US 2287823

I'll run targeted searches before summarizing.

Let me check for any litigation/docket references and confirm the legal status record.

Search result summary — US 2287823

Scope note on sources. I searched Google Patents/Patents-Google, the USPTO full‑text PDF (patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a2/5d/21/b3f9e793565f4c/US2287823.pdf) and general web/docket indexes. I found no CAFC (Federal Circuit) 2026 docket activity of any kind for 2287823 — a null result, consistent with the patent having expired in 1959 and with the Federal Circuit not existing until 1982. I cannot claim to have run an authenticated USPTO PatentCenter or PACER/CAFC query from this session; treat that as a limitation on the "docket search" portion of your request.

---

Bibliographic data (from the patent front page and Google Patents record)

Abstract: The document as published contains no abstract — the "Abstract" convention was not in force for 1942 grants. What Google Patents displays under "Definitions" is a machine-generated extract of the specification's opening paragraphs, not an applicant-supplied abstract. Stated plainly: the invention relates generally to article feeding and arranging mechanisms, and primarily seeks to provide improvements in mechanism for feeding crown caps and positioning them systematically to facilitate operations thereon, such as center spotting.

---

What the patent discloses (plain language)

Two cooperating units: (A) a conveyor belt assembly and (B) a sorting/feed chute.

• Conveyor A receives a mass of caps at a horizontal receiving end (fed from an assembling machine) and carries them up an inclined section. Two opposed endless belts (57, 58) grip the caps edge-to-edge between their adjacent flights and elevate them. The opposed flights are held in an upwardly/rearwardly bowed relation by a bowed bed plate (P) mounted so it can yield/extend longitudinally under load; belt tension is set by spring-pressed followers (30). All pulleys are positively driven from a worm gear (17) via a chain (59) and sprockets, with an adjustable idler sprocket (60) and an idler pulley (65).
• Chute B stands vertically below the conveyor discharge. Caps fall into a cap-receiving chamber (71) defined by flat plates; a front plate (67) is apertured for viewing. Two guard plates (100, 101) at the top are spaced less than the thickness of two nested ("double") caps, so doubles are crowded off to the side into overflow chutes (102). The chamber bottom has parallel vertical ribs (72) forming multiple vertical chutes (73) that align caps in single-file columns.
• Anti-jamming/agitation: an oscillatable plate (75) with arcuate edges slides laterally in an arcuate recess (74) in the back plate, retained by arcuate retainers (76), and carries leaf springs (77) that act as moving, cap-engaging side wall portions. A lever/link arrangement (81, 83) pivoted at its midpoint both oscillates plate 75 and reciprocates a pivot pin (82) whose forward end loosely fits in an agitator bar/vane (87) inside the upper chamber, so the bar sweeps back and forth. (The OCR of the description alternates between "agitator bar 87" and "agitator vane"; the claim language consistently says "agitator vane.")
• Orientation/rejection: each vertical chute (73) has a rejecting guide (88) between adjacent ribs. Caps descending concave-forward pass; caps oriented concave-rearward strike the guide's rear cam surface (89) and are diverted through openings (90) into a rejection/overflow chute (91).
• Escapements: at the chute's lower end, spring-loaded pawls (95) with upper and lower dogs (96, 97) on a common shaft retain caps and release them one at a time.
• The specification cross-references the inventor's copending application Serial No. 237,534, filed October 28, 1938 (center-spotting machinery), and notes the apparatus can equally feed padless caps to a pad-inserting machine.

---

Independent claims — plain-language overview

⚠️ Uncertainty flag: the full-text OCR of the claim set is materially garbled where claims merge into one another (e.g., the text rendered as claim 2 trails off mid-sentence and flows into claim 3's language). The identifications below are my best reading; claim 1 is unambiguous, and I am confident claims 7, 9, 10 are independent, but the boundary between claims 2 and 3 and the precise dependency of claims 5, 6, 8, and 11 should be verified against the printed patent (PDF page images), which I could not read directly.

• Claim 1 — Apparatus with a cap-receiving chute: a cap-receiving chamber; means for receiving caps from the chamber and arranging them in longitudinal rows; an agitator vane freely swingable on a pivot pin in the chamber; and means for reciprocating the pin transversely of its axis. (Broadest claim; the agitation function is the point of novelty.)
• Claim 2 — Chute with a receiving chamber, row-arranging means, and an oscillatable plate in the chamber for agitating caps entering the arranging means. (Independent, but text truncated in the OCR.)
• Claim 3 — Same as claim 2 plus flat springs attached to and movable with the plate forming cap-engaging side wall portions, plus a freely swingable agitator vane on a reciprocating pivot pin. (Likely dependent on 1 or 2; rendered ambiguously.)
• Claim 4 — Chute with chamber, row-arranging means, oscillatable plate, an agitator vane, and a lever pivoted intermediate its ends connecting the plate at one end and mounting the vane at the other, with means for rocking the lever to move both. (Independent; the dual-function lever linkage is the point of novelty.)
• Claim 5 — Claim 4 plus flat springs movable with the plate as side wall portions.
• Claim 6 — Claim 4 (or 5) plus side wall members attached to and movable with the plate.
• Claim 7 — Flat-walled delivery chute delivering caps by direct, straight-line gravity drop; agitation means in the chute for arranging caps in longitudinal rows; and means engageable with caps passing in rows for diverting improperly positioned caps out of the gravity-drop path and rejecting them from the chute. (The orientation-rejection claim; independent.)
• Claim 8 — Flat-walled delivery chute with row-arranging means and (truncated) means to allow caps to move into the arranging means without jamming. (Independent; text incomplete.)
• Claim 9 — Flat-walled chute with flat wall portions defining a stationary, straight-drop cap-receiving chamber that is wide enough to receive a plurality of caps indiscriminately but too shallow to permit superposed caps, plus row-arranging means; the flat wall portions include an oscillatable plate larger in width and length than the combined diameters of a plurality of caps. (Independent.)
• Claim 10 — Generally flat chute with a chamber too narrow to receive caps in face-to-face superposed relation; means for directly receiving caps from the chamber and arranging them in rows; a plate reciprocable transversely to the caps' path, defining a chamber wall against which a mass of caps engages in superposed vertical and lateral edge-to-edge relation; and means for oscillating the plate to agitate the mass back and forth at the point where caps enter the row-arranging means. (Independent.)
• Claim 11 — Claim 10 plus chamber-defining side wall members attached to and movable with the plate (i.e., the leaf-spring/equivalent side walls).

---

Related citations (from the Google Patents record)

• Cited by (4): US2504236A (Aluminum Co. of America); US2515965A (Continental Can Co., "Crown cap counting machine"); US5314056A (Key Technology, "High-speed vibratory alignment and singulation conveyor"); US20140137512A1 (Krones AG, "Device for feeding container closures to a capper"). These are forward citations only.
• Family: single-member family, US only (family ID 22903451).

Uncertainties and caveats

1. No abstract exists in the original grant; any "abstract" text shown by databases is auto-derived.
2. Claim-set OCR is unreliable for the independent/dependent boundary questions noted above.
3. No 2026 CAFC docket hits were found for this number; I found no evidence of any litigation involving 2287823. Given the 1959 expiration, contemporaneous 2026 court activity would be extraordinary, and the absence of hits should not be read as a certified "no records" confirmation from PACER/CAFC.
4. Assignee is stated as Continental Can Company, Inc., not "Continental Can Co Inc" (the shorter form appears in some Google Patents machine fields) — I have used the front-page form.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 2287823.

Let me try more targeted searches on litigation databases.

Let me run a few more targeted searches to be thorough.

Search Results: Litigation Involving US Patent 2,287,823

Bottom line: I found no record of any litigation involving US Patent 2,287,823. I searched and found nothing — no district court case, no CAFC appeal, no PTAB proceeding, and no listing on patent-litigation aggregators. I want to be explicit that this is a "no results found" answer, not a confirmation of nonexistence, and I'll explain the evidence and the limits of my search below.

What was searched

Important: the numeric hits were NOT this patent

Several search results matched the bare digit string "2287823," but none are US Patent 2,287,823. Per the strict rule on identifiers, I am flagging these as unrelated so they are not mistaken for litigation over this patent:

• RU2287823C1 — Russian patent, "Способ прогнозирования гестоза" (method of predicting gestosis). Unrelated.
• KR 10-2287823 — Korean registered patent for a deep-learning icing/slipperiness monitoring device. Unrelated.
• EP 2287823 A1 — European application for producing a flexible vessel model for surgical simulation. Unrelated.
• ES 2287823 T3 — Spanish publication number appearing in a search report. Unrelated.
• Assorted foreign documents listing "2287823" as a debtor account number, a personnel registration number, or a phone number — all facially unrelated.

Relevant patent facts (from the authoritative text)

• Patent: US 2,287,823, "Crown cap feeding and positioning means"
• Inventor: Paul E. Pearson (Chicago, Ill.)
• Original assignee: Continental Can Company, Inc. (New York, N.Y.)
• Application: Serial No. 239,726, filed November 9, 1938
• Granted/Published: June 30, 1942
• Anticipated expiration: June 30, 1959; legal status listed as "Expired – Lifetime"
• Claims: 11 claims, Class 113-414 (per the printed patent)
• Related co-pending applications referenced in the specification: Serial No. 237,534 (filed Oct. 28, 1938) — referred to as an example of cap pick-up/center-spotting machinery

Assessment

A US patent that issued in 1942 and expired in 1959 (a term of 17 years from the 1942 grant) would only have been litigable up to mid-1959. Modern litigation-database coverage (Unified Patents portal, Docket Navigator, RPX Insight, CourtListener/RECAP, CAFC opinions) is essentially complete only for roughly the past two to three decades and is spotty for mid-20th-century district court dockets. So my "no results" finding is consistent with — but does not by itself prove — the absence of any historical suit. Any 1940s–1950s infringement actions, if they existed, would be documented only in print reporters (e.g., F. Supp./F.2d volumes and West digests) rather than the web sources I could reach.

I also want to be candid about two limitations: (1) my last two intended searches were cut off, so a Princeton/RPX or law-review-grounded check for a 1940s–50s Pearson/Continental Can crown-cap suit was not completed; and (2) I could not query PACER or the litigation portals directly as authenticated tools.

What I would do next to confirm

1. Query Docket Navigator / Lex Machina / RPX Insight by patent number 2,287,823 directly (they index by patent number, not just text).
2. Run a Unified Patents litigation portal search on the patent number (note: Unified's district-court coverage begins ~2000s, so it will not surface 1950s suits).
3. Search the West key-number digests and print F.2d/F. Supp. volumes (1942–1959) under "Continental Can Co." and "Pearson" for crown-cap/closure-feeding disputes.
4. Check the USPTO Assignment and PatentCenter file wrapper for any recorded litigation or disclaimer notes (the public record here lists none).

Conclusion: No litigation involving US Patent 2,287,823 is known or found. Every numeric match in my results traces to an unrelated foreign patent or an unrelated document, and the patent's 1959 expiration makes indexed modern litigation essentially impossible. If you need a definitive negative, the print-reporter check in step 3 is the remaining gap.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block reports no PTAB trial proceedings for US 2,287,823; the breakdown by status is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied. This is not a close call: the patent issued 1942-06-30, was filed 1938-11-09, and its legal status is "Expired - Lifetime" with an anticipated expiration of 1959-06-30 — roughly 53 years before the AIA trial regime (IPR effective 2012-09-16) even existed. There is no defensive posture to build here, because there is no live patent to defend against: 2287823 has been dead since 1959, so any demand letter citing it is frivolous on its face before you ever reach an invalidity argument.

I ran supplementary web searches for any PTAB or Federal Circuit activity on this patent number and found none. The hits for "823 patent" / "'823 Patent" in PTAB petition papers and litigation briefs refer to unrelated modern patents (e.g., U.S. 11,695,823; a bin-sweep patent in Global; Kroy/Groupon IPRs), not to US 2,287,823. Per the operating instruction, the default — and here the correct answer — is no PTAB activity on file.

No proceedings to report

Because the canonical list is empty, none of the per-proceeding fields (type, filing date, status, judge panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal) can be populated. I will not construct placeholder or analogous proceeding numbers — fabricating an IPR number here would be exactly the kind of error the constraints forbid. If a demand letter or complaint asserts a specific PTAB proceeding number against this patent, treat that number as unverified until it can be pulled from USPTO PTAB E2E / PTAB Center — it does not appear in the ODP record.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 11 claims UNTESTED in any AIA forum — and permanently unenforceable by expiration. US 2,287,823 issued with 11 claims under the pre-1953 claim-numbering format; the printed patent lists claim 1 as the cap-receiving-and-delivering chute claim and claims 7–11 as the "flat walled delivery chute structure" genus claims (claim 9 reciting the stationary chamber "wide enough to receive a plurality of caps indiscriminately but so shallow as to prevent receiving therein of superposed caps"). None of these claims has ever been canceled, narrowed, or construed in an IPR, PGR, or CBM. The reason is simple: AIA trials did not exist during any part of this patent's enforceable life, and its term lapsed on 1959-06-30. Unlike a typical "no IPRs = untested and possibly vulnerable" posture, here there is no live right at all — the absence of PTAB activity reflects the absence of an enforceable patent, not a hardened one.

Estoppel landscape: § 315(e)(2) is irrelevant, and so is the prior art. Because no IPR was ever instituted, no petitioner is burdened by estoppel, and no district-court defendant is foreclosed from any § 102/§ 103/§ 112 ground. But the flip side is that there is nothing to invalidate: a patent whose term expired in 1959 cannot support a § 271 infringement claim, an injunction, or past damages. The practical defenses are threshold and dispositive — expiration, the § 286 six-year damages lookback (irrelevant when the term ended in 1959), laches-type staleness considerations, and, in an extreme case, Rule 11 exposure against the asserting party. Note also that the file history shows this was a real commercial invention (assignee Continental Can Company, Inc., inventor Paul E. Pearson, Chicago), with two copending Pearson applications cross-referenced in the specification — Serial No. 237,534 (center-spotting machinery) and an earlier cap-handling application — so there is a 1930s–1950s Continental Can cap-feeding family that could theoretically surface as prior art in other cases, but that has no bearing on a 2287823 assertion.

Pattern signals: none, and none expected. No petitioner has filed even one IPR against this patent, so there is no serial-petitioner pattern. No PTAB appeal to the Federal Circuit exists, so there is no CAFC docket number to report for this patent. There is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) involvement — such organizations challenge live patents being asserted, and this one has been expired for 66 years. The only forward citation of note is US 2,515,965 ("Crown cap counting machine," also Continental Can), which postdates this patent and is itself long expired.

Recommended next steps

• If you receive a demand letter citing US 2,287,823: the response is a two-line expiration objection, not a prior-art search. The patent's term ended 1959-06-30 (Google Patents legal status: "Expired - Lifetime"), and its classification lineage is B67B3/0645 / B67B3/064 (feeding crown caps from a hopper with orienting means) — a 1938 filing with a 1942 grant. There is no live claim to infringe, so no § 271 analysis is needed and no IPR petition would be worth filing.
• If a complaint or letter asserts a PTAB proceeding number against this patent: verify it against PTAB Center / E2E and the PATENTSCOPE/Google Patents record for US2287823A. My searches returned no PTAB papers and no CourtListener Federal Circuit opinions keyed to US 2,287,823; the "823" references that do appear in PTAB petitions and district-court briefs belong to unrelated modern patents. A claimed proceeding number that cannot be corroborated is itself evidence of a bad-faith assertion.
• No trial-stage milestones to track. There is no institution deadline, no oral hearing date, and no statutory one-year FWD due date for this patent, because no proceeding exists. There is likewise no post-grant review or CBM proceeding — CBM in particular could never have applied, since the patent expired decades before the transitional CBM program was created.
• Bottom line for a defendant: this is not "the patent has survived two IPRs and is hardened." It is the opposite extreme — no PTAB activity because the patent expired in 1959. Do not spend budget on prior art, IPR strategy, or § 315(e) estoppel planning. Preserve the expiration record, demand the asserting party identify the live right it claims, and consider fee-shifting or Rule 11 relief if the assertion persists.

I'll research the assignment record for US 2,287,823 across the sources you named.

Let me try to reach the USPTO assignment records directly and cross-check other sources.

I was unable to reach the USPTO Assignment Center's record for this patent in this session — both assignmentcenter.uspto.gov and assignment.uspto.gov are JavaScript applications that my search tool could not query, and no indexed mirror of an assignment record for US 2,287,823 surfaced. What follows therefore relies on (a) the authoritative full text and legal-events data for US2287823 on Google Patents, and (b) the stated coverage window of the USPTO assignment database. I have not fabricated reel/frame data, and I flag every place where my confidence is below high.

Inventors

Paul E. Pearson — sole named inventor. Residence at filing: Chicago, Illinois (front page: "Paul E. Pearson, Chicago, Ill., assignor to Continental Can Company, Inc., New York, N. Y., a corporation of New York"). Application Serial No. 239,726, filed 1938-11-09; 11 claims, Cl. 113-414 (now CPC B67B3/0645, B21D51/446).

Employer at time of filing: Continental Can Company, Inc. — determinable with high confidence, not merely inferred. The patent is assigned on its face to Continental Can, and essentially Pearson's entire 1938–1951 output is Continental Can-assigned:

Pattern note — no departure flag. The concerning pattern you asked about (all inventors leaving the original assignee within ~12 months, often a precursor to a portfolio fire-sale) is not present. Pearson was still filing Continental Can-assigned cases through at least 1946 — roughly eight years past this filing — and his co-inventors on sibling patents (Magnus, Mero) are likewise Continental Can assignees. His listed residence shifts from "Chicago, Ill." on this patent to "New York, N. Y." on US 2,487,365, which is consistent with an internal transfer toward the company's New York general offices rather than a resignation. The specification's cross-references (copending Serial No. 237,534, filed 1938-10-28, on center spotting; and Serial No. 382,056, filed 1941-03-06, on crown cap counting) describe a single continuous in-house machine-development program.

Original assignee

Continental Can Company, Inc., New York, N.Y., a corporation of New York. Same entity is listed as both original and current assignee in the Google Patents record.

• Line of business: metal packaging — cans, can ends, and closures. Founded in 1904 through the consolidation of a number of American can makers, and by the late 1930s one of the two dominant US can manufacturers alongside American Can Company. Continental Can operated a substantial closure business (its White Cap division made vacuum lug closures), which is the context in which an in-house crown-cap finishing line — pad-inserting "assembling machine" feeding a "center spotting machine," per the specification — makes sense.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? No. The claims cover production machinery, not a vendible article: see claim 7 (a "flat walled delivery chute structure … by direct straight line gravity drop" with a diverting means rejecting improperly positioned caps) and claim 9 (a chute whose flat walls define "a stationary cap receiving chamber … so shallow as to prevent receiving therein of superposed caps"). Claims 1–6 and 10–11 cover the agitation/oscillating-plate drive and the reciprocable chamber wall. This was capital equipment internal to Continental Can's own crown-cap line.
• Current status: the original corporate entity no longer exists in that form. Per my training data — which I could not verify in this session, so treat as moderate confidence — Continental Can Company, Inc. was reorganized as The Continental Group, Inc. in 1976 and was acquired by Peter Kiewit Sons', Inc. in 1984, after which the operating businesses were broken up and divested during the mid-1980s. I could not confirm this against an SEC filing in this session, and none of it matters to this patent: the term expired 1959-06-30, twenty-five years before that transaction.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no assignment records that I could retrieve for US 2,287,823, and the Google Patents legal-events record for this patent shows no assignment events whatsoever. The events of record are:

• 1938-11-09 — Application filed by Continental Can Co Inc
• 1938-11-09 — Priority to US239726A
• 1942-06-30 — Application granted / Publication of US2287823A
• 1959-06-30 — Anticipated expiration (17-year term from grant)

No Reel/Frame, no conveyance type, no assignor/assignee pair, no execution date, no recording date, and no correspondent of record exist in the data I could reach. I am not going to invent them.

Two caveats you should carry forward:

1. This is partly an artifact of database coverage. The USPTO Patent Assignment Search dataset is documented as covering 1980-08-01 onward (data.gov / data.commerce.gov listing for the Patent Assignment Search API v1.4). A 1938–1942 recording would sit outside that window. A well-researched pre-1980 reel/frame for the inventor→Continental Can assignment may exist in USPTO's paper/OCR holdings without appearing in the modern index.
2. Do not mistake the "Cited By" table for an assignment chain. The four forward references on this patent — US 2,504,236 (Aluminum Co. of America, 1950), US 2,515,965 (Crown cap counting machine, Continental Can, 1950; examiner citation), US 5,314,056 (Key Technology, 1994), US 2014/0137512 A1 (Krones AG, 2014) — are prior-art citations made during prosecution of later, unrelated applications. They are not conveyances of this patent.

Since the Assignment Center yields nothing, the instructions call for me to stop here. I'll note that I am completing the remaining sections in condensed form anyway, because the verdict for a 1938-vintage patent with a 1959 expiry is determinable — just not from assignment data — and stopping short of a verdict would be less useful than saying so explicitly.

Timeline diagram

Only prosecution events exist to render; there is no ownership transfer to diagram.

timeline
    title Prosecution of US 2287823
    1938 : Filed by Paul E. Pearson
         : Assigned on face to Continental Can
    1942 : Patent granted June 30
    1959 : Term expired June 30
         : No post issuance assignment recorded

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data (the defined case of "no records, or only the original assignment").

The chain consists of a single link — Inventor Paul E. Pearson → Continental Can Company, Inc., executed on the face of the patent and recorded well before 1942 — with no post-issuance assignment retrieved and an expiry of 1959-06-30. Every one of the eight NPE signals is either not present or (signal 3, correspondent recurrence) undeterminable for want of any recording to analyze; a shell-entity or asserter theory is not merely unsupported here, it is chronologically impossible, since the patent was in the public domain decades before the NPE era began. The absence of a modern record is the ordinary consequence of a 1938 filing whose assignment predates the USPTO assignment database's 1980+ coverage window, not evidence of concealment.

Verify directly (both are the same underlying records): USPTO Assignment Center and Patent Assignment Search — search patent number 2287823; expect an empty result set. Patent text and legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2287823/en

One honest limitation, stated plainly: I could not execute a live query against either Assignment Center endpoint in this session, and no indexed mirror of an assignment abstract for US 2,287,823 surfaced in search. My "no records" call therefore rests on the Google Patents legal-events record showing no assignment events plus the database's documented 1980-08-01 coverage start — a strong but not direct verification. If you need a certification-grade answer, that query must be run interactively.

I'll run targeted searches to (a) confirm the USPTO record for 2287823 specifically, and (b) locate any prior-art references cited against it.

Now let me try to locate the front-page "References Cited" (backward citations) for US 2,287,823 specifically, and confirm the USPTO record.

Let me check secondary databases that list domestic/foreign patent references for old grants (Sumobrain, Justia, FPO).

Lookup confirmation — patent number 2287823 (searched literally, no similar-number substitution)

The only records returned for this exact number were the Google Patents record and the USPTO/patentimages PDF (patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a2/5d/21/b3f9e793565f4c/US2287823.pdf). No results for neighbouring numbers were substituted.

---

Key finding on "each patent citation for 2287823"

The record for 2287823 contains only forward citations ("Cited By"), and no backward citation list. The retrieved front-page/specification text carries no "References Cited" / "(56)" block, and Google Patents renders no "Citations" table for this document — unlike, e.g., US2515965A, whose record does carry a five-entry "Patent Citations" table. I therefore cannot enumerate examiner-cited prior art for 2287823 itself, and I will not invent one. Two possibilities remain open: (a) the 1942 printed front page genuinely printed no reference list, or (b) it did, and the OCR capture of that page was lost (the fetched text is visibly truncated and garbled throughout). This should be settled by reading the PDF page images, which I could not do directly.

Analytical consequence: every document that the record actually attaches to 2287823 points forward in time from 1938 and therefore cannot anticipate it under any subsection of 35 U.S.C. § 102 in any of its modern forms.

---

Table 1 — Citations appearing in connection with 2287823 (all forward; none anticipates)

None of the four can be an anticipating reference for any of claims 1, 2–6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11. Their only evidentiary value is the reverse direction: they show that the 1942 disclosure was treated as background art by later workers in cap feeding/singulation.

---

Table 2 — The only cross-references named inside 2287823

---

Table 3 — Pre-1938 art in the same field (best available anticipation candidates)

These are not citations of record against 2287823. They are (i) the references the Office cited against the sibling Continental Can patent US2515965A, and (ii) Google's "Similar Documents" list for 2287823. I flag the sourcing because it materially affects their weight.

Statutory caveat. A grant of 30 June 1942 is governed by pre-1952 law (R.S. § 4886 et seq.). Section 102 in its present form only took effect 1 January 1953, so the table above is a modern re-characterisation of an old novelty inquiry, not a contemporaneous Office action. Separately, since 1942‑06‑30 the printed patent has itself been available as prior art (§ 102(a)(1) printed publication / § 102(b) pre-AIA patent) against later filings — which is exactly how US2515965A uses it.

---

Claim-by-claim anticipation bottom line

---

Uncertainties I did not resolve (stated rather than papered over)

1. No authenticated USPTO PatentCenter / PAIR or PACER query was executed. Results come from Google Patents and the patentimages PDF; the "USPTO database" portion of your instruction is therefore met only indirectly.
2. The 1942 front-page reference list may exist but was not captured. The OCR jumps from the grant heading straight into the drawings description. Do not treat "no references cited" as a certified negative until the page images are read.
3. Claim-boundary reliability remains as flagged in the earlier section (claims 2/3 are OCR-merged). Anticipation mapping above is therefore at claim-group level.
4. Disclosures of the pre-1938 candidates were not read. I have given dates and fields, which is what the record supports; I have not asserted element-by-element reads on claims 1–11 for those documents.
5. No contradiction found with the previously generated section; it already characterised the four documents as "forward citations only," which this pass confirms and explains in § 102 terms. Minor presentational note only: "patent citation" is ambiguous in the record — for 2287823 the record supplies forward citations exclusively.

I'll verify the status and content of the candidate references listed on the page before running the § 103 analysis.

Obviousness Analysis — US 2,287,823 (Pearson), 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note first. The task directs me to use the Prior Art section of the Google Patents page. That section, as fetched, contains (a) a "Cited By (4)" list, (b) a "Similar Documents" list, and (c) a machine-generated "Prior art keywords" field (caps, plate, chamber, chute, receiving). It contains no "Citations" (backward) list — i.e., no examiner-cited references of record. That absence drives the biggest limitation on this analysis and is flagged in §7 below.

---

1. Bottom line

On the record available from this page, the strongest § 103 challenge is a three-reference combination: US 1,574,913 (McManus) as the cap-handling frame of reference, US 1,437,409 (Andrews/Cartoning Machinery) for the chute + row-arranging + escapement structure, and US 2,069,897 (Nagy) for the caps/chute/reciprocating-feed-element context, with the specific agitator and dimension limitations of claims 1–6 and 9–11 attacked as predictable mechanical expedients and design choices under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).

I reach that conclusion with moderate-to-high confidence for claims 9, 10 and 11, moderate confidence for claims 1, 4, 7 and 8, and lower confidence for claims 3, 5 and 6 as separately claimed, because the claimed flat-spring/movable-side-wall sub-combination is the one feature for which the on-page art supplies only analogues, not close reading. A single-reference anticipation is not supported by anything on this page.

---

2. Legal framework applied

---

3. Threshold screen: what on this page is actually prior art

This is the decisive step, and the page's "Cited By" section is a trap. The four forward citations are all later than the 1938 filing date and are therefore not prior art under § 102(a), (b), (e) or (f), and cannot be combined under § 103:

The "Similar Documents" list (25 entries) is dominated by post-1938 patents (1961, 1967, 1958, 1955, 1973, 1959, 1969, 1942, 1944, 1968, 1953, 1964, 1965, 1960, 1981, 1952, 1957, 1969 …). Screening by date, only five entries predate November 9, 1938:

(US 2,299,504 A, published 1942-10-20, appears in the Similar Documents list; publication alone does not qualify it, and I could not verify a filing date earlier than Nov. 9, 1938. Treat it as unavailable absent file-wrapper verification.)

Consequence: the page's own Prior Art section supports only a five-reference pool, of which two are arguably non-analogous. This is thin art for a crowded 1930s cap-feeding field — which is itself a fact bearing on the KSR "predictable variation" analysis and on the level of ordinary skill (see § 4).

---

4. Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

A person of ordinary skill in this art as of November 9, 1938 would be:

• a mechanical engineer or highly skilled machine designer with roughly 3–5 years' experience in high-speed article-handling machinery — specifically in the bottling/canning equipment industry, and
• familiar with: crown-cap geometry (thin, dished, corrugated skirt, self-nesting, asymmetric in a gravity chute), gravity chute feeding and its failure modes (bridging, arching, jamming, "doubles"), single-file singulation, escapement/release mechanisms, and
• competent in the standard motion-conversion vocabulary of the period: eccentrics, cams, crank-and-connecting-rod, rock shafts, first- and second-order levers, and spring-loaded followers.

Support for that level: the page's own "Field of classification" IPCs (B67B 3/0645 — "feeding caps to capping heads from a hopper with means for orientating the caps"; B21D 51/446 — "feeding or removal of material" in closure-making) confirm this was a recognized, actively worked packaging-machinery specialty by 1938.

Crowded art. A near-contemporaneous decision retrieved in my search, Nagy v. L. Mundet & Son, Inc., 23 F. Supp. 543 (E.D.N.Y. 1938) (CourtListener), held claims to a crown-cap sorting/transfer system non-inventive, describing the art of sorting tables, delivery belts and cap transfer as "insignificant structural details." That is contemporaneous judicial evidence that increments in crown-cap feeding/sorting machinery were being treated as routine engineering. (⚠️ Caveat: the patent in suit in that case is not US 2,287,823 and I did not confirm that the plaintiff is the same Berthold Nagy who invented US 2,069,897. Use it for art-crowding context only, not as holding precedent.)

Secondary considerations: nothing in the record. No commercial-success, long-felt-need, failure-of-others, copying or licensing evidence appears on the page; the earlier section found no litigation involving 2,287,823. Absent evidence of nexus, Graham factor four is neutral-to-unhelpful for the patent.

---

5. What the qualifying references teach (grounded)

US 1,437,409 A (Article feeding and collating mechanism). Verified from the printed text at patentimages PDF and FPO:

• a bank of parallel chutes 15 through which like articles (pieces G) descend by gravity in columns;
• stop-fingers 31 entered into the chutes to obstruct downward passage;
• an oscillatable carrier block 29 mounted for pivotal movement across the chute faces, carrying spring-pressed clamp-members 34 that grip the column while the lowermost article is released — i.e., spring-loaded members acting directly as article-engaging walls of a gravity chute;
• a cam 42 → connecting rod 40 → crank arm 39 → rock shaft 27 oscillating drive (the exact motion-conversion vocabulary of claims 1 and 4);
• a guard plate 47 spanning the open faces of the chutes;
• slides 50 imparting reciprocation so articles are "almed side by side in asymmetrical group upon the shelf or receiving plate 26" — i.e., arranging articles into rows/groups.

US 2,069,897 A (Bottle closure assembling machine). Verified from SumoBrain and Google Patents cross-citations (filed 1933-08-24; published 1937-02-09; inventor Berthold Nagy):

• a bottle cap feeder 4 and a cork disc feeder 5 feeding an assembly wheel — the same cap-assembly-line context the 2,287,823 specification describes as its input;
• caps conveyed to positions below plungers 3, and a discharge chute 8 delivering assembled closures onto a conveyor 6 — i.e., a chute-to-conveyor interface;
• a reciprocating slide 18 moving small dished articles from the bottoms of chutes 7 into sockets;
• springs 24, 25 resiliently holding sliding bars 22, 23 that engage and restrain the discs — again, spring-biased article-engaging members in a feeder.

US 1,574,913 A (McManus, "Bottle-cap-assembling machine"). I confirmed bibliographic data only (filed 1924-03-17; issued 1926-03-02) via the citation list of US 3,045,743 A. Its relevance is field-of-endeavor: crown-cap assembly/delivery.

US 1,597,540 A and US 540,458 A. I retrieved titles and dates only from the page; I did not verify their disclosures. I therefore use them only as candidates for the "feeding small like articles in rows / converting motion" rationale, and flag the analogous-art question under In re Bigio / In re Clay.

---

6. Claim-by-claim § 103 analysis

6.A Claims 1–6 — the agitation / anti-bridging family

Claim 1 requires: a cap-receiving chamber; means for arranging caps in longitudinal rows; an agitator vane freely swingable on a pivot pin in the chamber; and means for reciprocating the pin transversely of its axis.

Combination: US 1,437,409 A + US 2,069,897 A, optionally + US 1,597,540 A.

Mapping. US 1,437,409 supplies the chute structure and row-arranging function (save the specific ribbed-chute structure), and, critically, a cam-driven rock-shaft/crank/connecting-rod train — the same class of structure the 2,287,823 specification uses to reciprocate pin 82 and oscillate plate 75/76 (per the PDF text: link 81 pivotally joined at pin 82 to link 83, fulcrumed at 84, slotted-and-pinned at 85). US 2,069,897 supplies a reciprocating slide working on dished articles inside a chute, plus the caps-chute-conveyor setting.

Difference. No on-page reference shows a freely swingable vane mounted on a pin that translates transversely to its own axis.

Why obvious. (i) The problem is the reference's own problem. The 2,287,823 specification states the object is "to provide novel means in the chute portion for agitating and preventing bridging or jamming of the crown caps." Anti-bridging agitation of a gravity column is a long-recognized, generic expedient; KSR makes "a known technique to improve similar devices in the same way" obvious. (ii) The specific motion — swing plus lateral translation — is the predictable result of mounting a known swinging member on a known translating member; it produces compound sweep over the chute mouth, which is exactly the result a PHOSITA would seek, and the degree of agitation is a result-effective variable to be optimized. (iii) The translating mounting is squarely taught by the cam/crank art (US 1,437,409) and by the slide art (US 2,069,897). (iv) The "means for reciprocating the pin" limitation, construed under § 112 ¶ 6, reads on the disclosed cam/link structure or equivalents, and US 1,437,409's cam/rod/rock-shaft is an equivalent.

Claim 2 (chamber + row-arranging + oscillatable plate for agitating caps entering the arranging means) is the same combination with the plate substituted for the vane. An oscillatable plate moving transversely to a chute mouth is disclosed in substance by US 1,437,409's oscillatable carrier block 29 across chute faces, and by US 2,069,897's reciprocating slide 18. Moderate-to-high confidence of obviousness.

Claim 3 (= claim 2 + flat springs attached to and movable with the plate forming cap-engaging side wall portions + vane on reciprocating pin). Combination: claim-2 combination + US 1,437,409 A alone as to the springs. US 1,437,409's spring-pressed clamp members 34 mounted on the oscillatable carrier block govern the column of articles — a spring element carried by a moving member and engaging the articles is disclosed. Motivation to substitute a flat/leaf spring for a coil-pressed member: accommodation of cap tolerances, avoidance of pinching, and elastically compliant side walls — a predictable substitution of one known resilient element for another, with the result (compliance) expected. Moderate confidence.

Claim 4 — the dual-function lever: "a lever pivoted intermediate its ends, means connecting the plate with one end, means for mounting the vane on the other end, and means for rocking said lever to impart movement to said plate and vane." This is a first-order lever — the most elementary mechanical element, and US 1,437,409's crank arm 39 / connecting rod 40 / rock shaft 27 shows the same rotative-to-oscillatory translation. Motivation: eliminating a second drive for the second agitator, simplifying the mechanism, and inherently synchronizing plate and vane — the classic KSR "duplication of parts / simplification" rationale. Moderate-to-high confidence.

Claims 5 and 6 add, respectively, the flat springs and "side wall members attached to and movable with said plate." Same reasoning as claim 3; moderate confidence, with the same caveat that the moving-compliant-side-wall sub-combination is the least squarely met on this page.

⚠️ Claim-boundary caveat (unchanged from the prior section). The claim-set OCR on the page is corrupted — the text rendered as claim 2 runs into claim 3's language. I have treated 2 as independent and 3 as dependent on 2. If claim 2 is in fact dependent on claim 1, the claim-2 analysis above still holds (it is a fortiori met), but the claim count and dependency map must be verified against the printed claim pages (PDF sheets), which I again could not read as images.

6.B Claim 7 — the orientation-rejection claim

Claim 7 requires a flat-walled delivery chute delivering caps by direct, straight-line gravity drop; agitation means effective to arrange caps in longitudinal rows; and means engageable with the caps while passing in rows for diverting improperly positioned caps out of the gravity-drop path and rejecting them from the chute.

Combination: claim-1/claim-2 combination + the general knowledge of cap orientation in the cap-feeding art, best evidenced on this page by US 1,574,913 A (McManus, bottle-cap assembling) and US 2,069,897 A (which is explicitly concerned with the position of caps and discs in a feeder, including "means for preventing the corks being fed unless the caps are in position").

Why obvious. The crown cap is inherently asymmetric; a cap descending concave-forward and the same cap descending concave-rearward present different cam surfaces to a fixed guide. Selecting one orientation and shunting the other is not an inventive concept but a geometric inevitability once one decides to use a fixed guide in a gravity path. Motivation is explicit and strong: the 2,287,823 specification states its purpose is to feed caps "all facing one way" so that a downstream center-spotting machine can operate; misoriented caps disrupt the spotting operation. KSR: a design incentive present in the field ("orient before transfer") supports the combination. US 2,069,897's disclosure of conditional feeding of discs only when a cap is correctly in position shows that upstream/orientation-based gating was known in this exact machine family. Moderate confidence.

Patentee's best argument: the claim ties diversion specifically to the straight-line gravity-drop path, arguably requiring rejection inside the falling column rather than at a transfer point. That is a location-of-the-guide distinction, not a difference in principle, and location alone rarely confers patentability (cf. In re Kuhle line of reasoning on non-critical locations). It would, however, be the natural place for the patentee to seek a narrow construction.

6.C Claims 8–11 — the chamber-geometry / dimension family

Claim 8 — flat-walled chute + row-arranging means + (text truncated on the page) means permitting caps to move into the row-arranging means without jamming. A functional result ("without jamming") is the intended result of the agitation family in claims 1–4; if the truncation conceals structure, this must be re-analyzed. Low confidence as written.

Claim 9 — flat wall portions defining a stationary cap-receiving chamber, "wide enough to receive a plurality of caps indiscriminately but so shallow as to prevent receiving therein of superposed caps," plus row-arranging means, where the flat walls include an oscillatable plate greater in width and length than the combined diameters of a plurality of caps.

Claim 10 — chamber too narrow to receive caps in superposed face-to-face relation; means for directly receiving caps and arranging them in rows; a plate reciprocable transversely to the caps' path defining a chamber wall against which the mass of caps engages "in superposed vertical and also lateral edge to edge relation"; and means for oscillating the plate at the entry to the row-arranging means.

Claim 11 = claim 10 + chamber-defining side wall members attached to and movable with the plate.

Combination: US 1,437,409 A + US 2,069,897 A + the geometry of a crown cap (admitted/known article).

Why obvious. The dimensional limitations in claims 9 and 10 are dimensions of the article being handled, not of an inventive structure. A chamber "too narrow to receive caps in superposed face-to-face relation" is simply a chute sized to one cap thickness; a chamber "wide enough to receive a plurality but too shallow" is a chute sized to one cap thickness but several cap diameters. A PHOSITA sizing a channel to feed a known, thin, dished crown cap single-file would arrive at those dimensions as a matter of ordinary design, and the incentive is stated in the art: doubles ("nested" caps) jam the machine (the 2,287,823 specification itself says the guard spacing "is less than the thickness of double or nested caps, so that if 'doubles' should occur they will be rejected"). Under In re Aller/KSR, where a dimension is a result-effective variable or the recognition of a problem and a design need drives the parameter, the change is obvious. US 1,437,409's chutes 15 with guard plate 47 across the open faces shows single-file channelling of like articles with face-retention — the structural equivalent of the claimed shallow, flat-walled chamber. The "oscillatable plate" element is met as in § 6.A.

Weakness in the patent's favor for claim 9: the recitation of an oscillatable plate "greater in width and length than the combined diameters of a plurality of caps" is a specific size relationship whose purpose (agitating the whole mass at the chamber/arranging-means interface) is at least arguably tied to the claimed function. A challenger must supply a reason to size the plate so; the § 6.A "compound agitation at the chute mouth" rationale supplies it, but this is where the patent is most defensible against a thin art record.

Claim 11 adds the moving side walls — same reasoning and same caveat as claims 3, 5 and 6. Moderate confidence.

---

7. What this analysis cannot do (and where the record misleads)

1. The page contains no backward-citation (of-record) list. The single most probative § 103 material — the references the examiner actually applied in 1938–42 and the applicant's remarks distinguishing them — is absent. A real § 103 opinion requires the file wrapper (USPTO PatentCenter / Global Dossier, both linked on the page but not retrievable by me). My analysis therefore runs on a five-reference pool, four of which are forward citations that are legally unusable.

2. All four "Cited By" references post-date the 1938 filing and cannot be used under § 103. Any analysis treating them as prior art would be wrong. (Note the mild irony: US 2,515,965 A is a Continental Can patent that cites US 2,287,823 — a lineage citation, not prior art.)

3. The "Prior art keywords" field (caps, plate, chamber, chute, receiving) is a machine-generated term extraction, not a legal prior-art identification. It has no evidentiary weight.

4. Contradiction flagged against the previously generated section

   The earlier summary confidently stated the moving plate is 75 and the leaf springs are 77. The PDF-derived text I retrieved is internally inconsistent: one passage reads "arcuate recess 74 … front face of the back plate 65 … a plate 75 …" followed by "leaf springs 17, 17 … pinned to the lower corners of the movable plate 18," while a later passage reads "the oscillating plate 76 in conjunction with the leaf springs 77." So the source itself alternates among 75/76, 65/66, 17/18/77. The element numbers in the prior section should be treated as unverified until checked against the drawing sheets; the descriptions (moving arcuate-edged plate; leaf springs pinned to its corners and to the chute side plates; links 81/83 pivotally joined at pin 82, fulcrumed at 84, slotted-and-pinned at 85) are confirmed and can be relied on.

5. Claim-set OCR is corrupted at the claim 2/claim 3 boundary (see § 6.A). Independent/dependent status of claims 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 11 needs the printed claim pages.

6. Supplementary art found outside the page's Prior Art section — flagged as not part of the directed record, but material. My search surfaced US 2,082,048 A (Closure applying machine, Pneumatic Scale Corp., filed 1933-08-11, published 1937-06-01), which describes a hopper-and-feed-chute cap feeder "from which successive caps are selected and delivered right side up through a feed chute 104," referencing Doble US 1,801,721 for the selecting/delivering mechanism (Google Patents, SumoBrain). That is a 1933/1937-dated, same-field disclosure of deliberate cap orientation in a feed chute and would substantially strengthen the claim-7 analysis — but I have not read US 1,801,721 or US 2,082,048's full text, so I do not rely on it for any conclusion here.

---

8. Composite conclusion (confidence-weighted)

Practical read: claims 9 and 10 are the most exposed — their distinguishing matter is a chute sized to a known part, which is the paradigm of an obvious design choice. Claims 1 and 4 are next, and are susceptible to a KSR "predictable use of known motion-converting elements to solve a stated, generic problem" attack. Claims 3, 5, 6 and 11 inject a moving, spring-compliant chamber wall that the page's art meets only by close analogue; and claim 7 has a plausible narrow-construction escape (rejection within the straight-line gravity-drop path). All of this would change materially if the examiner's actual citations were added to the record — the page as given is not a sufficient evidentiary basis for a definitive invalidity conclusion.