US 217914

I'll search for this specific patent number and check for any 2026 litigation references, then summarize.

Let me check the specific docket/litigation angle and the USPTO record directly.

US Patent 217,914 — Verification and Summary

Sourcing caveat up front (important)

Your instruction was to search the USPTO database and CAFC 2026 dockets for patent number 217914. What I actually have is the authoritative full text and front-matter record for US217914A (Google Patents mirror, source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US217914](/patent/US217914)/en, fetched 2026-09-24). My supplementary web searches did not surface any USPTO Patent Center page, assignment record, or Federal Circuit docket entry for this number. I will not claim I queried those systems directly.

On the CAFC 2026 question specifically: I found no 2026 (or any) Federal Circuit docket referencing US 217,914. This is also chronologically expected rather than merely a search gap — see "Litigation / legal status" below. I found no evidence to the contrary either way; I am stating a negative result, not a positive finding of non-existence.

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Bibliographic data (from the patent front matter and specification)

Note on classification: the CPC codes above are modern retro-assignments; a patent issued in 1879 could not have carried CPC marks originally. Treat them as an indexing artifact.

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Abstract

There is no abstract. US 217,914 issued in 1879, well before abstracts were required on US patents. Any "abstract" for this document is necessarily a derived summary, not original patent text. Here is a faithful derived summary drawn from the specification's stated object:

The invention improves and simplifies the mechanism for holding the shovels of a wheel-cultivator parallel to the axle, and provides a coupling connecting the beam to the axle constructed so the beam is prevented from twisting. A circular ribbed plate (letter rendered "O" in the specification) with an extension D is bolted to the front end of beam A. A corresponding circular plate E, having lugs f f and sleeves g g, is attached loosely to axle h. The ribbed plate's inner edge has recesses i i i i matching the lugs of plate E, and the lugs are grooved to receive the projecting portions of the ribbed plate (sectional view at c c, Fig. 1). Two parallel rods k k connect the vibrating frame to the axle, bolted at m m to the vibrating yoke-frame a and to the underside of sleeves g g. A collar G on axle h, between the sleeves, is fixed by set-screw n to prevent lateral motion of the sleeves, allowing the collar-and-sleeve assembly to be secured at any desired point on the axle. The coupling plates are intended to be cast to fit one another without machine work, and to be assembled or separated when the two plates are at forty-five degrees to each other.

Self-described novelty/advantage: the vibrating frame (cast or forged, e.g. malleable iron) has one bearing above and one below the beam. In the inventor's words, this "resist[s] the strain of the shovels and do[es] away with the friction-wheels and circular plates shown in my application for Letters Patent filed October 23, 1876."

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The claims — verbatim and in plain language

This patent has two claims. Neither depends on the other; both are combination claims in classic 1879 "substantially as described" form.

Claim 1 (verbatim): "The circular coupling-plates O and E, sleeves g g, and collar G, in combination with the beam A and axle h, substantially as described, and for the purpose specified."

Plain language: A cultivator assembly combining (a) the two circular coupling plates, (b) the two sleeves on the axle, and (c) the axle collar that locks the sleeves against lateral movement — together with the plow beam and the axle. The claim covers the coupling-and-beam-to-axle combination; it does not recite the shovels, the yoke-frame, or the parallel rods.

Claim 2 (verbatim): "The coupling-plates G and E, sleeves g g, collar G, and axle h, in combination with the beam A, parallel rods k k, and vibrating yoke-frame a a, substantially as and for the purpose herein described."

Plain language: The same coupling/sleeve/collar/axle subcombination, now further combined with the beam, the two parallel rods that tie the vibrating frame to the axle, and the vibrating yoke-frame that carries the shovels. This is the narrower, more fully integrated combination claim.

⚠️ Literal-reading flags — do not auto-correct these, but do not rely on them either

The OCR/source text is internally inconsistent on reference letters, and per your rules I am reporting the discrepancies rather than silently fixing them:

1. Plate "O" vs. "C" vs. "G" vs. "0". The specification describes "a circular ribbed plate, O" and later "the ribbed plate O." Claim 1 as rendered here reads "coupling-plates O and E," while Claim 2 reads "coupling-plates G and E." Since the specification separately assigns G to the axle collar ("A collar, G"), "G" in Claim 2 is most plausibly the same plate as "O," but I cannot certify that from this text.
2. Parallel rods "k k". The rendering varies among "k k," "70 k," "76 7c," "76 7c," and "la la." The specification's stated reading is two parallel rods k k (shown in Fig. 2), bolted at m m.
3. "bram" for "beam" and "conmeet" for "connect" appear in the record — transcription artifacts in the source text.
4. Because all claims close with "substantially as described," their scope is legally tied to the illustrated embodiment; these are not claims of independent, abstract scope.

Number of independent claims: By modern convention, two — Claim 1 and Claim 2, neither referencing the other. By 1879 convention, both are simply claims; there is no dependency structure at all.

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Litigation / legal status — direct answer to the docket request

• USPTO: Status is Expired – Lifetime. Anticipated expiration 1896-07-29. A patent that expired in 1896 cannot be asserted in 2026 and cannot be the subject of a live IPR, PGR, reexamination, or appeal.
• CAFC 2026 dockets: No match found. A 2026 Federal Circuit appeal concerning US 217,914 would be legally incoherent: the patent has been expired for roughly 130 years, and the Federal Circuit was not created until 1982. I am reporting this as a search negative plus a legal-status conclusion from the record, and I am explicitly not representing that I exhaustively queried the CAFC docket system.
• Caution against conflation: My searches surfaced 19th-century cultivator litigation involving patents numbered 222,767 and 242,497 (Wright spring patents) and 237,740 (Gardiner & Downey), plus 479,913 (Morey, 1892). None of these is patent 217,914, and none is by Jacob Wagner, Jr. Do not merge those results into this patent's history. Likewise, US 206,961 (James Edgedee Mustard) and US 114,767 are different patents with similar subject matter, appearing only in the "Similar Documents" list.

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Residual uncertainty (stated explicitly)

• Assignee: I have no assignment record, and I did not retrieve a USPTO Assignment database entry. I can only say the patent document itself names no assignee.
• Serial number: Not present in the text I have.
• Examiner / art cited on the face: Not present in the record I have.
• The 1876 prior application referenced in the specification is identified only by its filing date (October 23, 1876), not by number, so I cannot link it.
• Post-issue assignment, licensing, or 19th-century infringement litigation involving this specific patent: I found none, and I am not asserting none exists — only that my searches did not disclose any.

Bottom line: US 217,914 is a two-claim, unassigned 1879 combination patent to Jacob Wagner, Jr. of Chicago covering an axle-to-beam coupling (circular ribbed plate with a mating lugged plate, axle sleeves, and a set-screw collar) plus, in Claim 2, the parallel alignment rods and the double-bearing vibrating yoke-frame. It expired July 29, 1896, and I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity of any kind for this number.

I'll search litigation sources for this specific number.

Let me run targeted searches on the specific number and the inventor.

Let me check the litigation-specific portals and CourtListener for this exact number.

Litigation Search — US Patent 217,914

Direct answer

No litigation involving US Patent 217,914 is known. I found zero cases — plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome — for this number. I am reporting a negative search result, not a certified finding of non-existence. The reasons this negative is expected (and not merely a search artifact) are set out below.

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What I searched, and what came back

⚠️ Literal-ID conflation warning — these are NOT US 217,914

Per the strict rule against auto-correcting identifiers, I am listing the near-number hits so they are not merged into this patent's record:

• US 9,217,914 B2 — "Multi-projection system," issued Dec. 22, 2015 (a seven-digit number; Google Patents renders it "US 9,217,914 B2"). A modern patent, wholly unrelated to Wagner.
• PL-217914-B1 — Polish patent, Bayer AG, herbicide composition (grant 2014-09-29).
• WO 2018/217914 A1 — PCT application (PCT/US2018/034166), plasma/cold-spray system.
• HC 217.914 — Brazilian Supreme Court habeas corpus docket (2022).
• Sri Lanka trademark application No. 217914 (Laxapana Batteries PLC, filed 2017-04-07).
• 19th-century cultivator suits involving patents 222,767 / 242,497 (Wright spring), 237,740 (Gardiner & Downey), 479,913 (Morey) — none is 217,914 and none is by Wagner. The 53 F. 249-line case concerning a sleeve/collar/alignment-rod cultivator actually carries a disclaimer conceding that device "is embodied in the patent issued to Gardiner & Downey, February 15, 1881" — i.e., a different patent from Wagner's, even though the mechanism reads similarly.

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Why the negative is legally expected, not just a search gap

US 217,914 issued July 29, 1879, on an application filed January 23, 1879, and its anticipated expiration is recorded as July 29, 1896 (17-year term). Legal status: Expired – Lifetime.

1. The patent has been expired for roughly 130 years. It cannot be asserted, and cannot be the subject of a live IPR, PGR, reexamination, or appeal.
2. The Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982, so a "CAFC 2026 docket" for this number is chronologically incoherent.
3. Modern litigation databases (Unified Patents, PACER, Docket Navigator, CourtListener) have effectively no coverage of pre-1900 federal circuit equity dockets. Even if a bill-in-equity had been filed against an infringer in the 1880s, it would very likely not appear in any of these systems.

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Residual uncertainty — stated explicitly

• I did not query PACER directly, nor did I retrieve a USPTO Patent Center/Assignment record or a Docket Navigator report. I am stating what my searches did and did not disclose.
• 19th-century infringement suits: It is possible that an 1880s–1890s equity suit involving this patent existed and is simply not indexed anywhere I can reach. I found no evidence of one. I am not asserting that none ever existed — only that none is disclosed by searchable records.
• Note the internal numbering wobble carried forward from the prior section: this patent's own text renders the ribbed plate variously as "O," "C," and (in Claim 2) "G," while "G" is separately assigned to the axle collar. Any future party attempting to map this patent to litigation would face that same ambiguity — but that has no bearing on the litigation search result, which is negative.

Bottom line: Searching Unified Patents' litigation and PTAB caselists, CAFC/PACER-oriented sources, and general case-law databases for patent number 217914 returns no litigation. All near-number hits are unrelated foreign or modern patents and dockets, and should not be attributed to US 217,914.

I'll check whether any AIA trial actually exists for this number before writing anything.

Let me run a few more targeted checks before concluding.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — US Patent 217,914 ("Improvement in wheel-cultivators," Jacob Wagner, Jr.)

Proceedings overview

There are zero AIA trial proceedings on file for US 217,914. Count: 0 total — 0 active, 0 claims invalidated, 0 claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal, canonical source) returns no AIA trial records, and my supplementary web searches surfaced no IPR, PGR, CBM, or derivation proceeding for this number, and no Federal Circuit appeal of anything that would have been one.

Defensive posture: this is not "patent survived two IPRs" and not "claims 1–5 are canceled." It is the fourth category: the patent cannot be asserted at all. US 217,914 expired 1896-07-29 — the end of its 17-year term — roughly 116 years before the first AIA petition was ever filed (2012-09-16). There are no live claims to invalidate, so the correct defendant posture is not "I have an IPR-based defense" but "the demand letter is on its face baseless, and the sender's date-checking failure is itself evidence of bad faith."

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Per-proceeding profiles

Not applicable — no proceeding numbers exist to report

I will not synthesize proceeding numbers, panels, or dispositions. Per the operating constraints, an empty record is reported as empty. The requested per-proceeding template (type / filed / status / panel / grounds / institution / FWD / settlement / appeal / defensive value) has no instantiation for this patent.

Why the record is empty — structural, not just a search miss:

1. Temporal impossibility of a genuine dispute. The patent's anticipated expiration is recorded as 1896-07-29. Infringement liability cannot attach to acts occurring after expiration. No rational party pays PTAB fees to attack a patent whose claims have been in the public domain for over a century.
2. The AIA post-dates the patent by well over a century. IPR, PGR, and CBM were created by the America Invents Act and became available for petitions filed on or after 2012-09-16. This patent died 116 years earlier. Every AIA trial in existence (2012–2026) concerns patents that were unexpired, or at least recent enough to carry collateral consequences.
3. One important accuracy caveat — I am not claiming a statutory bar to suing over an old patent. 35 U.S.C. § 311(a) contains no expiration limit, and the Board has instituted IPRs on expired patents where a final decision carried collateral-estoppel or marketplace value. So the absence of an IPR here is not a legal impossibility; it is an economic absurdity. State it that way in any filing or client memo — overclaiming "the Board cannot do this" is exactly the kind of statement that gets picked apart.
4. The PTAB itself did not exist during the patent's life, and the Federal Circuit (created 1982, per the prior section's analysis) did not exist either. A "CAFC appeal of the FWD" is not something that is missing from the record; it is a category error.

Search trail (for transparency, and to prevent future conflation):

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Strategic summary

Claim status. Neither claim of US 217,914 is "canceled," and neither is "sustained" — both propositions would misdescribe the situation. Claim 1 (circular coupling plates + sleeves g g + collar G, in combination with beam A and axle h) and Claim 2 (same subcombination + beam A + parallel rods k k + vibrating yoke-frame a a) were granted 1879-07-29, ran their full term, and lapsed 1896-07-29. There is no PTAB-tested claim and no PTAB-surviving claim; the claims are public-domain subject matter from the 19th century and available as prior art against others (subject to the usual pre-AIA § 102(b) treatment for anything disclosed more than a year before a later applicant's filing date). Note also the literal-reading flags from the prior section — the source text renders the ribbed plate as "O" in the specification and Claim 1 but "G" in Claim 2, while "G" is independently assigned to the axle collar. Anyone drafting an invalidity contentions chart off this record must resolve those letter inconsistencies from the original drawing sheets, not from the OCR.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2). Estoppel attaches to a petitioner only after an IPR that results in a final written decision. There is no petitioner, so no estoppel binds anyone with respect to US 217,914. That cuts both ways: it means no one is foreclosed from raising prior art, but it also means no one has ever had to — because the invalidity question is academic. The right framing for a 2026 defendant is not "which § 102/§ 103 grounds are still available" but "there is no enforceable right, so validity is moot." Grounds still available: all of them, and none of them matter. If you need an invalidity position for some collateral reason, the patent's own specification supplies an admission of an earlier Wagner application filed 1876-10-23 (stated to cover friction-wheels and circular plates, whose structure the 1879 frame is expressly designed to replace) — but the specification identifies that earlier filing only by date, not by number, so it cannot be linked from this record.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner, no serial IPR campaign, no PTAB appeal by the patent owner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) involvement, no settlement, no joinder. All of those signals require at least one filed petition. The only "pattern" here is that the number has never appeared in an AIA trial, which is exactly what one expects for a patent that expired in the 19th century.

Contradiction check against the prior sections. None. The earlier PTAB block ("no AIA trial proceedings … the default should be 'no PTAB activity on file'"), the legal-status finding (Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 1896-07-29), and the no-CAFC-docket finding are all consistent with what I verified here. The only item I am adding that the earlier sections did not state is the § 311(a) nuance in point 3 above — that expiration is not a statutory bar to filing an IPR. That is a refinement, not a contradiction.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and received a demand citing US 217,914:

• Do not build a defense. Build a paper trail. Download the front matter showing the 1896-07-29 anticipated expiration and the "Expired – Lifetime" legal status, and put the Google Patents record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US217914](/patent/US217914)/en) in the file.
• Reply under 35 U.S.C. § 271: no infringement is possible for any act occurring after expiration. The patent has no live claims, so there is no "claim 1" to argue about — in contrast to the situation this request was modeled on ("claim 1 is dead — any infringement theory built on it is sanction-bait"), here the whole patent is dead.
• Treat the demand as a candidate fraudulent or bad-faith assertion. A sender who asserts a patent that expired during the Cleveland administration is either not checking the register or is deliberately betting the recipient won't. Preserve the letter, the envelope, and any payment instructions; consider reporting to the USPTO's patent-assertion channels and to your state AG if the letter demands payment.
• Verify the actual patent number yourself once more. The single most likely failure mode in this file is transcription drift between 217,914 and 10,217,916 (and, less likely, 2,179,140-style numbers). If the letter's number is really 10,217,916, everything above changes — and you do have a real IPR record to work with (IPR2020-00780, FWD 2021-10-12, all challenged claims unpatentable).

If you are running a diligence or freedom-to-operate check: US 217,914 is expired and can be ignored as an infringement risk, but it is live prior art for the cultivator-implement field. Its disclosure of the double-bearing vibrating yoke-frame, the parallel alignment rods, and the lugged/ribbed circular coupling plates cast or forged to fit without machining is citable against later filings in A01B61/04 and A01B61/044 (the CPC classes Google retro-assigned to it).

If no PTAB activity exists — and none does: say so plainly, and say it first. Here the absence is a stronger signal than any proceeding could be. Well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs; a 147-year-old expired patent attracts none, ever.

Verification paths if you want to confirm independently: USPTO PTAB E2E / Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End system (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) for AIA trials; USPTO Patent Center for the file history; CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) for any judicial decision mentioning the number. My searches against public web sources returned only the unrelated hits tabulated above, and I did not retrieve a PTAB E2E docket page directly — I am reporting the canonical ODP block plus a documented search negative, not a direct system query.

I'll attempt to verify the assignment record directly before writing anything.

The search returned no assignment records. Let me probe two more angles — the inventor's business entity and the Assignment Center's own coverage limits.

One decisive fact has surfaced. Let me confirm it and try to identify the inventor's related 1876 application.

Assignment-Chain Reconstruction — US Patent 217,914

Critical methodology note before any findings

Two things must be stated before the headers below, because they change what is findable:

1. My tooling is web search, not a direct Assignment Center query. I did not authenticate into or programmatically query assignmentcenter.uspto.gov. Every negative below is a search negative plus a structural conclusion, and I will say which is which.

2. A structural limit makes the assignment-record question unanswerable for this patent, not merely unanswered. The USPTO states its Patent Assignment Search database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO Assignment Database webinar; same limit restated by Finnegan and the Commerce Dept. dataset listing "Patent Assignment XML (1980 - Present)" at data.commerce.gov). More decisively, 37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2) provides that "[a]ll records of assignments of patents recorded before May 1, 1957... are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)" (govinfo, 37 CFR 1.12).

US 217,914 issued 1879-07-29 and expired 1896-07-29. Any assignment of it would necessarily have been recorded before 1896 — i.e., before the May 1, 1957 cutover, and roughly a century before the Assignment Center's August 1980 coverage begins. Neither Assignment Center URL the task specifies can return a record for this patent. A null result there is not evidence of no assignment; it is a coverage-floor artifact. This is the single most important finding in this report and it constrains every section below.

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Inventors

Sole inventor. The specification is written in the first-person singular throughout ("my invention," "what I claim"), and the signature block names one individual. There are no joint inventors, therefore no co-inventor assignment-splitting issue.

On the "Jr." suffix: a junior/senior naming pattern can suggest a family firm, and Chicago in 1879 was a major agricultural-implement manufacturing center. I want to be explicit that I have no evidence of any such firm, and I am not asserting one exists. No company name, no employer, and no business entity appears anywhere in the patent text. Per the constraints, I am not converting the "Jr." into a finding.

On the "unusual pattern" test you asked about (inventors departing the assignee within 12 months): inapplicable. Departure from an assignee presupposes an assignee. None is named.

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Original assignee

There is no assignee. The issued patent names no assignee, contains no "assignor to" language, and reflects no assignment on its face. Front matter at Google Patents lists a single family member and no assignee field content.

Because there is no assignee entity, the following requested sub-items are all not determinable / inapplicable:

• Product embodying the claims: The specification describes a partial machine — "a sufficient portion of a cultivator to show my improvement" — and states the full cultivator "has two beams, each of which supports two shovels, and is intended to straddle or work on both sides of the row to be cultivated." This describes a contemplated commercial article, but no manufacturer, brand, or sales record is named. I found no evidence of a shipped product.
• Primary line of business: Unknown. Jacob Wagner, Jr. is not documented in any source I retrieved as operating a business.
• Current status: A natural person (or his estate) from the 1870s — presumed long deceased; I have no record either way. This is a reasonable demographic inference, not a documented fact, and I flag it as such.

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Assignment timeline

The Assignment Center has no records for US patent 217,914, and structurally cannot. Stating this plainly, as instructed.

To be precise about what I did and did not establish:

• Search negative: Multiple searches for this patent number in combination with assignment/reel/frame terms returned no Assignment Center record, no reel/frame number, no assignor, and no assignee. My one substantive hit for the bare number "217914" was an unrelated Polish patent, PL-217914-B1 (Bayer AG herbicide composition, granted 2014-09-29) — see the Unified Patents portal entry. That is a different patent in a different jurisdiction and must not be conflated with US 217,914. It is a good illustration of why bare-number searching is dangerous here.
• Structural conclusion: Even a positive Assignment Center result would have been anomalous. Coverage starts August 1980; pre-1957 originals sit at NARA per 37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2).

Therefore: no assignment chain can be reconstructed for this patent from the sources specified in the task. I am not fabricating reel/frame numbers, correspondent names, or conveyance types. There are none to report, and inventing plausible-looking ones would be the single most damaging error possible in an ownership-chain analysis.

Where a real 19th-century chain would live: NARA's assignment records for pre-1957 patents, retrievable only by mail/certified-copy request under 37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2) — not online, not keyword-searchable, and not indexed by patent number in any interface I can reach. That is the correct referral for anyone needing to close this gap.

⚠️ Instruction conflict — flagged per your rules

Your format spec says to "stop after this section" if the Assignment Center has no records, but the same spec also mandates a Timeline diagram, NPE / troll-pattern signals, and a Verdict. I cannot satisfy both. I am honoring the anti-fabrication intent of the stop instruction (no invented chain, no invented reel/frames) while still delivering the mandated verdict, because "Insufficient data" is itself one of your prescribed verdict options and suppressing it would hide the actual conclusion. The remaining sections are necessarily compressed because the underlying evidence does not exist.

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Timeline diagram

Documented, non-fabricated events only. This is not an assignment chain — it records that no transfer of title is documented anywhere in the online record.

timeline
    title Ownership record of US 217914
    1876 : Prior application filed by same inventor
    1879 : Application filed January 23
    1879 : Patent issued July 29 to Jacob Wagner Jr
         : No assignee named on the patent
    1896 : Patent expired July 29
    1980 : Online assignment database coverage begins

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is not present or unclear — and the dominant reason is structural: the NPE/anonymous-shell-LLC phenomenon this checklist is built to detect did not exist in 1879 and cannot attach to a patent that expired in 1896 and has been in the public domain for ~130 years.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — no records, and only the original (non-existent) assignment.

Justification: The patent names no assignee on its face, so there is no original-assignee chain to begin with, and no recorded assignment exists to cite. More fundamentally, no assignment record can exist in the specified sources: the USPTO Assignment Center covers only August 1980 forward, and 37 C.F.R. § 1.12(a)(2) places all pre-May 1, 1957 patent assignment records with NARA, which is not online-searchable. Any 19th-century chain for this patent is therefore genuinely unavailable through assignmentcenter.uspto.gov or assignment.uspto.gov, and I decline to manufacture reel/frame entries or correspondent names to fill the format. Because the document shows zero of the eight NPE signals — and the phenomenon it screens for is historically and legally impossible for a patent expired since 1896-07-29 — this is a data-availability verdict, not a finding of clean ownership.

Verification link (will return no results, for the reasons above): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ · https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

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Residual uncertainty — stated explicitly

• I did not query Assignment Center directly. My negative is a search negative plus a documented coverage-limit conclusion from USPTO and CFR sources.
• An unrecorded 1879–1896 assignment may have existed. Recordation was not mandatory for validity, so an unrecorded transfer, license, or shop-right is fully conceivable and would leave no trace in any database.
• The inventor's employer and business are undocumented in everything I retrieved. If Wagner was employed by a Chicago implement manufacturer, that firm — not Wagner — would likely have held equitable rights. This is the highest-value unresolved thread in this analysis, and it is not resolvable from patent-office records alone.
• The prior application of October 23, 1876, expressly referenced in the specification ("the friction-wheels and circular plates shown in my application for Letters Patent filed October 23, 1876"), is not identified by number in the text. I attempted to locate the resulting patent and failed. If it is ever identified, its assignment record should be checked alongside this one, since it would sit in the same pre-1957 NARA cohort.
• No serial number, no examiner, and no cited art appear in the front matter available to me.

I'll search for citation data and any prior-art listings for this specific number.

Let me probe additional databases and look for any citation trail.

Prior-Art / Citation Analysis — US Patent 217,914

0. Tool disclosure first (affects how much weight to give this section)

Three of my follow-up searches (Espacenet full-text, FreePatentsOnline, and a targeted query for the "Jacob Wagner / Oct. 23, 1876 application") did not execute — the tool returned a step-limit error, not a null result. So I cannot claim those databases were checked. What I did complete:

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1. Direct answer: does US 217,914 have any cited patent references?

No. The authoritative document contains no "References Cited" / patent-citation section, and my completed searches surfaced no citation record for it.

The full text supplied to me (source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US217914](/patent/US217914)/en, fetched 2026-09-24) contains exactly these sections: front matter, classifications, description, two claims, signature block, family data, and a "Similar Documents" list. There is no Citations, Patent Citations, or References Cited field anywhere in it.

Why this is expected rather than a search defect: the systematic printing of examiner-cited references on the face of US patents is a practice that post-dates this document by decades. A patent granted 1879-07-29 would not ordinarily carry such a list. I state the historical practice as background and I am flagging that my confidence in the precise start date of that practice is only moderate — but the operative fact is not in doubt: this document has no citation list. Any examiner rejections would have lived in the 1879 file wrapper, which for most patents of that vintage either never survived or is not in the electronic record I can reach.

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2. Required framing correction: there is no "35 U.S.C. § 102" for this patent

You asked me to identify which claim(s) each citation "potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102." That statute did not exist in 1879. The governing provision was Rev. Stat. § 4886 (successor to the Act of July 8, 1870), whose bars ran to matters patented or described in a printed publication or in public use or on sale before the applicant's invention, and to publications/uses more than two years before the application. I am paraphrasing at a general level and would not stake a legal conclusion on that paraphrase.

Practically, this means the pre-1952 analogues of today's categories are:

• § 102(a)(1)-analogue → printed publication / patent before Wagner's invention date (unknowable from this record).
• § 102(b)-analogue → printed publication / patent / public use more than two years before 1879-01-23, i.e. before 1877-01-23.
• § 102(e)/102(a)(2)-analogue → did not exist; a US application filed earlier but published later was not statutory prior art. Its closest modern equivalent appears only if you are litigating validity today.

I flag this because the earlier-generated summary's framing ("two-claim ... combination patent," 17-year term to 1896) is consistent with this, but the "§ 102" vocabulary in the task cannot be applied literally to an 1879 grant.

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3. Table A — References cited on the face of US 217,914

Net: there is no prior-art citation to analyze. Anything further would be my invention, not the record's.

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4. Table B — Closest candidate prior art (the "Similar Documents" list — these are NOT citations)

⚠️ Critical distinction: Google Patents' "Similar Documents" is an algorithmic similarity output, not an examiner or applicant citation. I am offering these only because they are the sole pre-1879 signal in the record, and I am labelling them as candidates. I have only titles and grant dates — not their disclosures. I therefore cannot and will not assert that any of them discloses the claimed combination.

Pre-1877-01-23 (would fall in the § 102(b)-analogue window):

Between the filing and issue dates (edge cases):

Post-dating issue (not § 102(a)/(b) art under 1879 law; listed only because they appear in the record):

Naming caution (carried forward and reinforced): several of the above are incomplete entries — "Wagon-hound," "Bucksaw," "Putman," "Frank d," "William m," and the Joseph/Jacob McIndoo entry are not cultivator or coupling art on their titles and are almost certainly algorithmic noise. The earlier-generated section already warned against conflating US 206,961 (Mustard) and US 114,767 with this patent; that warning stands and now extends to this whole list.

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5. Anticipation matrix — what would actually have to be shown

Because there are no citations, the useful deliverable is the element checklist any candidate must meet. A § 102 reference must disclose every element:

Conclusion on anticipation: on the present record, no reference can be shown to anticipate Claim 1 or Claim 2, because (a) no reference is cited, (b) the non-citation candidates are unverified as to disclosure, and (c) the features most likely to be novel — the forty-five-degree cast-to-fit rib-and-lug coupling and the double-bearing vibrating yoke-frame — are absent even from the titles of every candidate. This is a finding of an empty record, not a finding of validity.

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6. Where the actual answer would come from

If a genuine citation search is required, the following are the only places it can live, and I did not retrieve them:

1. USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) — full-text US patents back to 1790; would confirm whether the scanned document carries any citation block (it does not, per the mirror I hold).
2. The scanned original PDF (patentimages / the "Download PDF" link on the Google Patents page) — the definitive check on whether a references list was printed.
3. 1879 file wrapper / NARA holdings — for examiner rejections, if the wrapper survives. Likely the single most valuable unexamined source.
4. Google Patents' "Similar Documents" tab versus its absent "Citations" tab — the dichotomy you see here is itself the evidence.
5. The Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents (1879) and Commissioner's Decisions — these occasionally reproduce rejected references.

7. Literal-ID notes (per your strict rule — no auto-correction)

• 217914 is read literally as US Patent 217,914 A (1879). I did not silently convert it to any 6- or 7-digit modern numbering.
• A search on 2,179,914 returned zero results. I am reporting that as an empty result, not as proof that no such patent exists — US 2,179,914 would be a roughly 1939–1940 grant in an entirely different numbering series, and it is not the patent you asked about.
• PL-217914-B1 (Bayer, glufosinate/glyphosate herbicide combination, priority 1998-08-12, granted 2014-09-29) surfaced in response to a "217914" query. It shares only the trailing digits. It is not a citation to US 217,914 and must not be merged into its prosecution or family history.
• Reference-letter discrepancies already flagged in the earlier section (plate "O" vs. "C" vs. "G"; rods "k k" vs. "la la" vs. "70 k"; "bram" for "beam") remain unresolved and are not corrected here.

8. Residual uncertainty (explicit)

• I could not verify the existence, content, or absence of a 1879 file wrapper.
• I could not verify the disclosures of any "Similar Documents" reference; all anticipation statements above are conditional and are explicitly not findings.
• The October 23, 1876 Wagner application is unidentified by number, so I cannot link it to a granted patent or check whether it publishes art material to Claims 1–2.
• The CPC codes on the front matter (A01B61/00–046, "preventing overstrain ... energy accumulator for restoring the tool to its working position") are modern retro-assignments and, as the earlier section noted, are a poor fit for a mechanical axle-to-beam coupler. They should not be used as a prior-art search signal here.

I'll ground this analysis by first characterizing the specific prior-art references listed on the patent page, since the "Similar Documents" list gives me titles and dates but not disclosures.

Let me pin down the remaining references from the "Similar Documents" list that actually pre-date the January 23, 1879 filing.

Obviousness Analysis — US 217,914 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Prepared: task date stated as April 26, 2026
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US217914](/patent/US217914)/en (fetched 2026-09-24)
Building on: the "Patent summary," "Claims," and "Litigation / legal status" sections already generated — those element decompositions and literal-reading flags are incorporated by reference and not restated here.

Two contradictions to flag before proceeding (per operating rules):

1. Date conflict. This task states "Current Date: April 26, 2026." The session metadata for the earlier-generated sections states 2026-09-29 and cites a 2026-09-24 fetch. This is immaterial to a §103 analysis of an 1879 patent, but it is a genuine inconsistency and I am not silently reconciling it.
2. "Prior Art section" ≠ cited art. Google Patents' Similar Documents list is a machine-similarity ranking, not an examiner's citation list, not an IDS, and not a §102/§103 determination. Treating it as "the prior art of this patent" is an assumption of convenience. I flag it because it materially shapes what follows.

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1. Legal framework actually applied

Because the application was filed January 23, 1879, the governing statute is the Patent Act of 1870 (R.S. §§4886, 4893), not the AIA. A §103 analysis is therefore a retrospective exercise under the pre-AIA framework, and I apply Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), as glossed by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007): (1) scope and content of the prior art, (2) differences between the prior art and the claims, (3) level of ordinary skill, then (4) secondary considerations.

Two honesty notes about that exercise:

• Anachronism. In 1879 there was no statutory nonobviousness requirement; courts applied a judicially created "invention" requirement with a strong presumption of validity and considerable deference to the Patent Office. The "flash of genius" formulation (Cuno Eng'g v. Automatic Devices, 314 U.S. 84 (1941)) did not exist. A Graham/KSR analysis of this patent is a hypothetical technique, useful for modern prior-art-facing work, not an account of how this patent would actually have been litigated.
• No live controversy. As the earlier section established, this patent's anticipated expiration is 1896-07-29 and its status is Expired – Lifetime. No §103 challenge can be brought against it. Its realistic modern function is as prior art (an 1879 printed publication) against someone else's later claim.

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2. The prior art universe actually available on this record

The Similar Documents list contains 25 references. Eighteen of them post-date the January 23, 1879 filing date and are legally unavailable as prior art. That is a foundational defect in the list for present purposes.

2.1 Legally usable (issued before 1879-01-23) — 7 references

2.2 Legally unusable (issued after 1879-01-23) — 18 references

US214974A (1879-04-29), US219709A (1879-09-16), US222240A (1879-12-02), US234046A (1880-11-02), US271631A (1883), US306895A (1884), US312570A (1885), US334874A (1886), US339108A (1886), US369167A (1887), US380635A (1888), US418981A (1890), US455312A (1891), US487848A (1892), US501818A (1893), US615786A (1898), US691660A (1902), US1010775A (1911).

US214974A is the closest call — it issued April 29, 1879, roughly three months after Wagner's filing, and US219709A and US222240A issue later that same year. None is §102 or §103 prior art against a January 23, 1879 filing on the dates shown. Also note US418981A ("bucksaw," 1890) is an outright non-analogous art even if it were timely.

2.3 What the usable references actually say (verified)

• US23024A (Hall, 1859) — https://patents.google.com/patent/US23024A/en and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/12/f8/88/3363b4d938c180/US23024.pdf. An inverted-U iron/steel plow-beam; the standard "passes up into the hollow of the beam" and is bolted therethrough (bolt d); brace e "bracing the standard and beam" whose forward end also passes into the beam "so that nothing will catch or hang to it"; the patent's express objects are strength, durability, cheapness, lightness, easy draft, and a beam "strong enough to resist all the strain to which a plow is ordinarily subjected." Hall is a structural antecedent for Wagner's double-bearing beam/yoke interface — the standard is received by the beam both above and below.
• US158140A (Smith, 1874) — abstracted in Allen's Digest of Patents at https://dn760003.eu.archive.org/0/items/allensdigestofpl01alle/allensdigestofpl01alle.pdf#157#24. A clevis-bar with a cast projecting arm "connected by a hook to relieve the beam of the draft-strain"; claim is "the combination, with clevis C c², of a double-hook, D, and clevis-bar B, having perforated flange E." This supplies the express motivation in the art to reconfigure a beam's coupling so that operating strain bypasses the beam — which is precisely Wagner's stated object ("the beam will be prevented from twisting").
• US30796A (Belden, 1860) — claim per Allen's Digest of Agricultural Patents (https://dn760104.eu.archive.org/0/items/digestofagricult01alle_0/digestofagricult01alle_0.pdf#167#19): "The frame A composed of a single iron bar, bent…" A one-piece bent-metal cultivator frame — directly pertinent to Wagner's single-piece forged/cast curved-leg yoke-frame.
• Applicant admission (in-spec, US217914A): Wagner states his double-bearing frame serves "to resist the strain of the shovels and do away with the friction-wheels and circular plates shown in my application for Letters Patent filed October 23, 1876." This is a binding admission that circular plates and friction-wheels were already in his own prior cultivator disclosure for the same beam/axle purpose.

2.4 Supplementary art surfaced but not on the page's list (flagged as such)

• Tinkham, US 30,897 (Dec. 11, 1860), reissued as Re. 4,231 and Re. 4,600 — https://dn760104.eu.archive.org/0/items/digestofagricult01alle_0/digestofagricult01alle_0.pdf#167#78. Re. 4,231 claims "the beams E, hinged or pivoted to the axle by a joint… whereby the beams, with their shovels, have a free vertical and lateral movement, and still be held in an upright position"; Re. 4,600 claims a straddle-row cultivator with tongue C "rigidly secured to axle B, in combination with bars D D rigidly secured to the axle." Tinkham was of Cameron, Ill., assignor to Hapgood & Co. of Chicago — same city as Wagner. This is highly material to Claim 2 and it is absent from the page's list.
• The 19th-century straddle-row beam-yoke record described in the Patter v. Moline Plow Co. opinions reproduced at https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0009.f1.hein.pdf#173#144 and https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[8160776](/patent/8160776).pdf#2#2 — Constant (1851), Arnton Smith (1855), Whitely (1860–65, unpatented but hundreds built), Vangundy (1864), Pratt (1864), Weir (1865), Young (1866), Owens (1871), all with tongueless straddle-row cultivators, arched beam-yokes, jointed axles, and beams hinged to the axle. I could not verify the reporter citation or date and am reporting this descriptively, not as a citation.
• US219006A (Nellis, filed 1879-07-14, issued 1879-08-26) — https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/02/fa/51/8a0a33df333221/[US219006](/patent/US219006).pdf. Post-dates the filing; usable only as evidence of the level of ordinary skill, not as prior art. Its background statement that cast beams were made "in order to strengthen the beam against torsional strain" confirms that beam torsion was a recognized design problem in this art contemporaneously.

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3. Level of ordinary skill (Graham factor 3)

A person having ordinary skill in this art circa 1876–1878: a blacksmith, patternmaker, or agricultural-implement machinist with apprenticeship-level training; no formal engineering degree; conversant with horse-drawn wheeled frames, plow/cultivator/harrow beam construction, coned and keyed axle mountings, clevises and draft gear, and the fabrication properties of wrought iron, cast iron, and malleable iron. The volume of the art is itself evidence: the page's own CPC neighborhood (A01B61/00–61/046) and the patent-population listings show hundreds of cultivator patents issued in the 1860s–70s, indicating an intensely crowded, incremental, empirical design space. That crowding cuts against the patentee: an overcrowded art with small incremental steps is the classic KSR posture.

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4. Claim 1 — proposed grounds

Claim 1 scope (by reference to the earlier section): circular coupling-plate O + circular coupling-plate E + sleeves g g + collar G, in combination with beam A and axle h, substantially as described.

Ground 1-A (strongest available): applicant admission + US158140A + ordinary mechanical knowledge

Why a PHOSITA would combine: the admitted 1876 device already placed circular plates at the cultivator beam/axle interface, so the field of modification was already established by the inventor's own work. Smith (US158140A) supplies the reason to rework that interface — beams in this art were known to need relief from draft/torsional strain, and the patent's own statement of object is "that the beam will be prevented from twisting." Placing the strain path through a plate-and-sleeve coupling rather than through the wooden beam, and pinning the assembly with a set-screw collar, is the routine substitution of a known positioning expedient (KSR, "simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results").

Ground 1-B: US30796A + US23024A + US158140A + ordinary knowledge

Belden (US30796A) supplies a one-piece bent iron cultivator frame; Hall (US23024A) supplies an iron beam expressly designed to "resist all the strain," with the tool standard received by the beam from above and below and bolted therethrough; Smith (US158140A) supplies the beam-relief coupling. Motivation: all three are directed to the same problem — making a light, cheap, strain-resistant beam-to-frame junction in a horse-drawn soil-working implement — and Hall expressly frames the design goal in terms of strength-to-cost. A PHOSITA seeking a beam that resists the torsional load of side-mounted shovels would look to Hall's beam and Smith's strain-relieving coupling.

⚠️ Where both Claim 1 grounds fail on this record

The interengaging, rotation-locking geometry is unmapped. Claim 1's ribbed plate O with recesses i i i i and mating plate E with grooved lugs f f, cast to fit "without machine-work" and assemblable at 45° to each other, is not disclosed or suggested by any reference on the page's Prior Art list. A face-clutch/jaw-coupling geometry is unquestionably old in general mechanics, but KSR still requires that the gap be bridged by a reference, by Official Notice, or by adequate reasoning — "well-known mechanical expedient" asserted bare is vulnerable on appeal (MPEP 2144.03). On the record supplied by the page, I would not regard Claim 1 as prima facie obvious. A credible rejection requires sleeve/collar art and face-clutch/coupling art that the page does not supply.

Compounding this: the claims close with "substantially as described," so Claim 1 will likely be construed to import the illustrated grooved-rib, 45°-indexed structure. That is the patentee's double-edged sword: narrow construction defeats validity attacks but also defeats infringement, since anything lacking the specific grooved-lug/ribbed-recess interface sits outside the claim.

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5. Claim 2 — proposed grounds (strongest part of the case)

Claim 2 scope (by reference): the Claim 1 subcombination plus parallel rods k k and vibrating yoke-frame a a.

Ground 2-A: Claim 1 ground + Tinkham Re. 4,231 / Re. 4,600 + US23024A + the straddle-row beam-yoke record

Motivation. Every reference here is directed to the same problem: carrying ground-engaging tools on a wheeled frame such that the tools are held in working position, permitted to yield, and relieved of strain. Tinkham expressly teaches pivoting the shovel-carrying beams to the axle to obtain "free vertical and lateral movement" while holding them "in an upright position" — which is the functional statement of Wagner's yoke-frame plus parallel-rod subassembly. Hall expressly teaches a beam braced and bolted from above and below as a way to "mutually strengthen and support each other." Belden teaches the one-piece bent metal frame. Combining a pivoted shovel-beam, a double-bearing beam bracket, and parallel tie-rods back to the axle is the aggregation of three known functions, each performing exactly its known function without asserted synergy — and in 1879 the crowding of this art (hundreds of cultivator patents in two decades) makes the marginal step unusually small.

Ground 2-B: the harrow references for the parallel-alignment function

Wagner's stated object is "holding the shovels… in a parallel relation to the axle." Harrow frames — US23914A (1859), US128601A (1872), US193756A (1877), all pre-filing — exist to hold ranks of ground-engaging teeth in fixed parallel relation on a beam-and-bar frame. I retrieved no text for any of these three, so I flag this mapping as inference from title and general art knowledge, not verified disclosure. If their texts do show parallel rods or bars tying a tool-carrying frame to a wheeled axle frame, they supply the last element of Claim 2 directly and the rejection becomes strong.

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6. Rationales for combining (consolidated)

1. Same field / analogous art. All usable references are soil-working agricultural implements (plows, cultivators, harrows, clevises). The analogous-art test is met on field-of-endeavor alone.
2. Common problem, expressly articulated in the references. Beam strain and torsion: US23024A ("resist all the strain"); relief of the beam from operating strain: US158140A ("relieve the beam of the draft-strain"); Pivoted shovel-beams held upright: Tinkham Re. 4,231.
3. Predictable results / known substitutions. Sleeve-and-set-screw-collar positioning, bolted clamp junctions, and tie-rod bracing each yield only their known effect.
4. Design incentives. US23024A expressly touts strength, lightness, and low cost ("first cost… would not exceed fifty cents") — establishing competitive pressure to simplify exactly this class of structure.
5. Number of disclosed solutions. Positional locking of a shaft-mounted assembly and pivoting attachment of a tool beam to a wheeled axle each admit a small, finite set of predictable alternatives — the KSR "obvious to try" rationale.
6. Applicant's own admission. The Oct. 23, 1876 application places "circular plates" at the same interface; the inventor himself characterizes the present arrangement as doing "away with" an earlier structure, i.e., a modification of his own known design, not a departure into a new field.

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7. Countervailing considerations

• Teaching away — weak but not zero. Wagner states he is "doing away with the friction-wheels and circular plates" of the 1876 application. Read generously, this is a self-declared retreat from the closest art. Read strictly, it is a retreat from friction-wheels, not from circular coupling plates — and Claim 1 still recites circular plates. I do not regard this as a viable teaching-away defense, but the passage should be anticipated and addressed.
• The unmapped coupling geometry. As set out in §4 — the grooved-lug, ribbed-recess, cast-without-machining, 45°-indexable interface is the real inventive core, and no reference on the page reaches it. This is the single strongest validity argument for Claim 1.
• No objective evidence of nonobviousness on this record. I found no commercial-success, long-felt-need, licensing, or copying evidence. That is a negative search result, not proof that none exists. There is, conversely, a documented history of widespread practice in this art (the Patter record describes the unpatented Whitely machine being built in the hundreds) which tends to undercut any "failure of others" narrative.
• Claim-definiteness predicate. Claim 2 recites "coupling-plates G and E" while the specification assigns G to the collar and O to the plate (flagged in the earlier section). A claim whose reference letters are internally inconsistent is difficult to construe with the precision a §103 comparison requires. An expired 1879 claim is not amenable to reissue or certificate of correction now, so this ambiguity is permanent.
• "Substantially as described" importation. If the illustrated structure is read into the claims, they narrow; if it is not, the claims are indefinite. Either way the validity and infringement analyses move in opposite directions — worth stating explicitly to whoever uses this memo.

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8. Bottom line

Claim 1: Under Graham/KSR, Claim 1 is not established as obvious on the prior art supplied by this page. The page's Similar Documents list is dominated by post-1879 references (18 of 25) that are legally unavailable, and the pre-filing subset reaches the beam, the shovel frame, and the beam-strain-relief coupling but not the rotation-locking ribbed/lugged circular coupling plate of Claim 1. A rejection would require additional art outside the page (face-clutch/coupling art and axle collar/sleeve art), plus the applicant's own October 23, 1876 admission as to "circular plates."

Claim 2: Claim 2 is materially more vulnerable. Its added elements — a pivoted, shovel-carrying yoke-frame held upright on the axle; a one-piece bent/forged metal frame; a double-bearing beam bracket; parallel tie-rods to the axle — are each disclosed or plainly taught in the art and stepwise toward the claimed combination: US23024A (Hall, verified: tool standard received and bolted through the beam from above and below, with brace), US30796A (Belden, verified: one-piece bent iron cultivator frame), Tinkham Re. 4,231/Re. 4,600 (verified abstracts: shovel-beams pivoted to the axle, straddle-row cultivator, bars rigidly secured to the axle), US158140A (verified: beam-strain-relief coupling), and the harrow/multi-beam straddle-row context (title-level only). Motivation is supplied by the express problem statements in the references and by the crowded, cost-driven art.

Practical caveat: none of this has legal consequence. The patent expired July 29, 1896 and its status is Expired – Lifetime. This is a validity-hypothesis exercise on an expired document, and the more realistic modern use of US217914A is as prior art against later claims.

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9. Residual uncertainty (explicit)

• US23914A, US128601A, US193756A, US114767A — dates and titles only; I retrieved no disclosure text. Every mapping of these four is inference, and I have labeled it as such. US114767A in particular would be the natural primary reference (a pre-filing "Improvement in cultivators"), and I could not confirm its contents.
• Tinkham 30,897 / Re. 4,231 / Re. 4,600, Taylor & Graves 29,637, Robertson & Carr 30,589 — verified only through Allen's Digest abstracts and the patent PDFs surfaced in search, and they are not on the page's Similar Documents list.
• The Patter v. Moline Plow Co. citation, court, and date are unverified. I am reporting the contents of the opinions I retrieved (https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8160776.pdf#2#2 ; https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0009.f1.hein.pdf#173#144) descriptively and expressly refrain from supplying a reporter citation I cannot confirm.
• No examiner record, no art cited on the face, no serial number, and no assignment record for US217914A exist in what I have (consistent with the earlier section's findings).
• No non-patent-literature, foreign, or public-use/on-sale prior art was identified; I am reporting a negative search result, not a positive finding of absence.
• The October 23, 1876 prior application is identified only by filing date, not by number, so its content is known solely through Wagner's own characterization of it. If it matured into a patent, whether it is prior art against the 1879 claims (as opposed to an admission bearing on the state of the art) depends on its issue date and on common-inventorship principles — which I cannot resolve without the number.