127's own text is badly OCR‑corrupted. Identifiers must be taken literally but verified against the PDF: the specification refers at one point to "the spiked rollers 21" although the roller series is numbered 31 elsewhere (and 21 is otherwise unused); "doflier"/"dofter" = reference numeral 24; "hun wall 13" = the front/lower wall 13; "FREDI FRANKIE 85 (10;, JOE" is the assignee Fred Franke & Co.; "Arfurther," "t-hewlinks," "fOlWttTCl" are artifacts. I have not auto‑corrected these; any argument that depends on numeral 21 must be checked against the facsimile.
2. Unverified references. US 1254148 ("Doffer‑machine"), US 1321576 ("Excelsior‑pad machine"), US 1438365 ("Fodder cutter"), US 457847 and US 482194 (titles rendered only as "caelie" and "Island"), and GB 190808316 are prior‑art‑eligible by date, but I could not confirm their disclosures from the available search results, and my searches for US 1254148 in particular returned unrelated doffer documents (e.g., EP 0466349 A2, US 1,142,013, US 1,802,021). They should be retrieved before being cited in any rejection.
3. A non‑listed lead. One search hit (a manure‑spreader specification whose identifier appeared as US1187953; publication data unconfirmed) describes "a rake or detainer which will act as an end‑gate or means of cutting off the manure from the discharge cylinder," adjustable to any desired angle. That is conceptually a movable wall throttling a picking/discharge mechanism, but it is not in the page's Similar Documents list and I did not verify the document, so it is a lead only, not supportable authority here.
4. The bulk of the "Similar Documents" table is unusable for § 103 against this patent. Any rejection that leans on the 1931–1969 items is legally baseless given the 1928 filing date.