US 177125

I'll search for this patent number.

US Patent 177,125 — Analyst Summary

Search basis and scope

I searched for the literal string "177125" against patent databases and litigation/docket sources. Results for the exact identifier resolved to one granted US patent: US177125A. I did not find any Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket entry, IPR, or district-court proceeding involving this patent. Three non-patent false positives reuse the string "177125" and should not be conflated with it:

• State Bar No. 177125 — the California bar number of attorney Elizabeth Day (Feinberg Day), appearing on an unrelated 2019 N.D. Cal. complaint caption.
• BLM serial SDMTAA 177125 — a 1921 Lake Traverse Reservation Indian fee land patent (Gideon Williams, Marshall County, S.D.), a land-grant record, not a patent document.
• US177125D / US177125DA — variant identifiers that appear only inside Google Patents' own record for the same document. I cannot confirm what these denote; I treat US177125A as the granted publication. (Note: do not auto-read the "D" as a US design-patent prefix — a US design patent numbered D177,125 would be a mid-1950s document and I have not verified that any such patent exists.)

Confidence: high on bibliographic data and claim text (authoritative full text supplied and cross-confirmed against the USPTO/Google Patents PDF at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/5c/17/c3/c8db73668084fd/US177125.pdf). Low/uncertain on assignee (see below).

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Bibliographic data

Assignee caveat: This is an 1876 grant, and the printed specification names no assignee. Pre-1880 USPTO assignment records are not reliably indexed through the sources I searched, so I cannot state whether Howe assigned his rights and, if so, to whom. I have no authoritative assignee information — treat "unassigned on the face of the patent" as the only supportable statement.

Two literal-text discrepancies I am flagging rather than correcting:

1. The Google Patents PDF OCR renders the issue date as "dated May 9, 1976." The surrounding record and the companion text set the date at 1876; the "1976" is an OCR artifact, but I note it because you asked for literal identifiers.
2. The body text is inconsistent in its own reference letters — the description refers to lever "O" in the OCR web version (a misread of "C") while the cleaner PDF text uses lever "C" with ratchet "C′." The claim itself uses no reference letters, so this does not affect claim scope.

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Abstract

There is no formal abstract. Abstracts were not part of US patent practice in 1876. The closest functional equivalent is the "Definitions"/summary passage:

"My invention refers to an improved lifting-jack that supports the wagon or other article reliably in raised position; and it consists of legs pivoted to a top support, to which a lifting-lever is fulcrumed. A ratchet and guard of the lever serves, in connection with a pivoted locking brace-link of the outer leg, to retain the lever in hoisted position."

The stated objects are (i) reliable support of a raised wagon/axle; (ii) height adjustment by spreading the pivoted legs to greater or lesser width; and (iii) compact folding for storage.

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Independent claims — plain-language overview

There is exactly one claim, and it is the sole independent claim. There are no dependent claims.

Claim 1 (verbatim, from the supplied authoritative text):

"A lifting-jack constructed of a top socket or support, swinging legs pivoted to the lower part, and a fulcrumed lever at the upper part of the socket, the lever having a top ratchet and guard, and being locked by a folding brace-link hinged to one of the legs, to be operated substantially as and for the purpose specified."

Plain-language reading. The claim is a single combination claim to an entire lifting jack, defined by five cooperating elements:

1. A top socket or support — the metal head (reference B) that carries the load.
2. Swinging legs pivoted to the lower part of that support — the ground-engaging legs (A), pivoted so their splay can be widened or narrowed to match axle height; their free ends have prongs/spurs for ground purchase.
3. A lever fulcrumed at the upper part of the socket — the hoisting lever (C), whose pivot sits vertically above the pivot bolt of the leg nearer the lever's lower end (per the description).
4. A top ratchet and guard on that lever — ratchet teeth (C′) on the upper portion of the lever plus a guard wire (D) that keeps the brace-link seated near the ratchet teeth so it "may be quickly applied when required."
5. Locking by a folding brace-link hinged to one of the legs — the outer leg carries a brace-link (E) that rides along the ratchet teeth to lock the lever at the desired hoisted height; the link is made in two pivoted sections so the whole assembly folds flat with the legs and lever (Fig. 2).

Scope notes / claim-construction observations.

• The claim is closed by the archaic formula "substantially as and for the purpose specified," which ties the claim's scope to the structure and function described in the specification — a common 1876 drafting convention that imports the described mode of operation rather than reading on any jack having those nominal parts.
• Because there is only one claim and it recites every element in combination, the claim is a narrow, whole-device claim; there is no separate sub-combination or single-element claim to assert independently.
• The claim is expired (since 1893) and serves today purely as prior art. Its most useful prior-art teaching is the pivoted, splay-adjustable leg pair combined with a folding two-section ratchet-locking brace-link — a combination cited against later 19th-century lifting-jack art (the page's "Similar Documents" list includes US 130,449, US 168,530, US 180,552, US 182,956, US 206,516 and others in the same field).

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What I could not establish

• Assignee or any chain of title. No assignee is named on the patent face; I found no assignment record.
• Any CAFC 2026 (or other) litigation. No docket hits for this patent number in 2026 or otherwise.
• The meaning of the "US177125D" / "US177125DA" identifiers in the Google Patents record.
• Any reissue, extension, or disclaimer of this patent. Pre-1900 extension practice existed, but I found no record of one here.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 177125.

The first searches returned only State Bar numbers (SBN 177125), not patent litigation. Let me try more targeted queries.

No relevant results. Let me try a few more targeted queries to be thorough.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 177,125

Patent identified (literal interpretation): U.S. Patent No. 177,125, titled "Improvement in Lifting-Jacks," granted May 9, 1876 to George G. Howe of Faribault, Rice County, Minnesota; application filed April 4, 1876; recorded on the face of the document as "Anticipated expiration 1893-05-09," legal status "Expired – Lifetime."

Bottom line

I found no litigation — none — involving U.S. Patent No. 177,125. No district court case, no Federal Circuit or predecessor appellate proceeding, no ITC investigation, no PTAB post-grant proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM — which would in any event be unavailable for a patent of this vintage), and no declaratory judgment action. The requested table (plaintiff / defendant / jurisdiction / case number / filing date / status) cannot be populated because I could not substantiate a single case.

Sources searched and what they returned

I ran multiple query formulations against litigation-oriented sources, including the Unified Patents portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com), PACER-adjacent aggregators (Docket Alarm, RPX Insight, Justia, CourtListener/RECAP), and CAFC materials as surfaced through general web search. Every query resolved to one of three classes of false positives, none of which involves U.S. Patent No. 177,125:

1. California State Bar Number 177125. The overwhelming majority of hits are the State Bar of California member number of attorney M. Elizabeth Day (Feinberg Day / Kramer Day, later DLA Piper), appearing as "SBN 177125" on complaints and briefs in unrelated patent cases (e.g., Sovereign Peak Ventures, LLC v. Lifi Labs, Inc., No. 3:19-cv-00025 (N.D. Cal.); Uniloc 2017 LLC v. [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.), No. 8:18-cv-02054 (C.D. Cal.); Hypermedia Navigation LLC v. Google LLC, No. 4:18-cv-06137 (N.D. Cal.)). This is a bar registration number, not the patent number, and I have excluded it per your instruction.

2. Unrelated patents colloquially called "the '125 patent." Results refer to other patents sharing the trailing digits "125" — e.g., the bit-mapped display patent in General Electric Co. v. Nintendo Co. (Fed. Cir. 1999), the linear-motor patent in the Delaware baggage-handling case (D. Del. No. 07-127), and the carfilzomib " '125 Patent" in an ANDA case (D. Del. No. 18-cv-0262). These are different patents numerically and substantively and are excluded as non-matching.

3. Documentation about the patent itself. The only accurate hits are the patent document and its family record at Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US177125](/patent/US177125)/en), plus "Similar Documents" listings of contemporaneous 1870s–1880s lifting-jack patents (e.g., US 130,449; US 180,552; US 182,956; US 37,707). Those are citations/similarity listings, not litigation.

Why the null result is expected (and how firm it is)

As a matter of patent law and history, this outcome is unsurprising rather than merely an artifact of thin searching:

• The patent expired May 9, 1893 — over 130 years ago. Its statutory term is long spent; there is no subsisting right that could be infringed today, and no live case can exist.
• Damages are time-barred under 35 U.S.C. § 286 (six-year limitations period), and laches/§ 282 defenses would bar any hypothetical 20th-century assertion.
• Modern litigation databases do not reach the relevant era. PACER generally begins in the late 1980s–1990s; the Federal Circuit was created in 1982; Docket Alarm, RPX Insight, and the Unified Patents portal index modern dockets. Any enforcement of an 1876 patent, if it occurred at all, would be reflected only in 19th-century reporters (e.g., Federal Reporter volumes of that era, Commissioner of Patents decisions, or circuit court equity dockets), which are not indexed in the sources I was able to search.

Caveats on completeness. I could not query PACER directly (it is a paywalled, per-court system), and I did not have access to Bloomberg Law, Lexis, Westlaw Litigation Analytics, or Darts-IP. My searches were therefore run through free aggregators and general web search. I can state with reasonable confidence that no litigation appearing in accessible modern sources involves US 177,125; I cannot rule out the theoretical existence of a pre-1900 enforcement action documented only in historical print sources, and I have found no evidence of one.

Recommendation

If you need a certified negative for a due-diligence file or an opinion of counsel, the appropriate next step is a paid search of Bloomberg Law or Lexis "Litigation" modules, a manual check of 19th-century Federal Reporter volumes and Commissioner of Patents decisions for 1876–1893, and (if desired) a PACER docket sweep by party name ("Howe" / "George G. Howe" as plaintiff, Faribault, Minnesota). I would expect all three to come back empty, given the patent's 1893 expiration.

I'll verify the structured data with a couple of targeted searches before reporting.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 177125: zero — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials — which is not a gap in the data but the expected and only possible result for a patent that issued 1876-05-09 and reached its anticipated expiration on 1893-05-09; the bottom-line defensive posture is not "hardened" or "narrowed" but "the patent has been dead for over 130 years" — any demand letter citing US 177125 as an enforceable right is facially baseless, and no IPR/PGR/CBM was, is, or realistically can be filed against it.

No proceedings on file

The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal) returns no AIA trial proceedings, and my independent web searches surfaced none. I therefore cannot populate the per-proceeding template (type, filed date, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal) with anything real, and I will not invent proceeding numbers to fill it.

For completeness, here is what I checked and what I found:

• PTAB / E2E — no hits. Nothing in PTAB Decisions or the E2E docket for 177125 or US177125A. Verify directly at PTAB E2E and the USPTO PTAB decisions page.
• CourtListener / CAFC — no hits. No Federal Circuit appeal, no Rule 36 summary affirmance, no opinion. Nothing to link.
• False positive flagged: searching "177125" in federal litigation databases returns California State Bar Number 177125 (M. Elizabeth Day, Feinberg Day Alberti Lim & Belloli LLP) in briefs from Hypermedia Navigation LLC v. Facebook, Inc., No. 4:17-cv-05383 (N.D. Cal.) and Uniloc 2017 LLC v. [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.) (C.D. Cal.). That is counsel's bar number, not this patent. Do not let a docket-scraping tool conflate the two.
• Patent status: Google Patents records the legal status as "Expired - Lifetime," publication date 1876-05-09, and an anticipated expiration of 1893-05-09 (17-year pre-1995 term), from the Google Patents record.

Why the absence is structural, not coincidental

Three independent reasons no AIA trial exists or is plausible:

1. Temporal impossibility of any live dispute. The patent expired in 1893. Even under the six-year damages lookback of 35 U.S.C. § 286, there is no window in which infringement liability could accrue. AIA trials are creature-of-statute proceedings (35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319, 321–329) created in 2011; there was no PTAB, no IPR, no PGR, and no CBM for the first 135+ years of this patent's existence, and by the time those regimes existed the patent was a historical document.
2. PGR is unavailable by definition. Post-grant review requires an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. This patent was granted in 1876.
3. CBM is doubly unavailable. Covered Business Method review required claims directed to a financial product or service, applied only to pre-2013 effective filing dates, and sunset on 2020-09-16. A wagon lifting-jack is neither a financial service nor a live candidate for the program.
4. IPR is theoretically the only door, and nobody walks through it. IPR under § 311 is not limited by filing date (the Board has historically permitted review of expired patents), so a "paper" IPR is not strictly impossible. But the statutory precondition — a petitioner who is not the patent owner, with a real interest in invalidating claims — cannot exist for a patent that grants no exclusionary right. I found no such filing.

Strategic summary

Claim status: UNTESTED — and untestable, because there is nothing to test. The printed claim set (as OCR'd on the Google Patents record) consists of a single claim to "a lifting-jack constructed of a top socket or support, swinging legs pivoted to the lower part, and a fulcrumed lever at the upper part of the socket, the lever having a top ratchet and guard, and being locked by a folding brace-link hinged to one of the legs." No claim of US 177125 has been canceled by the PTAB, and none has been sustained by the PTAB — because no petition was ever filed. If someone asserts "claims 1–5" of this patent, note that no claims 1–5 are identifiable in the issued disclosure; that alone is a tell that the assertion is not grounded in the actual patent document.

Estoppel landscape: empty, in both directions. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only upon a final written decision in an instituted IPR. With no institution and no FWD, no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is estopped from anything. Conversely, a defendant gains no benefit from an invalidity judgment, because none exists. Practically: every prior-art ground (including the 19th-century lifting-jack patents listed as "Similar Documents" on the Google Patents page — e.g., US 130,449 (1872-08-13), US 168,530 (1875-10-05), US 180,552 (1876-08-01), US 206,516 (1878-07-30)) remains fully available in district court, along with the expired-patent and no-recovery defenses. Those sibling references are not PTAB art; they are just adjacent patents, and I have not verified what any of them actually discloses.

Pattern signals: none to read. No serial petitioner, no repeat IPR filer, no PTAB appeal history, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) in the chain — I searched for all of these and found nothing. There is no litigation-funder or aggregator angle because there is no asset to aggregate. The single "signal" worth reporting is the epistemic one: well-asserted patents inevitably attract IPRs; a patent with zero PTAB activity across 15 years of AIA practice is not a patent anyone is meaningfully asserting. If your file contains a demand letter or a complaint citing US 177125, treat the source's diligence — and its credibility on every other patent in the portfolio — as compromised.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and have received an assertion citing US 177125: there is no FWD to link, because there is no FWD. Your citation set is instead the patent's own face: the Google Patents record, which shows Prior art date 1876-05-09, publication date 1876-05-09, and legal status Expired - Lifetime with 1893-05-09 Anticipated expiration. Attach it as an exhibit. (The Google Patents status line is expressly labeled an assumption and not a legal conclusion — but the statutory term is not in doubt here, and the contemporaneous legislative record confirms a 17-year term for 1876 grants.)
• Do not file an IPR. It would be a waste of fees: the Board would have to confront an expired patent with no possibility of prospective relief, and you would gain nothing that a one-paragraph Rule 11 / § 285 letter does not already achieve.
• Check what you are actually being shown. Confirm whether the assertion cites (a) this 1876 letters patent, (b) a state bar number (the 177125 false positive described above), or (c) a modern publication number that a scraper has truncated — e.g., an 11,771,xxx-series utility patent. The operating instruction here is literal interpretation, but a reality check against the actual document costs nothing and prevents a serious misread.
• If any active proceeding were to appear: the statutory milestones to track are the § 314(b) institution deadline (6 months from the accorded petition filing date), the 1-year-from-institution FWD deadline under § 316(a)(11), and any request for oral hearing. As of 2026-09-30 there are none, and I would treat any claim to the contrary as requiring documentary proof before you credit it.
• Plain statement for the file: No PTAB activity exists on US 177125. No IPR, PGR, or CBM was filed. No final written decision, no settlement, no appeal. The patent expired 1893-05-09. This absence is itself the signal.

I'll verify the assignment-record landscape for this patent before writing anything up.

Two more checks: the inventor's identity/employer and any trace of a recorded transfer or successor entity.

Inventors

Sole inventor: George G. Howe, of Faribault, county of Rice, Minnesota.

• The specification's venue clause is explicit: "Be it known that I, GEORGE G. HOWE, of Faribault, county of Rice, and State of Minnesota, have invented a new and useful Improvement in Lifting-Jacks" (specification, US 177,125). (Google Patents' rendering "GEORGE e. HOWE, 0E FARIBAULT" is OCR noise for "George G. Howe, of Faribault.")
• Employer at time of filing: none determinable — Mr. Howe was a self-employed individual, not an employee-inventor. Contemporaneous records compiled at mnbricks.com place him in Faribault from 1855, working as a mason/brickmaker and in a brickyard (1863); the 1870 census lists his occupation as surveyor, the 1880 census as land agent, and he acted as agent for land speculator Lewis Bischoffsheim. He later moved to Todd County, Minnesota (1878), platted the townsite of Clarissa, and relocated to Washington in 1890, dying there in 1897. None of that is a corporate employer of record for the 1876 filing.
• Co-inventors: none. The two names on the patent — "WM. STRAUB" and "B. F. STRAUB" — appear only in the witnesses block and are not joint inventors or assignees.
• Unusual-pattern check: the standard red flags (all inventors departing the original corporate assignee within 12 months of filing, pre-fire-sale attrition) are inapplicable — there was no corporate assignee and no employment relationship. The applicable historical fact is the inventor's own death (1897), which occurred four years after the patent's 17-year term expired on 1893-05-09.

Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventor personally; no assignee is named on the face of the patent or in the printed specification. This is a genuine finding, not a data gap: in 1876 practice, an assignment or an employer's ownership interest would normally be recited on the face of the specification (e.g., "assignor to the X Manufacturing Company"). US 177,125 contains no such recital, and the claim is drafted in the first person singular ("my invention").

• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? No corporate entity exists to ship anything. The invention is a folding wagon/carriage jack — swiveling ground-spurred legs pivoted to a metal top socket, a hoisting lever fulcrumed above the nearer leg pivot, a top ratchet and guard wire, and a two-section folding brace-link hinged to the outer leg (claim; Fig. 1–2). The specification is directed to the jack itself, and no product literature, catalogue, or manufacturing entity is anywhere in the record.
• Primary line of business: not applicable — the owner of record was a natural person (brickmaker/mason, later surveyor and land agent).
• Current status: the individual owner died in 1897; the patent itself expired 1893-05-09 (Google Patents "Legal events": granted 1876-05-09; publication 1876-05-09; anticipated expiration 1893-05-09; status "Expired - Lifetime"). There is no operating entity, acquisition, dissolution, or bankruptcy to report.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search has no records for US 177,125. I am stating that plainly, as instructed.

This is expected and is a coverage fact, not an evidentiary gap in the search:

• The USPTO's searchable assignment database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO "What are Assignments?" webinar deck, uspto.gov; corroborated by Finnegan's Prosecution Pointer 119: "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information from August 1980 to the present"). Pre-1980 recordings — which would be the only place a 1876–1893 transfer of this patent could live — are not in the online index.
• USPTO's bulk "Patent Assignment Data for Academia and Researchers (1970 – 2023)" and the "Patent Assignment XML (1980 – Present)" dataset (data.commerce.gov / catalog.data.gov) push coverage back only to 1970 in the aggregate research file. Either way, 1970 is 77 years after this patent's 1893 expiration and 73 years after the inventor's death, so the pre-1980 blind spot is not curable by the bulk data and does not change the conclusion.
• Independent negative corroboration: Google Patents' Legal Events for US 177,125 list only the 1876 grant, the 1876 publication, and the 1893 anticipated expiration. Google Patents ingests USPTO assignment/legal-events data where it exists; it shows no assignment, reissue, or transfer event for this patent.
• Identifiers note: the string "US177125D" that appears throughout the Google Patents page (family ID 2246532) is an internal family/document identifier artifact, not an assignee and not a reel/frame citation. No reel/frame can be reported because none exists.

Consequence: the record supports only that George G. Howe (and thereafter his estate/heirs) remained the owner of record for the patent's entire 1876–1893 life. Any transfer that occurred would have been by unrecorded paper — invisible to Assignment Center, PEDS/ODP (which for pre-1980 grants carries no assignment chain), SEC filings (no entity to file), and the RPX/Unified asserter directories (which index litigation and assertion activity; there is none for an 1876 jack). I cannot report a reel/frame, correspondent, or conveyance type for this patent because no such record exists in the source you specified.

Protocol note: because there are no recorded assignments, the remaining mandated sections — the timeline diagram, the eight NPE/troll-pattern signals, and the verdict — are not produced, per your "stop after this section" instruction. For completeness of the protocol's own closed verdict list, the bucket that applies is "Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment)" — expressly the "no records" branch, and specifically not a finding of NPE activity, since no transfer, no asserter, and no correspondent exists here to evaluate. Signal-by-signal: shell-entity transfer — not present; known asserter in chain — not present; repeat correspondent — not present and non-evaluable (no correspondent of record exists); cascading transfers — not present; pre-litigation transfer — not present (no infringement suit has ever named this patent); bankruptcy fire-sale — not present; privateering — not present; defensive aggregator — not present.

Verify: USPTO Assignment Center, search patent number 177125 — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (or https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) — and the patent record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US177125](/patent/US177125)/en. Both should return zero assignment records; if a modern recordation ever appears against 177125, treat it as a data-quality artifact rather than a real chain-of-title event for an 1876 grant that expired in 1893.

I'll research prior art for US 177,125. Let me start with targeted searches.

Let me verify whether US177125 has any citations at USPTO/Google Patents, and check the pre-1876 contemporaneous art.

Prior-Art Report — U.S. Patent No. 177,125

"Improvement in Lifting-Jacks," George G. Howe, Faribault, Rice County, Minnesota. Application filed April 4, 1876; granted May 9, 1876. One claim.

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1. Bottom line up front

U.S. Patent No. 177,125 has no patent citations — none, in either direction.

There is no inventor-cited reference, no examiner-cited reference, no "References Cited" front-page list, and no "Cited By" (forward-citation) list. The requested table cannot be populated from citations of record, because the document has no citations of record. I will not manufacture one. What I can do — and do below — is (a) show you exactly what the record does and does not contain, (b) explain why the absence is historically expected rather than a search failure, and (c) supply the most relevant actual prior art identified by my own search of the contemporaneous art, with a § 102 element-by-element assessment against the sole claim.

This is consistent with — and does not contradict — the earlier litigation section, which likewise found a null record for this number.

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2. Identification of the patent (literal, no auto-correction)

Methodological note on the USPTO leg of the search. I queried by the literal number 177125 against the web-accessible patent record surfaces (Google Patents' US177125A record, which mirrors the USPTO bibliographic data, plus PDFs of the original grant and the surrounding classification listings). I did not obtain a direct hit from the USPTO Patent Public Search / Patent Center interactive interfaces themselves — those are JavaScript applications not directly reachable by the tooling used here — and I am flagging that rather than implying I ran a native USPTO query. Per your instruction I filtered out all similar-but-different numbers; the only records returned for the literal number 177125 are this patent and its own family entry (family ID 2246532), which contains this patent alone.

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3. Why there are no citations — and what the record does contain

Historical reason. The "References Cited" section and systematic examiner citation of prior art were artifacts of twentieth-century USPTO practice (formalized with the modern front page and Rule 97/98 practice). An 1876 grant simply had no such field. The Howe grant's printed text recites exactly one self-referential datum — "Specification forming part of Letters Patent No. 177,125" — and nothing else. Its "claim" is a single combination claim with no citation apparatus behind it.

What automated databases display instead. Google Patents displays for US177125A:

• "Prior art keywords": lever, lifting, improvement, jacks, legs — algorithmically extracted from the text, not a citation list.
• "Similar Documents": a machine-similarity list of 25 documents. These are not citations; they are computed neighbors, and most are decades later.
• "Landscapes" / "Concepts": likewise algorithmic (the amusing "Oryza sativa" / rice entries and the "Catching Or Destruction" landscape are artifacts of the text-extraction engine).

I therefore split the "Similar Documents" list below by the one thing that actually matters for § 102: whether the document predates Howe's April 4, 1876 filing.

Only four of the twenty-five "Similar Documents" can even be considered prior art. The rest postdate the grant. This is the single most important filtering step, and it is the step that a naive reading of the Google Patents page would get wrong.

Governing law for a 1876 filing. The Patent Act of 1870 (Rev. Stat. § 4886) governed — the direct ancestor of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102. It barred a patent where the invention was "patented or described in any printed publication … before his invention … or more than two years prior to his application." Two consequences:

• (§ 102(b)-analog statutory bar): anything published before April 4, 1874 is a bar irrespective of Howe's actual invention date. US 37,707, US 62,117, and US 130,449 fall here.
• (§ 102(a)-analog): documents published between April 4, 1874 and April 4, 1876 bar only if published before Howe's actual invention date, which the record does not state. US 168,530 and US 175,461 sit in this narrower window.

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4. The claim to be measured

Claim 1 — the only claim — reads:

"A lifting-jack constructed of a top socket or support, swinging legs pivoted to the lower part, and a fulcrumed lever at the upper part of the socket, the lever having a top ratchet and guard, and being locked by a folding brace-link hinged to one of the legs, to be operated substantially as and for the purpose specified."

Two claim-construction points worth flagging:

• The specification's statement that the fulcrum is "vertically above the pivot-bolt of the leg nearer the lower end of the lever" is not in the claim and therefore cannot help distinguish over the art.
• This is a classic 1876 combination claim closed by "substantially as and for the purpose specified." Such claims were, in the contemporaneous case law, construed narrowly and sustained only as combinations — a point the era's lifting-jack litigation repeatedly makes (see the Federal Reporter lifting-jack opinions surfaced in my search).

For anticipation under § 102, a single reference must disclose every element (a)–(g). Partial disclosure is not anticipation; it is at most § 103 fodder.

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5. Most relevant prior art (within-window references I could fully read)

Reference 1 — US 37,707

• Full citation: William F. Rundell, "Improvement in Lifting-Jacks," U.S. Patent No. 37,707, granted Feb. 17, 1863 (East Genoa, Cayuga County, New York). (OCR of the printed grant renders the number once as "37,701"; per your rule I do not auto-correct, but the record header reads 37,707.)
• Publication/filing date: Feb. 17, 1863 — before the April 4, 1874 statutory-bar cut-off.
• Description: Wooden base block; a standard split into two pillars; two iron rack-bars g g each with teeth "for the purpose of suiting the operation of the jack to any required degree of height"; a lever with a feathered-edge plate m secured on its upper side and "adapted to engage with the teeth of the rack c, to secure the lever at any desired height"; a loose fulcrum-pin a with set-screw, fitted loosely to allow the lever to vibrate laterally.
• § 102 assessment vs. Claim 1: Discloses (c) lever on a support and (d) a toothed rack (ratchet) with an engaging plate. Fails (a) (a standard on a base block, not a top socket receiving legs), (b) (no pivoted legs), (e) (no guard), (f)/(g) (no brace-link, no folding). → Does not anticipate. Relevance: it shows rack-and-lock lever jacking was long known.

Reference 2 — US 38,654

• Full citation: Jeremiah Cook, "Improvement in Lifting-Jacks" (specification titled "Improved Hoisting-Jack"), U.S. Patent No. 38,654, granted May 26, 1863 (Palmersville, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania).
• Publication/filing date: May 26, 1863; signed Oct. 28, 1862 — statutory-bar art.
• Description: Base A with a strong standard; a vertically sliding, notched fulcrum-bar C held by a spring detent/pawl E; a hoisting-lever D pivoted at the top of the fulcrum-bar; a ratch G on the standard's front edge with downward-hooking notches; a catch-hook/stirrup H extending down from the lever to catch the ratch teeth, drawn in by a spring h.
• § 102 assessment vs. Claim 1: Discloses (c) and (d), and additionally teaches a spring-loaded catch that locks the lever against a ratchet — the same function as Howe's ratchet-plus-guard-plus-link. Fails (a) (ground-standing standard, not a top socket), (b) (no pivoted legs), (e), (f)/(g) (no folding leg-hinged brace-link). → Does not anticipate.

Reference 3 — US 40,981 (closest single reference on the locking sub-feature)

• Full citation: Thomas M. Kane, "Improvement in Lever-Jacks," U.S. Patent No. 40,981, granted Dec. 15, 1863 (Goshen, Orange County, New York; assignor to himself and Ogden Howell).
• Publication/filing date: Dec. 15, 1863 — statutory-bar art.
• Description: Bed-piece A carrying two uprights B and C. Upright B has a lock pin D through apertures E to hold the lever permanently. Front upright C carries a rack on one side and a movable block H on the other; the lever G is fulcrumed on pin J in block H. A clevis or adjustable link K is attached to block H and is "moved up and down to fit any tooth of the rack" to hold the front end of the lever at the required height.
• § 102 assessment vs. Claim 1: This is the best prior-art teaching of the link-riding-ratchet-teeth-to-lock-the-lever sub-feature that forms the functional heart of Howe's (d)+(f)+(g). It meets (c), (d), and functionally approximates (f)/(g). But the clevis K is attached to the movable fulcrum block H, not hinged to a leg; it is not a two-section folding link; and there are no pivoted swinging legs, no top socket, and no guard. → Does not anticipate. It is, however, the reference I would expect an examiner or an invalidity challenger to lead with on the locking sub-combination.

Reference 4 — US 130,449

• Full citation: John J. Stuart, "Improvement in Lifting-Jacks," U.S. Patent No. 130,449, granted Aug. 13, 1872 (New York, N.Y.).
• Publication/filing date: Aug. 13, 1872 — statutory-bar art.
• Description: Outer pipe A on a foot/stand B; inner telescoping pipe C; pin D through holes a′ to support C; an arm E slotted to receive fulcrum-bolt F; lever G with notches in its lower edge; a pawl H hooked through a slot in pipe A to engage notches c′ on pipe C.
• § 102 assessment vs. Claim 1: Meets (c) (lever fulcrumed at the upper part of a support) and shows a pawl-and-notch lock. Fails (a) (a pipe/foot, not a top socket with pivoted legs), (b), (e), (f)/(g). → Does not anticipate. It is architecturally a telescoping-pipe jack, a different family from Howe's folding tripod-with-lever.

Summary of the read references

No single read reference discloses (a), (b), and (f) together, let alone all seven elements. On the record I could verify, the sole claim is not anticipated by any reference located.

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6. In-window candidates I identified but could not fully evaluate

These predate the filing and are therefore properly part of the § 102 universe, but I could not retrieve their full texts within this session. I am listing them rather than silently dropping them, and rather than guessing at their contents.

Any of these could in principle disclose a top socket with pivoted spreadable legs — the element that distinguishes Howe's device — but I found no evidence of one, and I decline to assert it.

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7. Methodology, limitations, and confidence

What I did. Searched the literal number 177125 (excluding similar numbers); retrieved and read the full text of US 37,707, US 38,654, US 40,981, and US 130,449; screened all 25 "Similar Documents" against Howe's April 4, 1876 filing date; and browsed CPC subclass B66F listings to enumerate pre-1876 in-window art by title and date.

Confidence.

• High confidence that US 177,125 contains no citations of record and no forward citations. The absence is over-determined: the front-page "References Cited" convention did not exist in 1876, and the Google Patents record shows neither a citations section nor a cited-by section for this number.
• Moderate-to-high confidence that none of the four readable references anticipates the sole claim — the element mapping above is direct and each reference is missing at least three elements.
• Moderate confidence in the completeness of the in-window candidate list; it is bounded by what the accessible databases index and by the classification paths I could browse.
• Low confidence / explicitly unresolved: the content of US 168,530, US 175,461, US 62,117, and the ~20 other in-window lifting-jack patents whose texts I did not retrieve.

Recommended next step for a formal § 102 clearance. Pull the full texts (and drawings — drawings matter enormously here, since (b) the pivoted spreadable legs and (f) the two-section folding brace-link are structural features that appear in figures before they appear in words) of at least: US 168,530; US 175,461; US 62,117; US 172,973; US 168,663; and the 1870–1874 statutory-bar group. Where prior art could not be fully evaluated, I have said so rather than filling the gap — because in an anticipation analysis a fabricated reference list is worse than an empty one.

I'll first try to retrieve the actual content of the prior-art references listed on the patent page, so the obviousness analysis rests on verified disclosure rather than inference from titles.

I have full text for three of the pre-1876 references. Let me retrieve the fourth (US 62,117) and check whether any listed reference discloses the pivoted/folding leg feature — the one element that appears distinctive.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 177,125 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

0. Threshold flags before the analysis

0.1 Date contradiction (flagged, per instructions). This task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026." The supplied authoritative Google Patents fetch is timestamped 2026-09-30T14:05:12Z, and the previously generated sections of this analysis ran under "Today's date: 2026-09-30." I cannot reconcile these two dates and I do not auto-correct either. Nothing in the §103 analysis below turns on which date is correct, because the operative legal dates are all in 1863–1893.

0.2 § 103 did not exist in 1876. The patent issued May 9, 1876, under the Patent Act of 1870. Section 103 was enacted in the Patent Act of 1952. Applying it here is an analytical exercise in hindsight: the contemporaneous (and therefore legally correct) inquiry for an 1876 patent was want of invention / "ordinary mechanic" under Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850), not the Graham/KSR framework. I use the modern framework because that is the task, but every conclusion below maps one-for-one onto the older "mere mechanical skill" standard. This field's own case law shows courts applying that standard to lifting-jacks: Mosher v. Joyce, 31 F. 557 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1887) (sustaining narrow lever-jack claims), and the Duff Mfg. Co. v. Forgie, 78 F. 626 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1897) line (upholding some jack claims, and elsewhere voiding a claim as "the product of mere mechanical skill").

0.3 The "Prior Art" section of the page is not a prior-art citation list. Google Patents' "Similar Documents" block is machine-generated semantic similarity output. Critically, 21 of the 25 listed documents post-date this patent's April 4, 1876 filing date and therefore are not prior art to it at all. Only four qualify. This is the single most important filter for any §103 analysis here.

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1. Qualification screen on the listed "Similar Documents"

Constructive date of invention: April 4, 1876 (filing date; Howe's actual invention date is not of record and could only be earlier, never later — so no document published after that date can qualify absent a statutory exception I have no evidence of).

Caveat on US 180,552 (Aug. 1, 1876): it may have been filed before Howe's filing date, but I am not aware of any 1870s-Act equivalent to the modern "secret prior art" rule (pre-AIA §102(e) / AIA §102(a)(2)) that would make an as-yet-ungranted application prior art. I do not rely on it. The post-1876 documents may be consulted only as background showing the density of the field (they cannot be §103 references), and even that use is contested.

Also note: I have text only, not the drawings, for Howe and for the references. Howe's Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 therefore cannot be visually compared, and the analysis below rests on the specification text.

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2. Element-by-element mapping of Claim 1 to the qualifying references

Claim 1 recites five cooperating elements. Verified disclosure:

Reading of the record: every element of Claim 1 except the precise location of the brace-link pivot (on the leg rather than on the lever) and the two-section hinging of that link is disclosed, element-for-element, in the qualifying art. Those two residual differences are the entire inventive distance.

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3. Combinations that render Claim 1 obvious

Combination A (primary): US 168,530 (Richards) in view of US 130,449 (Stuart) or US 37,707 (Rundell)

Richards supplies elements (a), (b), (c), (e) in substance: a foldable multi-leg support with a lever fulcrumed in the upper end of the main leg, a toothed rack-bar pivoted between the lever and a bolt on the leg to lock the lever at a selectable height, and expressly-recited height adjustment for "the varying heights of different vehicles" plus folding "into a compact form … economizing room."

Stuart or Rundell supplies element (d) as a lever-carried locking member riding a toothed member fixed to the support — exactly the ratchet/brace geometry Howe claims — and Stuart additionally shows the routine practice of tethering a small jack element (chain d′) so it stays "within easy reach of the operator," which is the function Howe attributes to guard-wire D ("to keep the brace-link E near the ratchet, to be quickly applied when required").

Motivation to combine (KSR rationales)

1. Same field, same problem, same art. All four qualifying references are lifting-/carriage-jacks directed to raising a wagon axle to free a wheel for oiling — the precise stated object of Howard's and Stuart's and Richards' specifications. They are a fortiori analogous art.
2. The result is a predictable combination of known elements (KSR rationale A). Combining a foldable multi-leg support carrying a top-fulcrumed lever (Richards) with a lever-carried pawl/plate engaging a rack on the support (Stuart, Rundell) yields nothing more than the sum of the known functions: raise load, hold at discrete heights, fold away.
3. Simple substitution of one known locking element for another (KSR rationale B). Howe's toothed ratchet-plus-brace-link is a straight substitution for Richards' toothed rack-bar-plus-bolt, with the same function (incremental height locking of the hoisting lever) and a predictable result.
4. Reversal of parts (KSR rationale; MPEP 2144.04(IV)(D)). Richards pivots the toothed bar on the lever and hooks it to the leg; Howe pivots the toothed brace-link on the leg and runs it along the ratchet on the lever. Reversing which of two cooperating members carries the pivot, where both arrangements are shown in the art, is a classic obvious expedient. It also has a recognized design advantage a mechanic would see without invention: the link hinged to the stationary leg does not swing with the operator's handle.
5. Folding is a known design incentive, expressly stated in the art (KSR rationale F). Richards' stated object is compactness in storage. A two-section, pivoted (folding) brace-link is the ordinary way to fold a diagonal member that must span a variable distance — Howe's own specification offers no other function for the two-section construction than "the purpose of folding with the legs and lever into compact shape."
6. Guards/keepers are a known, trivial expedient. Stuart's chain d′ tethering pin D so it is not lost, "within easy reach of the operator," is directly analogous to Howe's guard-wire D. Nothing in the claim calls for more than a retainer holding a link near the teeth.

Combination B (alternative): US 168,530 (Richards) in view of US 37,707 (Rundell)

Rundell expressly states its lever-carried feathered-edge plate is "adapted to engage with the teeth of the rack … to secure the lever at any desired height" — a statement of the identical objective Howe states ("to lock the lever in the position required for keeping the wagon in raised position"). Substituting Rundell's plate-and-rack lock for Richards' rack-bar-and-bolt lock, both on the same foldable support with a top-fulcrumed lever, is within the skill of the ordinary mechanic and produces only predictable results.

Combination C (also available, drawn from the same page's list but post-dating)

The page's own list contains the whole family of 1876–1911 jacks (US 180,552; 182,956; 206,516; 301,881; 303,120; 331,415; 356,443; 375,675; 393,527; 666,642; 749,489; 757,793; 851,401; 1,012,818). Under the 1870 Act these are not prior art and cannot be combined. They are usable only as corroboration that the jack trade was, by 1876, a crowded art of incremental, predictable improvements — which weighs in favor of obviousness on the "ordinary mechanic" standard but is not a §103 reference. Do not use them as such.

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4. The genuine counterargument (why the claim is not a slam dunk

):

• The top socket with legs pivoted to its lower part. Howe's distinguishing structure — a single hub receiving the splayed legs below and the lever above, with the legs' splay width set to match axle height — is not literally shown in any of the four qualifying references I could verify. Richards adjusts height by changing which leg folds into which, not by splaying; Stuart and Rundell have a single fixed stand. A patentee would argue the socket-and-splayed-leg combination is the point of novelty and is not disclosed.
• "substantially as and for the purpose specified." This archaic closing ties the claim to the described mode of operation and would be read narrowly, importing the folding brace-link hinged to the outer leg. Narrow claims are harder to invalidate in combination, and Mosher v. Joyce shows 19th-century courts sometimes sustained narrow jack claims as "useful and patentable" over dense prior art.
• No express suggestion to splay the legs in the art. The motivation to convert Richards' nested folding legs into splayed pivoting legs is inferential (both solve "fit different vehicle heights"), not stated.

The response: KSR permits exactly this inferential motivation where the field is predictable, the problem is identical, and the art itself articulates the objective ("raising and adjusting the height … to the varying heights of different vehicles," Richards). The splayed-leg height adjustment is a predictable mechanical variant of a disclosed function, not a new operation of any element.

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5. What I could not verify (stated honestly)

• US 62,117 (A. M. Culver, "Lifting Jack," Feb. 19, 1867) — I confirmed the number, title, inventor and date (Google Patents list; and the 1867 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents index line "62117—A. M. Culver—Lifting Jack"). I could not retrieve its specification, and I have not attributed any structure to it. It cannot be relied upon as a §103 reference in this analysis.
• The drawings for US 177,125 and for the four references are not in the supplied text; visual comparisons (e.g., Howe's Fig. 2 folded view) cannot be made.
• Howe's actual date of invention. I used the April 4, 1876 filing date as a constructive date. If Howe could have sworn behind more of the listed art, the pool of qualifying references would shrink rather than grow — it cannot rescue the claim.
• No claim-by-claim dependency analysis is possible: there is one claim and no dependents (consistent with the earlier section).

Confidence: high on the qualification screen, the mapping of US 168,530 / US 130,449 / US 37,707 to the claim elements, and the KSR-style motivations (all quoted directly from the retrieved specifications). Low on US 62,117 and on any assertion about the drawings.