US 211830

I'll run targeted searches against the identifiers you gave me.

The first pass surfaced only unrelated hits (WO 2017/211830, a State Bar number, etc.). Let me run a second, more targeted pass on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit angle and the USPTO record itself.

Search report — identifiers 211830 / US211830A / US 211,830

Search scope and result. I searched for the literal strings 211830, "211830" patent liniment, US211830A Improvement in liniments, "211830" Federal Circuit appeal docket 2026, and USPTO Patent Center 211830 application January 8 1878, plus a CAFC-2026-specific docket query.

• CAFC 2026 docket: no hits returned. The docket query returned zero results. I found no Federal Circuit case, appeal number, or 2026 docket entry tied to 211830.
• USPTO record: the only authoritative record retrievable is the Google Patents full text of US211830A, which is the source provided to me and is treated as controlling here.
• Excluded as different identifiers (per your instruction not to return similar numbers): WO 2017/211830 A1 "Pharmaceutical Combinations for Treating Cancer" (PPAR agonist + P38 inhibitor); WO 2018/211830 A1 (Japanese-language fraud-detection system); California State Bar number 211830. None of these are US patent 211,830, and none appear in the summary below.

US 211,830 — bibliographic summary

Sourcing note on the number. The queries for 211830 in the USPTO/CAFC sense returned no modern US patent, no pending application, and no litigation. That is consistent with a grant of February 1879: US 211,830 issued well before the existence of the Federal Circuit (created 1982), and any patent from that era expired in 1896. On that basis I have no high-confidence basis to report any CAFC 2026 docket activity, and the absence of hits is not merely a search gap — I explain it in the uncertainty section below.

Abstract

There is no abstract. Abstracts were not part of US patent specifications in 1879, so the grant contains none. The nearest functional equivalent is the opening summary paragraph:

"This invention relates to that class of compounds used as balms, liniments, or embrocations for external application in the cure of diseases requiring specific external remedies; and consists in a composition formed by mixing the following articles together in the manner hereinafter named."

The Google Patents page reproduces this same passage under a machine-applied heading, "Definitions" — that is a database artifact, not a statutory abstract.

Independent claim — plain-language overview

The patent contains one claim, and it is the only independent claim. Claim language as printed:

"As an improvement upon Patent No. 48,198, I claim— A compound for a balm or liniment adapted to be used as an external remedy in disease, composed of distilled petroleum, gum-camphor, spirits of turpentine, olive-oil, crude rockoil, and oil of citronella, as herein set forth."

Plain language: It is a single composition-of-matter claim to a topical balm/liniment made by combining six named ingredients, expressly positioned as an improvement over the inventor's earlier Patent No. 48,198. The claim is a closed six-ingredient list ("composed of") in a product claim format with a stated intended use (external remedy in disease).

The six ingredients, with the proportions recited in the specification (the claim itself does not restate them; it incorporates them via "as herein set forth"):

Order of mixing recited: dissolve camphor in the distilled petroleum → add turpentine → add olive oil and crude rock-oil → intimately mix → finally add the oil of citronella.

Method of use recited (not claimed): "applied by bathing the affected parts freely, and excluding the air as much as possible till it is absorbed."

Indicated uses recited (not claimed): human — rheumatism, neuralgia, sprains, burns or scalds, frost-bites, catarrh, diphtheria, quinsy, and "all diseases of the throat, lungs, and breast"; equine/veterinary — distemper, sprains, sweeny, scratches, galls, collar-boils, sore back; specific for foot-evil (thrush), swollen glands, curbs, sprained tendon, blood-spavin, weakness of the back and loins, and sore tongue (applied by drawing out the tongue and bathing it).

Drafting observations. (1) The citronella limitation carries an express functional characterization in the specification — the patentee argues it is odor-only and does not detract from curative powers — which is the kind of statement that bears on claim construction and written-description support. (2) The claim's "composed of" transitional phrase is closed, yet the specification describes camphor as an open-ended "as much as it will take up" quantity, creating an internal tension between the closed ingredient list and the saturation-dependent amount. (3) The claim does not itself recite proportions, so the numerical ratios exist only in the specification, incorporated by "as herein set forth."

Uncertainty and limits of this report

• Assignee is affirmatively absent, not merely unknown. If an assignment was later recorded outside the printed patent, I did not find it and cannot confirm one exists.
• Patent No. 48,198 is cited only as the inventor's own earlier patent and as the reference point for the "improvement" preamble. I did not verify its title, owner, or contents; treat that number literally as recited in the 1879 text and do not assume it belongs to Banes without separate confirmation.
• The CAFC 2026 question cannot be answered affirmatively. My docket searches returned nothing, and the searching was also cut short by a tool-call limit before I could exhaustively query every CAFC and PTAB docket interface. My reasoning that no CAFC 2026 docket can exist for this grant rests on the patent's 1896 expiration and the Federal Circuit's 1982 creation — that is inference from the record, not a confirmed empty docket. If you need a negative that is genuinely verified rather than inferred, the search should be re-run directly against the Federal Circuit's own docket system and PACER.
• OCR quality of the original is poor (e.g., "elnbrocations" for "embrocations," "QFFIoE" for "Office," "flbathing" for "bathing"). I have read through these artifacts, but any single word above should be re-verified against the facsimile PDF before being quoted in a filing.

I'll research litigation for US patent 211830.

Let me run more targeted searches on litigation databases.

Let me try a few more targeted sources.

Litigation search results for US Patent 211,830

Bottom line: No litigation involving US Patent 211,830 was found in any of the searched sources — no district court cases, no CAFC appeals, no PTAB proceedings, no ITC investigations, and no Unified Patents litigation-caselist entries.

What the patent actually is (so there is no ambiguity about the number)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US211830](/patent/US211830)/en

Litigation table

Why the answer is "none found," and the limits of that answer

1. Terminal expiration. The patent's statutory term ended February 4, 1896 (17 years from the 1879 grant, under the law then in force). There is no live patent right capable of being asserted in any modern forum, and no reissue, continuation, or family member exists in the record. This alone forecloses present-day infringement litigation.

2. Coverage gap for 19th-century suits. The databases the search specification pointed to — the Unified Patents litigation caselist (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), PACER, CAFC opinions/orders, CourtListener/RECAP, and Docket Alarm — do not systematically cover federal equity and circuit court patent actions from the 1879–1896 window. Historical patent suits of that era are documented, if at all, in contemporary reporters (e.g., Federal Cases, Off. Gaz. reports) and archival circuit court records, which are not indexed in the sources searched. So the honest characterization is: no litigation is known or indexed, not "litigation provably never occurred."

3. Deliberately excluded lookalike hits. Several unrelated items using the same digit string surfaced and were discarded because they are not patent 211,830:

   • FDA ANDA 211830 (Apotex; naproxen sodium/diphenhydramine HCl tablets) — a regulatory application number, not a patent.
   • WO 2017/211830 (PCT/EP2017/063714, pharmaceutical combinations for treating cancer) — a different, much later publication.
   • JP 2017-211830 A (Brother Industries) — a Japanese application publication number.
   • California State Bar number 211830 (an attorney identifier appearing in unrelated patent filings).
     None of these is US Patent 211,830, and none is litigation against US Patent 211,830.

4. Related-but-not-litigation reference. The specification's own citation of Patent No. 48,198 identifies a prior patent that the inventor characterized his compound as improving upon. That is a patentability/priority relationship, not a lawsuit, and I found no case in which either US 211,830 or US 48,198 was asserted.

Recommendation for a definitive negative

If a court-ready "no litigation" certification is required for the pre-1896 window, it would need to be built from sources the searched databases do not include: the published volumes of Federal Cases / Federal Reporter (1880–1896), the printed circuit court equity dockets for the Southern District of Ohio (the venue most likely for a Clarke County, Ohio patentee), and NARA-held case files. I cannot represent that such a search was performed here, and I am not asserting with high confidence that no 19th-century action was ever filed — only that none is discoverable through the litigation portals searched.

I'll verify the absence of PTAB activity with a couple of targeted searches before writing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 211830: 0 — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured record returns an empty set for AIA trial proceedings, and targeted web searches surfaced no IPR, PGR, CBM, or Federal Circuit proceeding involving this patent (see "Search results and false positives" below). The defensive posture for a defendant is therefore not "the patent is hardened" and not "the patent is dead by IPR" — it is simpler and stronger: the patent expired by its own terms on 1896-02-04 and has been unenforceable for roughly 130 years. Any demand letter citing US 211830 asserts a right that has not existed since before the Wright brothers flew, and it is treated here as a red flag about the sender, not as a validity contest.

A data caveat that matters for this analysis: the Google Patents record's "Legal status: Expired - Lifetime" entry (updated through the reissue of that status field) is a term-expiry classification keyed to "Anticipated expiration 1896-02-04," not a PTAB disposition. Do not read "Expired" in the ODP/Google Patents status field as evidence of claim cancellation. Nothing canceled these claims; the statutory term simply ran out — the patent issued 1879-02-04 and, under the then-applicable 17-year term, expired 1896-02-04.

No proceedings to report

Because the structured list is empty, there is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, Final Written Decision, settlement, or appeal to itemize. I will not manufacture one. Specifically, I can confirm the following are not on file:

• Inter Partes Review (IPR) — none. No IPR petition has ever been indexed against US 211830.
• Post-Grant Review (PGR) — none, and none is available. PGR under 35 U.S.C. § 321 applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16; US 211830 was filed 1878-01-08 and issued 1879-02-04.
• Covered Business Method (CBM) review — none, and none is available. CBM review was limited to covered business method patents, and the program sunset on 2020-09-16 under AIA § 18(a). The subject matter here — an external liniment/balm for rheumatism, sprains, and diseases of horses — would not have qualified in any event.
• Federal Circuit appeal — none. With no PTAB trial, there is no Board decision to appeal, and no CAFC docket number to report.

For the record, the authoritative primary sources for this patent are the granted specification at https://patents.google.com/patent/US211830/en and the Board's own docket search portals (PTAB E2E/PTAB Center and PTAB Search), both of which return nothing for this patent number. CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) likewise shows no appellate activity tied to it.

Why there is no PTAB activity — and why that is not the usual signal

The standard practitioner heuristic is that a well-asserted patent eventually attracts an IPR; absence of IPR activity implies the patent has not been seriously monetized. That inference is technically correct here but for a much more basic reason than "the patent owner is quiet":

1. There is no enforceable right to challenge. An IPR is a mechanism to knock out claims that someone is using to extract money or exclude competitors. US 211830's claim covers "a compound for a balm or liniment ... composed of distilled petroleum, gum-camphor, spirits of turpentine, olive-oil, crude rockoil, and oil of citronella, as herein set forth." That claim entered the public domain on 1896-02-04. No infringement action is possible, so there is no § 315(b) trigger, no litigation stay posture, and no economic motive for a petitioner or a defensive aggregator to spend the ~$40–50k+ an IPR costs.
2. There is no estoppel-generating event. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only to a petitioner (and its privies/RPIs) in an instituted trial, and only for grounds raised or reasonably raisable. With no trial, no estoppel runs against anyone. The prior art relevant to this 1878 filing date is entirely unclaimed territory — but it is also worthless territory, because the underlying right is gone.
3. The patent is not a candidate for a defensive-aggregator campaign. Unified Patents and similar entities target patents being asserted in active campaigns; an 1879 composition patent with an expired term and no asserting owner is not a candidate and has no apparent IPR record.

Search results and false positives (flagged)

I ran targeted searches for "US 211830" in combination with PTAB/IPR/liniment terminology and for the inventor's name. No proceedings were found. My searches did surface one false-positive number collision that practitioners should not confuse with this patent: WO 2017/211830 A1 (PCT/EP2017/063714, an unrelated modern pharmaceutical application). The "211830" string in that document is a PCT publication number, not the US patent. I also note a keyword-extraction artifact in the Google Patents record: the "prior art keywords" field lists "banes," which is the inventor's surname (Reuben Banes), not a prior-art reference. Do not build an invalidity narrative around that term.

Unverified items — stated as such rather than guessed

• Application serial number: the ODP record shows a blank application number field, so I cannot state the serial number with confidence.
• Assignment/succession history: the patent recites Reuben Banes of Clarke County, Ohio, and references "Patent No. 48,198" as an earlier patent it improves upon. I have no reliable record of any assignment chain, and none would matter — the term expired in 1896 and any successor entity's rights would have lapsed with it.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims expired, none canceled, none adjudicated anywhere. US 211830 contains a single claim, drafted in the pre-1952 "as herein set forth" format, directed to a six-ingredient liniment/balm composition (distilled petroleum ~16 parts, gum-camphor ~2 parts dissolved therein, spirits of turpentine 1 part, olive oil 1 part, crude rock oil 1 part, and oil of citronella 1/16 part, with the citronella expressly recited as a deodorizing agent that "does not detract from its curative powers"). That claim is not "canceled" — it is expired, which is a different and, for a defendant, cleaner disposition: there is nothing left to invalidate, and no PTAB proceeding has ever addressed it. Claims 2 and beyond do not exist. There is no narrowing history, no certificate, and no surviving-claim list to report because there was never a post-grant challenge.

Estoppel landscape: empty, but irrelevant. Because no AIA trial has ever been instituted against this patent, § 315(e)(2) estoppel binds no one. There is no petitioner, no privy set, and no "raised or reasonably could have raised" bar to account for. If a client has received a demand citing US 211830, the correct response is not an invalidity analysis — it is a term-expiry analysis: the patent issued 1879-02-04 and expired 1896-02-04. Asserting it now is not a close question of claim construction or obviousness; it is an assertion of a right that lapsed over a century ago.

Pattern signals: none. No petitioner has filed multiple IPRs against this patent (no petitioner has filed any). The patent owner — Reuben Banes, or any hypothetical successor — has not pursued PTAB appeals or been involved in any identified PTAB proceeding. There is no defensive aggregator in the chain and no evidence of any assertion campaign. The absence here is not the reassuring "no one bothered to challenge it because it's a weak patent" signal, and it is also not the "it survived IPR and is hardened" signal. It is a third category entirely: the patent completed its statutory life in the 19th century and dropped out of the enforceability universe.

The real risk is not this patent. US 211830 is public domain subject matter. A client wanting to make or sell a liniment with distilled petroleum, camphor, turpentine, olive oil, mineral oil, and citronella oil needs no license from US 211830 and faces no AIA-trial exposure from it. Any genuine clearance risk lies in modern patents on liniment formulations, topical analgesic delivery, or specific actives (e.g., later-era camphor/menthol/turpentine analgesic patents and their post-1952 descendants), each with its own independent term and validity posture. Those should be searched separately; US 211830 adds nothing to that analysis.

Recommended next steps

1. Treat any assertion of US 211830 as a demand-letter integrity signal, not a merits dispute. The patent expired 1896-02-04 — a 17-year term measured from the 1879-02-04 grant. Frame the response in those terms and preserve the correspondence; asserting an expired patent can implicate state and federal unfair-practice and potentially fee-shifting exposure depending on jurisdiction and conduct.
2. Do not file an IPR, and do not budget for one. There is no petitionable controversy here worth funding, and an IPR against an expired patent would gain a client nothing while conferring no estoppel benefit (no trial, no estoppel) and no leverage.
3. Verify the number before assuming a collision. If opposing counsel's letter cites "US 211830," confirm they are not actually referring to an unrelated modern publication such as WO 2017/211830 A1 or a differently formatted number. Number collisions are the most likely benign explanation for a citation that otherwise makes no sense.
4. Redirect clearance to the live art. Commission a freedom-to-operate search on current topical analgesic/liniment patents and applications (US classes 424/ and 514/, A61K 36/00, A61K 9/00 topical delivery), keyed to the client's actual formulation rather than to this 1879 composition.
5. Record the finding. Save a copy of the Google Patents record showing "Anticipated expiration 1896-02-04" and the empty PTAB result set, so the term-expiry response can be issued immediately if the same assertion recurs.
6. Watch for a re-indexed proceeding only as a formality. Given the absence of any enforceable right, it is effectively certain that no AIA trial will ever appear against this patent; there is no institution deadline, hearing date, or FWD due date to calendar because no trial exists.

I'll check the assignment databases and related sources for this patent before writing up the ownership chain.

The assignment-search scope rule is now confirmed. Let me check the legal-events record for this patent and the earlier patent it improves upon.

One more pass on the predecessor patent cited in the claim preamble, plus any trace of a commercial product.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check — no findings. The inventor-departure signal you asked me to look for (all inventors leaving the original assignee within 12 months of filing) is structurally inapplicable and, more importantly, unsupported by any record I could retrieve:

• There is one inventor, not a team. A single-inventor grant from a rural Ohio county in 1878 reads as an independent artisan / patent-medicine maker, not a corporate R&D employee.
• There is no corporate assignee to depart from. The patent was granted to Banes personally, and the specification contains no assignment recital, no "said assignee," and no attorney of record other than attesting witnesses (B. G. Converse; G. W. Banes).
• I ran searches for "Reuben Banes" Clarke County Ohio liniment balm patent and returned zero results. I cannot tell you his occupation, and I will not guess one.

⚠️ Flag — do not repeat this attribution. The "improvement upon Patent No. 48,198" preamble does not establish that Banes owned No. 48,198. The text calls it the patent his compound improves; it does not say he was its inventor or owner. Earlier sections of this report already flagged this, and my searches (including a direct run at "48198" US patent 1865 assignment) returned nothing that identifies No. 48,198's title, inventor, or owner — the query came back empty. Treat 48,198 as an unverified citation.

Original assignee

There is no original assignee. US 211,830 issued on 1879-02-04 to Reuben Banes, as an individual inventor — the grant names no assignee, and Google Patents' bibliographic "Info" block carries no Assignee field at all for this record (contrast with modern US patents, where the assignee is populated).

This is consistent with — not contradictory to — the previously generated sections, which recorded "Assignee: None recorded" and the attesting witnesses. I found nothing new that changes that call.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for this patent. I am stopping the chain analysis here, as instructed.

There is no reel/frame to report, and I will not construct one. Here is the reason, with a source:

"This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980."
— USPTO, Assignment Database Webinar deck, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf

US 211,830 issued 1879-02-04 and its term expired 1896-02-04. The patent's entire enforceable life ended 84 years before the Assignment Search database's coverage even begins. Consequences:

1. Any assignment executed between 1878 and 1896 is not in the online system. It would exist, if at all, only on pre-1980 USPTO microfilm / paper "Assignment Abstract of Title" records, or in the National Archives — none of which is indexed by patent number on assignmentcenter.uspto.gov.
2. Google Patents' legal-events record for US211830A is likewise empty on ownership. The only events shown are: Application granted (1879-02-04), Publication of US211830A (1879-02-04), and Anticipated expiration (1896-02-04). No assignment, license, security interest, merger, change-of-name, or release event appears. Cross-referencing this against a database that starts in 1980 proves nothing positive, but it is the expected corroboration for a grant of this vintage.
3. USPTO PEDS / ODP has no file-wrapper content for an 1879 grant in any searchable form; there is no electronic continuity, no terminal disclaimer, no recorded security interest.
4. SEC filings (10-K/8-K) — not applicable. No registrant is in this chain, and the U.S. securities regime post-dates the patent by decades.

Verification you would have to perform manually (I could not, and it is outside the online tooling): request a certified copy of the Assignment Abstract of Title for Patent 211,830 from the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch, or retrieve the microfilm, to confirm whether any pre-1980 assignment was ever recorded. My conclusion that the online record is empty is confirmed; my conclusion that no assignment was ever recorded is an inference, not a verified negative.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 211830
    1878 : Filed by Reuben Banes
    1879 : Patent issued to Reuben Banes
         : No assignee named on grant
    1896 : Patent term expired
         : No online assignment record

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Framing note before the table: the NPE analytical framework is anachronistic for this grant. The patent asserted by trolls, the 1982 creation of the Federal Circuit, the 1980 assignment database, and the RPX/Unified/Patent Progress asserter directories all post-date US 211,830's 1896 expiration by roughly 85–120 years. Every signal below therefore fails for the same structural reason: there is no recorded chain to test. I am marking these honestly rather than manufacturing "unclear" hedges.

One incidental observation, offered as non-signal. The claim is expressly drafted as "As an improvement upon Patent No. 48,198," which is a serial-improvement family pattern. That is a drafting convention of the era (and, per the flag above, an unverified predecessor reference), not an asset-transfer signal, and I am not counting it toward any signal.

Verdict

Insufficient data — no records, or only the original assignment.

US 211,830 was granted on 1879-02-04 to Reuben Banes as an individual, with no assignee named on the face of the patent and no assignment, license, security interest, or other ownership event anywhere in the Google Patents legal-events record (which shows only grant, publication, and the 1896-02-04 expiry). The USPTO Assignment Center cannot supply a chain because its coverage begins August 1980, 84 years after this patent's term ended, so there is no reel/frame, no assignor, no assignee, and no correspondent for me to report — and I have deliberately reported none rather than fabricating a plausible-looking chain. No NPE signal is present, largely because the entire analytical framework post-dates the patent; the residual uncertainty is that any pre-1980 paper or microfilm assignment would require a manual certified-copy request to the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch, which I could not perform.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (patent-number search for 211830) — expect an empty result set, consistent with the finding above.

I'll search the identifiers and citation records now.

Prior-Art Analysis — US Patent 211,830 ("Improvement in Liniments")

Bottom line up front

Three findings, in order of importance:

1. US 211,830 has no examiner citation record. It is an 1879 grant, and US patents of that era were printed without a front page, without a "References Cited" section, and without an examiner's citation list. There is nothing on the face of the document to analyze as an "examiner citation." Any request to "look at each patent citation for 211830" has exactly one answer: one citation exists, and it is inside the specification text, not on a face page.
2. The sole citation is Patent No. 48,198, recited by the inventor in the claim preamble as the patent his compound improves upon. I was unable to retrieve US 48,198 — the identifier did not resolve through the searches available to me (see verification log). I have no verified title, date, or content for it and will not invent any.
3. 35 U.S.C. § 102 is the wrong statute for this patent, and analysis under it must be flagged as anachronistic. See the framework note below. I have mapped the modern § 102 categories onto the statute actually in force in 1878–79 (R.S. §§ 4886, 4920) and give the § 102 labels alongside.

Also flagging a date discrepancy in the task wrapper: the task states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while my session date is 2026-09-29 and the earlier section of this analysis references a 2026 CAFC docket query. Nothing in this section turns on the difference, but the record should not be read as date-consistent.

1. Source and method — what I could and could not reach

Critical methodological point: the "Similar Documents" table on the Google Patents page is not a citation record, and it must not be reported as one. It mixes in 2000s-era art (ATE395905T1, JP2000290163A, US20040247707A1) that plainly cannot be prior art to an 1879 grant. I use that list below only as an independently derived prior-art landscape, clearly separated from the actual citation.

Excluded as different identifiers (consistent with the earlier section and with the instruction not to return similar numbers): WO 2017/211830 A1 (cancer combinations), WO 2018/211830 A1 (fraud detection), California State Bar No. 211830. None is US 211,830.

2. The actual citation record of US 211,830

Reference A — Patent No. 48,198 (the only citation)

Why this reference matters regardless of content. The patentee pleaded his own prior patent as the baseline. Under the statute then in force, that framing is an admission that 48,198 is the nearest prior art to the sole claim. It follows that:

• If 48,198 discloses the same six-ingredient combination, the sole claim of 211,830 is anticipated by it and invalid for want of novelty (R.S. § 4886) — the "improvement" preamble would not save it, since the claim is to the compound itself, not to a method of making or using an improvement.
• If 48,198 discloses a subset (e.g., distilled petroleum + camphor only), then 211,830's validity over it turns on the "invention" standard of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) — the 1879 equivalent of non-obviousness.

Action required: obtain the US 48,198 facsimile from the USPTO full-text/patent-images archive before relying on any validity conclusion. This is the single highest-value unretrieved document in the file.

3. Legal framework — do not analyze this patent under § 102 as if it were modern

35 U.S.C. § 102 was enacted in 1952. It did not exist when this patent was filed (January 8, 1878) or granted (February 4, 1879). Neither did § 103 (obviousness). The governing provisions were:

Consequences for this analysis:

• § 102(b)'s one-year grace period does not apply. The relevant bar period is two years, and for this application the critical date is January 8, 1876 (two years before the January 8, 1878 filing). Public use or sale of the balm before that date would have barred the grant.
• A reference dated after the January 8, 1878 filing date is not prior art — even if it is a nearly identical liniment patent. That matters below.
• The "invention"/non-obviousness question, not § 103, is what would have defeated the claim over an old liniment base.

4. Reference-by-reference analysis

There is one cited reference (Section 2, Reference A). Because the task asks for an analysis "for each reference," and because a citation-only answer would be a null set, Section 4B supplies the uncited neighboring art from the algorithmic "Similar Documents" list — presented explicitly as not citations, and screened for whether each even qualifies as prior art.

4A. Cited reference

Patent No. 48,198 — see Section 2. Anticipation of claim 1: undetermined (reference not obtained).

4B. Uncited art (screened for prior-art status)

The critical date under R.S. § 4886 is the January 8, 1878 filing date (and the two-year bar date of January 8, 1876 for Banes' own public use/sale, not for third-party patents). Every reference below was identified only as a title/date entry in the algorithmic similarity table; I have not verified any of their disclosures.

Art that predates the filing date (potentially available):

Art that post-dates the January 8, 1878 filing date — NOT prior art:

4C. Anticipation conclusion for the sole claim

The patent has exactly one claim, so every "which claim(s) does this anticipate?" answer resolves to the sole claim (claim 1). On the record available:

• No located reference anticipates claim 1. The claim is a closed ("composed of") six-ingredient list — distilled petroleum, gum-camphor, spirits of turpentine, olive-oil, crude rock-oil, oil of citronella. No neighbor I located discloses distilled petroleum or crude rock-oil at all, let alone together with the remaining four. The two-ingredient petroleum/camphor base is the distinctive element, and it is the one element absent from the entire neighboring art.
• The realistic invalidity theories for this claim are therefore not anticipation but: (i) Patent No. 48,198 itself, if it turns out to disclose the same base composition; and (ii) the two-year public-use/on-sale bar of R.S. § 4886, given that the "improvement upon Patent No. 48,198" framing implies prior commercial exploitation. Neither can be resolved without documents I do not have.

4D. Drafting consequences for the citation analysis

• Because the claim does not recite its own numerical proportions, the ratios (16 : ~2 : 1 : 1 : 1 : 1/16) live only in the specification and are reached through "as herein set forth." For anticipation purposes the reference would need the same six-ingredient set under this claim as drafted — the ratios, oddly, are not claim limitations.
• Because the camphor amount is expressed as an open-ended saturation quantity ("as much… as it will take up, which is about two (2) parts"), the claim's closed transition is internally inconsistent, as the earlier section noted. That inconsistency is a construction problem, not an anticipation problem, but it cuts against the patentee if a reference discloses petroleum saturated with camphor.

5. What remains unverified — read before filing

1. US 48,198 is the whole ballgame and I could not obtain it. No title, no date, no inventor, no disclosure. Whether it is Banes' own patent is also unconfirmed — the 1879 text does not say so. Retrieve the facsimile from USPTO patent images before any opinion relies on it.
2. The eight pre-1878 uncited references in Section 4B were screened by title and date only. US 65,688 is the only one I verified in full. The record of US 155,820, US 134,808, US 119,179, US 177,387, US 136,308, US 127,925, and US 143,427 must be pulled and read before any of them is dropped.
3. US 211,390 (1879-01-14, "Improvement in liniments") deserves a dedicated look as a possible interference/priority sibling rather than as prior art.
4. No CAFC, PTAB, or district court activity exists for this patent and none can be confirmed, consistent with the earlier section: the grant expired February 4, 1896, and the Federal Circuit was created in 1982. That is inference from the record, not a verified empty docket.
5. OCR of the 1879 facsimile is poor ("elnbrocations," "QFFIoE," "flbathing"). Verify any quoted language against the PDF before it appears in a filing.
6. Date inconsistency in the task wrapper (April 26, 2026 vs. session date 2026-09-29) is noted but not resolved.

Verification log — queries issued this pass

1. US48198 patent "Improvement in" Google Patents → unrelated modern patents
2. "48,198" patent 1865 liniment Banes → zero results
3. USPTO patent center US211830 "Improvement in liniments" citations → no citation record; unrelated hits
4. patents.google.com/patent/US48198 → unrelated modern patents
5. "US48198" patent → unrelated modern patents
6. "Reuben Banes" patent liniment Clarke County Ohio → no results returned (budget exhausted)
7. patent 48198 1865 "Letters Patent" improvement liniment balm → no results returned
8. Google Patents US211830 "Patent Citations" cited by → no results returned

Net result: US 48,198 did not resolve in any query, and no citation table exists for US 211,830 to analyze. The one citation in the record is the in-text reference to Patent No. 48,198, and its disclosure remains unretrieved.

I'll pull the prior-art references identified on the patent page before analyzing.

The broad queries returned mostly off-point material. Let me target the specific prior-art numbers that appear on the patent page.

Obviousness Analysis — US 211,830 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Two threshold flags before the merits

Flag 1 — statutory anachronism (must be stated, then bracketed). US 211,830 issued February 4, 1879, on an application filed January 8, 1878. Section 103 did not exist; it was created by the Patent Act of 1952. The governing novelty/invention standard in 1878 was §24 of the Patent Act of 1870 plus the judicially imposed requirement of "more ingenuity and skill … than were possessed by an ordinary mechanic acquainted with the business" (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1850)), and the 19th-century "aggregation vs. combination" rule later restated in Lincoln Engineering Co. v. Stewart-Warner Corp., 303 U.S. 545 (1938). I therefore present this as a **§103 reconstruction applying Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007)**, and note at the end where the 19th-century standard would cut the other way. Because the grant expired February 4, 1896, this analysis has no live litigation consequence.

Flag 2 — contradiction with the previously-generated sections (required disclosure). The earlier bibliographic section lists "Prior art date (Google Patents metadata): 1879-02-04." That is the issue date, not a prior-art date — it is a database field default for pre-1900 US grants and is affirmatively misleading. For a patent filed in 1878 the critical date is the date of invention, on or before January 8, 1878, and the 1870 Act had no one-year grace period for printed publications. This materially changes which references on the page qualify, as shown in the screen below. The earlier sections are otherwise consistent with this one.

1. Art-qualification screen of the page's prior-art content

The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list is a similarity-ranked heuristic, not a §102/§103 art set. Applying the correct critical date (invention on or before Jan. 8, 1878):

Honest limitation: I retrieved only titles and dates for the page-listed US references. I could not verify the ingredient lists of US 119,179, 127,925, 134,808, 136,308, 143,427, 155,820, 177,387, 201,194, or 211,390, nor of Patent No. 48,198. The combinations below are therefore stated as conditional — each is followed by the disclosure the reference must contain for the combination to hold. Any assertion of what those patents actually teach, beyond their titles, would be fabrication, and I am not making one.

Extra-record references I did verify verbatim during this analysis (contemporaneous, and therefore better §103 evidence than several page-listed items — flagged as outside the page's own prior-art section):

That last row matters: the pharmacopeial liniments establish that camphor + turpentine + a fixed oil (olive/sweet/cottonseed) + an aromatic volatile oil was the standard, textbook four-part architecture of a liniment before 1878. US 211,830's formula is that architecture with the alcohol/soap vehicle swapped for petroleum.

2. Level of ordinary skill

A person of ordinary skill in the art as of the 1878 critical date was a compounding apothecary, patent-medicine formulator, or veterinary liniment maker — a practitioner trained by apprenticeship in the dispensing of pharmacopeial liniments and ointments, not a research chemist. Such a person would know by heart the Linimentum Saponis and Linimentum Terebinthinae formulas, would know that camphor is alcohol- and oil-soluble and is added by saturation ("as much as it will take up" is a recipe instruction, not an invention), would know turpentine and camphor as the standard cutaneous counterirritants, and would know the aromatic volatile oils (rosemary, origanum, sassafras, lemon, citronella) as perfuming agents for otherwise offensive preparations. The skill level is therefore low, which broadens what counts as an obvious combination.

3. Element-by-element mapping of the single claim

The claim (quoted in full in the earlier section) is a closed "composed of" product claim to six named ingredients, with amounts and mixing order imported by "as herein set forth."

Observation that drives the whole analysis: five of six elements are the standard liniment set, and the sixth is conceded in the specification to be purely cosmetic. The patent's own text supplies the motivation and the predictable result.

4. The combinations

Combination A — Patent No. 48,198 alone (primary), plus the patentee's own admission

This is the strongest and cheapest challenge, because the patentee supplies the art himself.

The claim opens: "As an improvement upon Patent No. 48,198, I claim—". That is a binding admission that 48,198 discloses the subject matter being improved. Banes' own specification then identifies the only substantive additions as (i) distilled petroleum/crude rock-oil as the vehicle and (ii) oil of citronella as a deodorant, which he expressly says "does not detract from its curative powers."

• Motivation to combine (from the patent itself): "disguises the unpleasant and disagreeable odor from the distilled petroleum and crude rockoil … which would otherwise render it obnoxious to many persons." The patentee states the reason a formulator would add citronella. A stated, commercial, consumer-acceptance motivation is exactly what KSR treats as a sufficient reason to modify.
• Predictable result: better odor. Nothing else. Under KSR, "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." Adding a known fragrance to a known fetid medicine yields a predictably better-smelling known medicine.
• Result-effective-variable point: citronella is admitted to be non-result-effective with respect to the therapeutic effect. Prior-art modifications that do not affect the properties relied on for patentability are the paradigm of obviousness.

Conditional on: 48,198 disclosing a petroleum/camphor/turpentine/oil base. I could not retrieve 48,198, and I do not assume that. If 48,198 discloses a different base, Combination A weakens and Combinations B–D carry the analysis.

Combination B — Page-listed liniment patents (primary) + petroleum-vehicle art (secondary) + aromatic-oil art (tertiary)

• Primary: one of US 119,179 (1871, liniments), US 134,808 (1873, liniment), or US 155,820 (1874, liniments) — whichever discloses a camphor/turpentine/oil liniment. Conditional on their disclosures, which I did not retrieve. If one of them recites camphor plus spirits of turpentine in an oily base, it is a near-complete teaching of five of the six elements.
• Secondary: US 177,387 (1876, salves) and US 136,308 (1873, ointments) for the use of petroleum/mineral carriers in topical preparations, corroborated by the pre-1878 commercial availability of petroleum jelly as a remedial topical.
• Tertiary: aromatic volatile oils as liniment odorants, as taught by the USP and the printed formularies (oil of rosemary, origanum, sassafras, lemon).
• Motivation: (a) petroleum was known to be occlusive — it forms a film that excludes air — and Banes' own method-of-use recites "excluding the air as much as possible till it is absorbed," so the occlusive function supplies a technical reason to substitute petroleum for the traditional soap/alcohol vehicle, not merely an aesthetic one; (b) petroleum was cheaper and less volatile than alcohol-based vehicles; (c) the odor problem created by the petroleum substitution was the known, expected consequence, and perfuming a liniment was routine.
• Predictable result: a petroleum-based camphor/turpentine liniment, perfumed. No new property is asserted anywhere in the specification beyond "rapid soothing and curative properties" — a bare conclusory efficacy statement with no data.

Combination C — Crowded-art / KSR "finite number of identified, predictable solutions"

The verified record establishes that by 1876 the liniment art contained an enumerable, heavily worked set of interchangeable components: a volatile counterirritant (turpentine or ammonia), camphor, a fixed oil (olive/sweet/linseed/cottonseed), a vehicle (alcohol, soap, or petroleum), and a perfume oil (rosemary, origanum, sassafras, lemon, citronella). US 137,624, US 152,874, GB 1874/1876, Dr. Chase's formularies, and the pharmacopeias are all permutations of that set. Where the prior art discloses a small, finite list of known options to solve a known problem, KSR holds the selection obvious. Picking citronella from the known list of perfuming oils, and crude rock-oil alongside distilled petroleum from the known petroleum fractions, is a routine selection with no unexpected result.

Combination D — "Obvious to try" with a reasonable expectation of success (petroleum + rock-oil pairing)

Nothing in the specification explains why both "distilled petroleum" and "crude rock-oil" are required, or what either contributes that the other does not. Two fractions of the same substance, performing the same disclosed role (vehicle) in a 16:1 ratio, is the definition of an arbitrary, unexplained duplication. Under KSR, an unexplained, functionally redundant addition to a known composition carries no patentable weight; at most it is a mere aggregation of old elements each performing its own function.

5. Anticipated rebuttals to the §103 case, and why they fail

6. Bottom line

Under a modern §103 analysis, the claim is highly vulnerable to obviation, and the vulnerability is concentrated in the two features that are asserted as novel:

1. The petroleum/rock-oil vehicle — old element, known vehicle, known occlusive function, used for its known purpose; obvious in view of petroleum's established topical use (corroborated by the registered 1878 "emollient and remedial preparation of petroleum" mark) combined with any pre-1878 camphor/turpentine liniment.
2. The citronella limitation (1/16 part) — old element, old perfume, admitted to be non-result-effective, added to solve a problem the patentee himself identifies. KSR disposes of this in one sentence.

The strongest single-reference case is Patent No. 48,198 as admitted by the claim's own preamble, and it turns entirely on a document I could not retrieve.

Three caveats that should travel with this analysis:

• The 19th-century standard was higher. Pre-1952 law required "more ingenuity … than were possessed by an ordinary mechanic acquainted with the business," and 19th-century courts routinely sustained patents on exactly this kind of minor formulary change. A §103 reconstruction is anachronistic; a 1879 court might well have sustained this claim even though a modern examiner would reject it. State the standard you are applying whenever you use this analysis.
• My content verification is thin and I am not papering over it. I verified the full text of US 137,624, US 152,874, US 149,857, GB 1874/1876, and several 19th-century formularies/pharmacopeia passages. For US 48,198 and every page-listed US reference except the two I retrieved nothing — I have only number, date, and title. The combinations in §4 are stated with the disclosure each reference must contain for the combination to hold. Do not quote §4 as though those contents were confirmed.
• The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list is not a prior-art set. Roughly two-thirds of the listed items post-date the January 8, 1878 invention and are ineligible as §102 art, including two that superficially look like on-point liniment art (US 201,194; US 211,390). If this analysis is reused, run the screen in §1 first.

I also did not search for 1878–1896 printed decisions (Off. Gaz., Federal Cases) that might have adjudicated this patent's validity — no such record appeared in the sources I reached, and I am not asserting none exists.