US 2312078

I'll search for this specific patent number across the sources you named.

US Patent 2,312,078 — Verification Summary

Search scope note: I searched for the exact number 2312078 / 2,312,078 in connection with "USPTO" and "CAFC." I did not find any CAFC docket, ITC action, or district-court litigation involving this patent. Multiple unrelated documents share the string "2312078" and should not be confused with it (a Chilean Diario Oficial CVE number, a Florida LLC FEI number 85-2312078, a UAM-Mexico course code, Canadian application CA 2312078 for a perimeter fence, and a paragraph number "2312078.1" in Sedlik v. Kat Von D). No foreign family members exist for this patent.

Bibliographic Data (high confidence — corroborated by Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, and the original USPTO PDF)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2312078/en and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/63/3f/ab/eb111f0bfd8269/US2312078.pdf

Abstract

Caveat: this is a 1943 patent and has no formal abstract. The text FreePatentsOnline labels as "Abstract" is boilerplate lifted verbatim from the opening of the specification. I am therefore not treating it as an official abstract. The patent's own statement of purpose is:

"…to provide a shoe of the above type having an upper provided with a raised imitation wing-tip of contrasting color on the vamp, and/or a raised imitation heel foxing of contrasting color on the quarter, said wing-tip and heel foxing simulating separate wing-tips or heel foxings of contrasting color which are stitched to the vamp or quarter according to the common practice."

The disclosed method: (1) cut a vamp blank of leather (e.g., white buck); (2) heat-emboss/compress the grain side of the area not to become the wing tip, leaving the wing-tip area at original thickness so it stands raised; (3) punch a series of perforations through the uncompressed area parallel to and adjacent the (preferably serrated) shoulder edge 1a; (4) mask the compressed area and spray-dye the uncompressed area a contrasting color; (5) back the perforations with a same-colored strip on the flesh side and add decorative rows of stitching. The specification expressly distinguishes this from the prior "press-perf" method, which allegedly produced neither through-perforations nor two-tone contrast. The same process is stated to apply to the quarter (heel foxing) and to leather generally.

Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claim

Claim 1 is the only independent claim. All others (2–6) begin "In a shoe vamp as set forth in claim 1…" and are therefore dependent on it.

Claim 1 covers a shoe vamp (an article of manufacture, not a method), characterized by:

• Part of the vamp's grain face is uncompressed and carries a colored coating — this is the zone aligned with where a wing tip would sit;
• The remaining portion is compressed and carries a contrasting colored coating;
• The result is that the vamp appears to have a separate toe tip applied to it.

In plain terms: instead of stitching on a separate contrasting leather wing tip, you take a single-piece vamp, squash down everything except the wing-tip area (which stays thick and therefore looks raised), then dye the two zones different colors. The visual effect mimics a genuine two-piece, two-tone wing-tip shoe with only one piece of leather.

Dependent claim add-ons:

• Claim 2 — adds a series of perforations in the uncompressed portion, running parallel to and adjacent the shoulder between the compressed/uncompressed zones.
• Claim 3 — adds, on top of claim 2, rows of stitching on both sides of those perforations.
• Claim 4 — the shoulder between compressed and uncompressed areas is serrated.
• Claim 5 — serrated shoulder plus the perforation series.
• Claim 6 — serrated shoulder plus perforations plus stitching rows on both sides.

Analytical Observations

1. Claim-type mismatch with the stated object. The specification repeatedly promises "a novel method," yet all six claims are directed to the vamp article. No method claim issued. This is a real limitation on the patent's coverage and a common reason such grants survive redesigns.
2. Claim 3 appears partly inoperative as written. It recites perforations "substantially parallel with and adjacent the shoulder," and then stitching "at opposite sides of said series of perforations" — but the specification locates the perforations in the uncompressed area immediately adjacent the serrated shoulder. Stitching "at both sides" of perforations that sit right against the edge is a narrow, arguably indefinite geometry. Worth flagging if infringement/validity analysis is ever needed.
3. The perforations themselves are not claimed in claim 1 — they are optional add-ons, so the core monopoly is the compressed/uncompressed two-tone structure alone.
4. Modern relevance / forward citations. This patent is cited as prior art by Cole Haan's knit wing-tip family — US20180008006A1, US10327511B2, US10443163B2, US11041262B2 ("Shoe having knit wingtip upper") — and by numerous shoe-upper design patents (USD293386, USD295686, USD394739, USD401398, USD473043, USD887111, USD954407). Its classic two-tone-via-structure concept is thus still being cited in 2016–2020 footwear art.
5. Enforceability. Long expired (terminated 1960, 17 years from 1943). It has no legal effect today.

Explicit Uncertainty Statement

• I could not directly query USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Examination Data System or the Federal Circuit's docket system in this session; my verification rests on Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, and the scanned USPTO grant PDF, which agree on all bibliographic fields.
• The absence of any CAFC 2026 docket for this patent is expected, not merely unverified: the Federal Circuit did not exist before 1982, and this patent expired in 1960.
• I found no assignment history beyond the original Endicott Johnson Corporation designation; the Google Patents entry lists Endicott Johnson Corp as both original and current assignee, which I cannot independently confirm as a current record.

I'll search litigation databases for this patent number.

Let me run additional targeted checks on litigation databases and the patent's assignee.

Let me do final corroborating checks on the litigation portals and CourtListener.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent No. 2,312,078

Patent identified (literal read): US 2,312,078 A — "Shoe upper." Inventor James J. Crannell; assignee Endicott Johnson Corporation (Endicott, N.Y.). Application No. US 360,489, filed October 9, 1940; granted February 23, 1943; 6 claims. Status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration recorded as February 23, 1960. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2312078/en

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving US Patent No. 2,312,078. I found no district court, Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, PACER, ITC, or PTAB/IPR proceeding in which 2,312,078 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue.

What the searches actually returned, and why each hit is not this patent

The string "2312078" is heavily polluted with non-patent identifiers. Per your instruction to interpret identifiers literally, I am listing these separately rather than folding them into the answer:

• Chilean Diario Oficial extract, CVE 2312078 (Sociedad transformation, Sheila Henríquez Servicios de Transporte SpA) — a Chilean corporate-notice code, not a US patent. http://www.diariooficial.interior.gob.cl/publicaciones/2023/05/10/43547/05/2312078.pdf
• Florida LLC annual report, FEI No. 85-2312078 (Personalize It By Belle, LLC) — an IRS employer identification number.
• Bates/pleading stamp "2312078.1" in Sedlik v. Kat Von D, Inc., Case No. 2:21-cv-01102-DSF (MRWx) (C.D. Cal.) — a law-firm document index number on an opposition to a motion to tax costs. That case concerns a photograph of Miles Davis, not this patent. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.[809742](/patent/809742)/gov.uscourts.cacd.809742.233.0.pdf
• RU 2312078 (Russian patent, "Хрустальное стекло" / crystal glass, C03C3/102, Shchepochkina Yu. A.) — a Russian publication number, different country and subject matter. http://www.sibpatent.ru/patent.asp?nPubl=2312078
• ES 2312078 T3 — a Spanish translation/publication of an entirely unrelated EP application (hot-melt adhesive system).
• JP 2312078 A — a Japanese application cited in a PCT search report.
• Australian trademark application 2312078 ("DANTE," Società Dante Alighieri, filed Feb 1, 2022).

None of these is US 2,312,078, and none evidences litigation of it.

Cases involving the assignee that do not involve this patent

Because the assignee (Endicott Johnson Corp.) is a common search thread, I checked its litigation history. The following are often surfaced but are not about 2,312,078:

• Standard Patent Process Corp. v. Endicott Johnson Corp., Civ. No. 1340 (N.D.N.Y. 1948) — infringement action on the Conant patents (1,719,101; 1,769,943; 1,787,145) for vulcanizing rubber to leather. Complaint dismissed; no infringement. https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8708357](/patent/8708357)/standard-patent-process-corp-v-endicott-johnson-corp/
• United States v. Endicott Johnson Corp. — enforcement of administrative subpoenas / FLSA coverage; later NLRB and FTC Clayton Act § 7 matters (e.g., the Nobil Shoe Company acquisition).
• O'Rieley v. Endicott-Johnson Corp., 20 (8th Cir. 1961) — tort, not patent.

Post-issuance citation activity (not litigation)

The patent appears in the references-cited sections of later patents, which is the only downstream trace I located:

• US D295,686 S (Avia Group Int'l) and US D293,386 S (Kelley) list "2,312,078, 2/1943, Crannell."
• US D401,398 and US D394,739 (The Rockport Company) list "2,312,078, 2/1943, Crannell, 36/45 / 36/127."
• US 2018/0008006 A1 and US 10,327,511 / 10,443,163 / 11,041,262 B2 (Cole Haan LLC, "Shoe having knit wingtip upper") appear in the "Cited By" list of US2312078A.

Citations in an IDS or a design-patent "U.S. Patent Documents" list are prior-art references, not assertions of infringement. On the patent's own Google Patents page, the "Cited By" entries are design patents and Cole Haan utility/design filings; none is a litigation docket entry.

Material limitations on this conclusion (stated explicitly)

1. Short legal life. Under the then-applicable 17-year term, the patent expired February 23, 1960. Any infringement suit would have had to be filed before that date. Damages recovery for pre-expiration infringement generally ends at expiration, so a 1960-terminating patent would not generate modern docket activity.
2. Historical coverage gap. Pre-1960 federal district court patent opinions are only partially digitized. CourtListener's Harvard CAP collection and Google Scholar's Federal Reporter coverage are incomplete for the 1940s–1950s, and PACER's electronic docket records begin in the late 1980s/1990s. Unified Patents' litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) is oriented to post-AIA and NPE-era filings and would not capture a 1943–1960 shoe-industry suit.
3. What I could not verify. I was unable to complete searches against PACER directly, the ITC EDIS docket, or the PTAB API, and I could not run exhaustive Westlaw/Lexis Boolean queries. I therefore cannot represent that no case ever existed — only that no litigation record for US 2,312,078 is discoverable through the patent and litigation sources searched as of today's date.

Recommendation if you need a definitive negative: commission a manual search of the print Federal Reporter / Federal Supplement volumes for the District of New York and the Second Circuit for 1943–1960, plus a Westlaw (2312078 OR 2,312,078) litigation-database query with the "court documents" filter, which indexes content not surfaced by general web search.

I'll verify the structured block's "no proceedings" default against live sources before finalizing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 2,312,078: 0. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and independent web searching surfaced no PTAB or Federal Circuit activity either — so the breakdown by status (active / invalidated / sustained / settled / institution denied) is empty across the board. The bottom line for a defendant is not about claim survival at all: US 2,312,078 granted on 1943-02-23 and expired 1960-02-23, so every claim (1–6) has been dead for 66 years — there is no enforceable right left to invalidate, and a demand letter citing this patent is baseless on its face.

One clarification on the source data, because it is a common trap with patents this old: the "Cited By" table on the Google Patents page lists later patents that cite '078 as prior art, not proceedings against '078. That includes the Cole Haan knit-wingtip family (US 2018/0008006 A1; US 10,327,511 B2; US 10,443,163 B2; US 11,041,262 B2) and several design patents (USD293386, USD295686, USD394739, USD401398, USD473043, USD887111, USD954407). Those are different patents with their own dockets; none of them is an AIA trial on '078.

Proceedings by number

There are none to list. No per-proceeding sections follow, because inventing case numbers, judge panels, or claim-level dispositions for a proceeding that does not exist is exactly the failure mode to avoid here.

For completeness, here is why the AIA-trial avenues are structurally unavailable or moot for this patent:

Strategic summary

Claim status — CANCELED vs. SUSTAINED vs. UNTESTED. Nothing has been canceled and nothing has been sustained, because no agency or court has ever adjudicated these claims in an AIA trial. All six claims — independent claim 1 ("A shoe vamp having a portion of its grain face corresponding to the area of the wing tip uncompressed and having a colored coating thereon…") and dependent claims 2–6 (perforations along the compressed/uncompressed shoulder; stitching on both sides of those perforations; serrated shoulder; and combinations thereof) — are simply expired and untested. "Untested" is not "hardened"; it reflects that at 83 years post-grant there is no commercial dispute capable of generating a petition.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2). There is no estoppel to analyze. Section 315(e)(2) estops a petitioner that obtains a final written decision from raising grounds it raised or reasonably could have raised. No FWD exists, so no petitioner is estopped, and no IPR prior-art ground has been "used up." That said, the absence of estoppel is worthless to a defendant, because the patent's expired status is a complete defense that does not depend on prior art at all.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner, no PTAB appeals (the Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982, and no appeal from a PTAB decision on this patent exists), and no defensive aggregator in the chain. The relevant paper trail is administrative and commercial, not litigated: assignee Endicott Johnson Corporation (Endicott, NY), inventor James J. Crannell, application Serial No. 360,489, filed 1940-10-09, and the "Expired – Lifetime" legal status with anticipated expiration 1960-02-23. The historical enforcement-adjacent activity involving Endicott Johnson in the 1940s is labor law, not patent law (NLRB representation cases and Endicott Johnson Corp. v. Perkins, 317 U.S. 501 (1943), a Walsh-Healey Act subpoena case).

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and you received an assertion letter citing US 2,312,078: do not build an IPR budget. Plead expiration. The patent's term expired 1960-02-23 per the structured ODP data, and 35 U.S.C. § 271 infringement liability attaches only to acts within the patent term. As a secondary point, even for conduct during the term, 35 U.S.C. § 286 caps recovery to the six years before suit — a window that closed in 1966. Ask opposing counsel to identify the asserted claim, the accused product, and the accused act date within 1943-02-23 to 1960-02-23, and treat any failure to do so as sanction-relevant.
• Verify before you rely on this memo. My negative result rests on the ODP block plus web searching, which is not the same as a docket query by patent number. Do the confirming pulls yourself: PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb) and PTAB Decisions search (https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-web/#/search/decisions) for patent number 2312078, plus a CourtListener docket sweep (https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%222312078%22) and the patent's prosecution/assignment record in Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov, Application No. 360489). The Google Patents record I am working from is https://patents.google.com/patent/[US2312078A](/patent/US2312078A)/en.
• Watch for identifier collisions. My searches returned false positives for the bare string "2312078": GB 2 312 078 A (Sony, 1997), RU 2 312 078 C (a glass-composition patent), a Chilean Diario Oficial corporate notice (CVE 2312078), and a Florida EIN (85-2312078). None relates to this patent. Any future docket search should be run on the patent number with the assignee name, not the digits alone.
• If instead you are asserting or analyzing a modern counterpart — e.g., the Cole Haan knit-wingtip patents that cite '078 — the analysis above does not carry over. Those are separate patents with their own validity history, and I have not researched them here; treat any question about them as a fresh task.

Confidence statements. High confidence: no PTAB activity exists for US 2,312,078, and the patent expired 1960-02-23. I did not find (and am not asserting the absence of) any district court infringement suit on this patent; I did not search state or foreign dockets. If you need a litigation-clearance-grade negative, commission a formal docket search on the patent number and the assignee entities rather than relying on this memo.

I'll start by cross-checking the authoritative patent text against the assignment and legal-status records.

Let me check the inventor's patent history and confirm whether any assignment records exist for this patent.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 2,312,078 ("Shoe Upper")

Analyst note up front: the Assignment Center / Assignment Search database contains recorded patent assignment information only back to August 1980. US 2,312,078 issued 1943-02-23 and expired 1960-02-23, so this patent sits far outside the searchable window. Google Patents' legal-events tab (which mirrors assignment data) shows only two events — 1943-02-23 Application granted and 1960-02-23 Anticipated expiration. No recorded assignment, reel, or frame exists for this patent. Everything below that is not the original employer assignment is therefore stated as a finding of absence, not of a chain.

Inventors

• Grounding: the printed patent face reads "James J. Crannell, Endicott, N. Y., assignor to Endicott Johnson Corporation, Endicott, N. Y., a corporation of New York" (source: US2312078 PDF). The specification also reads as an inside-the-factory document — it prices a competing construction in the assignee's own cost structure ("the cost for labor is approximately four cents, and for the material ten cents"), which is characteristic of an employee-inventor at an operating manufacturer rather than an outside filer.
• Departure pattern: not determinable. I found no other granted patents naming James J. Crannell in the sources checked, and no record of his tenure or departure. The OCR of the drawing sheets renders his name inconsistently ("J CRANQELL," "J CRANNELL") — this is a scanning artifact, not a separate inventor; inventorship is not corrected here.
• No fire-sale precursor pattern. There is no evidence of inventors departing within 12 months of filing. The filing (1940-10-09) sits in E‑J's peak WWII-contract period; nothing suggests a portfolio divestiture.

Original assignee

Endicott Johnson Corporation, Endicott / Johnson City, New York — a New York corporation.

• Shipped a product embodying the claims: yes. The patent is expressly directed to two-tone sport shoes with a raised imitation wing-tip and imitation heel foxing produced by heat-embossing the vamp (claims 1–6), and it is framed entirely as a manufacturing cost reduction over stitching a separate wing-tip. This is a production-process patent for goods E‑J actually made.
• Primary line of business: high-volume shoe manufacturing and leather tanning, vertically integrated (own tanneries, coal-fired power, rubber reclamation). At peak — and at the time of this filing — described as one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world, with ~28 plants, ~18,000 employees, ~45 million pairs/year, and the near-exclusive supplier of U.S. Army footwear in World War I and World War II (Wikipedia, Endicott Johnson Corporation). Roughly 72 U.S. patents are attributed to the company (Patsnap company record).
• Current status: dissolved as an independent entity; brand lineage survives as a non-manufacturing subsidiary. Corporate history relevant to (but not recorded as) any IP succession: outside management brought in 1957; family control ends; purchased by U.S. Industries, Inc. in 1995 and renamed EJ Footwear Corp., moving to Franklin, Tennessee; 2000 bought by Citicorp Venture Capital Ltd.; 2004-12-06 agreed to be acquired by Rocky Shoes & Boots, Inc. (now Rocky Brands). EJ Footwear, LLC persists as a Rocky subsidiary with all manufacturing outsourced. The last New York plants closed in 1998.
• Important caveat: none of the 1995 / 2000 / 2004 transactions appear as recorded USPTO assignments for this patent, and legally they could not have conveyed it — the patent had already been expired for 35 years by 1995. They are corporate-control events, not patent assignments.

Assignment timeline

No records found. The USPTO Assignment Center / Assignment Search has no recorded assignment for US 2,312,078, and none can be expected: the database's coverage begins August 1980, twenty years after this patent expired. Google Patents shows no assignment legal events either.

Consequently there is no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no recorded execution date, and no correspondent of record to report. The only ownership fact of record is the original employer assignment recited on the patent face (Crannell → Endicott Johnson Corporation), which was effected at filing in 1940 and, per the pre-1980 practice for a company-applied-for case, does not surface in the modern assignment database.

I am stating this plainly rather than reconstructing a chain, and I have not invented reel/frame numbers or correspondents.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 2312078
    1940 : Filed by Crannell assigned to Endicott Johnson
    1943 : Patent issued Feb 23
    1960 : Patent expired Feb 23
    1995 : Endicott Johnson sold to US Industries
    2000 : EJ Footwear bought by Citicorp Venture Capital
    2004 : EJ Footwear acquired by Rocky Brands

Note: no ownership line connects the 1995 / 2000 / 2004 corporate events to this patent — those entries are corporate-history context only.

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Because the chain contains no post-issuance assignment at all, most signals are not present by absence of evidence, not by evidence of cleanliness. Marked accordingly:

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignment to any IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures entity exists at any reel. The patent has been expired since 1960-02-23.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither the named inventor nor Endicott Johnson Corporation / EJ Footwear / Rocky Brands appears on any NPE list checked (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). No Unified Patents or RPX high-frequency-plaintiff match surfaced.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present. There are zero recorded assignments, so there is no correspondent of record to recur. (The patent's prosecution was handled in the 1940–43 era; nothing about that appears in Assignment Center.)
4. Cascading transfers — not present. Zero assignments in the last ~46 years of database coverage; no chained LLCs, no common correspondent addresses.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No assignment, and no infringement suit naming this patent surfaced in the open sources checked.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. E‑J declined and was sold through ordinary M&A (1995 → 2000 → 2004); no Chapter 7/11 sale of this patent is evidenced. Its expiration predates all of these events by decades.
7. Privateering — not present. No operating-company-to-NPE transfer exists.
8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at expiry.

Additional neutral-but-relevant observation: this patent is cited as prior art by modern footwear filings, including Cole Haan's knit-wingtip family (US20180008006A1 → US10327511B2, US10443163B2, US11041262B2) and several design patents (USD293386, USD295686, USD394739, USD401398, USD473043, USD887111, USD954407). Citation is a prior-art relationship only; it conveys no ownership and creates no standing.

Verdict

Insufficient data — no post-issuance assignments of any kind are recorded, so the chain consists of nothing but the original 1940 employer assignment recited on the patent face (Crannell → Endicott Johnson Corporation) and the patent's own terminal events of 1943-02-23 (grant) and 1960-02-23 (expiration).

That said, this is an unusually clean "insufficient data": the analysis is not merely inconclusive, it is settled. US 2,312,078 expired 1960-02-23 — seventeen years from grant, with no maintenance-fee regime applicable to a 1943 patent — which is roughly 66 years ago. No NPE, aggregator, or operating company can assert it, so no NPE pattern could develop even in principle, and none did. The "Current Assignee: Endicott Johnson Corp" field on Google Patents reflects the printed front page of an expired patent, not a live title record.

Verify directly at the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) — searching patent number 2312078 will return no assignment records, which is itself the finding.

I'll search for the specific patent and its cited prior art.

Let me look at the patent's front page (references cited) and search for potential prior-art references.

Let me try to confirm whether the patent's own front page lists any cited references.

Bottom line up front

US 2,312,078 carries no prior-art citations at all. Neither the Google Patents record nor the FreePatentsOnline record nor the scanned grant PDF reproduced in the authoritative text contains a "References Cited" / "[56]" section. For a 1943 grant that is unusual but not unheard of — the examiner apparently cited nothing, and the only art discussed anywhere in the document is the "press-perf" process, admitted in the specification itself.

Consequently, when you say "each patent citation for 2,312,078," the only citations that actually exist in the record are forward citations — later patents that cite 2,312,078 as their prior art. Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, a reference that postdates the 1940 filing cannot anticipate. So the answer to "which claim does each reference anticipate" is: none of them, and none can.

I am flagging that plainly rather than manufacturing a prior-art list that does not exist.

Search scope and its limits

• I searched for the exact string 2312078 / 2,312,078 against Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, and the patentimages.storage.googleapis.com PDF of the grant. I did not get direct access to USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Examination Data System (PEDS) image file wrappers in this session, and I hit the tool-call ceiling before running an exhaustive pre-1940 novelty search. The absence of a [56] References Cited section is based on the Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline and PDF records agreeing; I could not inspect the original paper file wrapper's "Reference Cited" stamp block directly.
• Date discrepancy to flag: the task header sets the current date as April 26, 2026, whereas the document retrieval timestamp in the authoritative patent text is 2026-09-26. I have not resolved which is operative; it does not affect the analysis, since the patent expired in 1960 either way.

Part 1 — Every patent citation in the 2,312,078 record (forward citations only)

Format: publication number — title — assignee/patentee — filing date — publication date — relationship — § 102 effect on US 2,312,078.

Two hard citations worth highlighting, because they are confirmed from the printed USPTO front pages (not merely Google's database aggregator):

• US D295,686 S, [56] References Cited: 2,312,078 2/1943 Crannell 36/45
• US D401,398 S (Carlson), [56] References Cited: 2,312,078 2/1943 Crannell

Both list it in the same breath as Sink US 5,197,210 (36/127) and a series of shoe-upper design patents. This confirms 2,312,078 functions in the modern record as a § 102(b)/§ 103 background reference for two-tone leather vamps and for wingtip styling generally, not as a target of prior art.

Legal mechanism, precisely: Under pre-AIA § 102 (which governs a 1940 application), a reference anticipates only if it falls under § 102(a) (known/used by others in the U.S., or patented/published, before the applicant's invention), § 102(b) (patented or published more than one year before the U.S. filing date — i.e., before October 9, 1939), or § 102(e) (a U.S. patent to another filed before the applicant's invention). Every reference in the table above was filed and published after February 23, 1943. They cannot satisfy any subsection. Their only relevance is as evidence that the 2,312,078 concept — one-piece, two-tone, structurally raised wingtip — remains citable in footwear art, most pointedly by Cole Haan's knit-wingtip family (2016–2021).

Part 2 — The actual prior art relied on by the patent: the "press-perf" admission

This is the only prior art the document itself identifies. It is an applicant admission in the specification and therefore is prior art against the patent under pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b):

"A method of manufacturing shoe uppers known as 'press-perf' heretofore has been used to produce thereon imitation perforations and stitchings in imitation of wing-tips and heel foxings on shoes of inexpensive construction; but the 'press-perf' method did not produce raised imitation wing-tips or heel foxings having perforations extending entirely through the portions of the shoe uppers, nor did said 'press-perf' method produce imitation wing-tips and heel foxings of colors contrasting to that of the vamps or quarters of shoes to give a two-tone effect thereto."

§ 102 analysis: Press-perf is the closest art, and it is the art the patentee had to design around. It does not anticipate any of claims 1–6, and the patentee says exactly why: by the patentee's own characterization, press-perf lacked (i) through-perforations and (ii) contrasting color between zones, and produced no raised structure. Claim 1 requires a compressed vamp portion bearing a contrasting colored coating against an uncompressed portion with its own colored coating. Press-perf, as admitted, has no compression/dye differential at all. The admission is therefore useful for § 103 obviousness framing (what a 1940 shoemaker already had in hand) but is not an anticipation reference.

Caveat: because press-perf exists only as the patentee's own description, there is no verified printed publication or patent I can cite for it, and its commercial details (who practiced it, on what styles) are unrecoverable from this record. I am not able to date it with confidence.

Part 3 — Candidate prior art not in the patent's citation record, but predating the October 9, 1940 filing

The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list is an algorithmic similarity list, not a § 102 citation list, and it must be filtered hard: roughly two-thirds of it postdates the patent and is legally irrelevant for anticipation. The following entries predate the filing and are the ones actually worth examining:

A distinct and more interesting cluster: the shoe-ornamenting machine patents

These surfaced during the search and are genuinely on-point for the "perforations-plus-coloring in a single operation" idea that claim 1 and its dependents embody. All predate 1940:

§ 102 bottom line on this cluster: none of these anticipates claim 1, because none discloses a single-piece leather vamp having (a) an uncompressed grain-face zone corresponding to the wingtip area with a colored coating on it, and (b) a compressed remaining zone with a contrasting colored coating. What they do supply is element-by-element prior art — through-perforation of shoe uppers (1,834,919; 2,144,059/60), combined perforation-and-ink patterning (1,990,595), and contrasting-color marking of leather blanks (2,031,763). Under pre-AIA § 103 that combination is where a validity attack on claims 2–6 would be built, not under § 102.

Part 4 — Claim-by-claim anticipation verdict

Part 5 — What I will not claim, and what I could not verify

• No US "References Cited" section was found for 2,312,078. I am treating that as a finding, not an absence of effort. But my source base for it was Google Patents + FreePatentsOnline + the grant PDF, not the paper file wrapper. If a [56] block exists only on the printed original front page and was dropped by all three digitizers, I would have missed it. That is the single highest-value item to confirm at PatentCenter.
• All issues/date claims above are sourced from the documents I retrieved, with the OCR header years for US 1,990,595, US 2,031,763 and US 2,144,059/60 flagged as unconfirmed.
• The "Similar Documents" list is not a citation list. I have labeled the pre-1940 entries as candidate art requiring a real novelty search against claim 1's six-element dictionary, which I was not able to run to completion in this session.
• No § 102(g) prior-invention or § 102(a) public-use analysis is possible from a patent document alone; that would require the Endicott Johnson file wrapper and any litigation record. As my earlier verification summary noted, this patent expired February 23, 1960 and has never appeared in a CAFC or district-court docket I could locate — so there is no adjudicated validity record to cite, and none to expect.

I'll research the prior-art references listed on this patent's page before building the § 103 analysis.

Now let me pull the details of the remaining pre-1943 references that could actually qualify as prior art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 2,312,078 (Crannell, "Shoe upper")

Preliminary flags (per the no-auto-correct rule):

1. Date discrepancy. The task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the retrieved patent page carries a fetch timestamp of 2026-09-26. I am not reconciling these; treating the analysis date as 2026 either way — it does not affect the outcome, since the patent expired February 23, 1960.
2. What the "Prior Art section" of that page actually contains. The Google Patents page presents two very different lists. "Cited By" is NOT prior art — it is a forward-citation list of later documents (1987–2022) that cite US 2,312,078. Every entry (USD293386S, USD295686S, USD394739S, USD401398S, USD473043S1, US20180008006A1, USD887111S1, USD954407S1, plus the Cole Haan knit-wingtip family US10327511B2 / US10443163B2 / US11041262B2) post-dates the February 23, 1943 grant by 44–79 years and is categorically unavailable under § 102/§ 103 against this patent. The "Similar Documents" list is a machine-similarity list, not an examiner's cited-art list; many of its entries (US2472265, US2384927, US2420466, US2429354, US2554823, US2583826, US2648080, US2696057, US2751691, US2838855, US2974427, US3228050, US3496655) also post-date the grant.
3. Legal framework mismatch. This patent was filed October 9, 1940 and granted February 23, 1943 — before the 1952 Patent Act. § 103 did not yet exist; the governing standard was the judge-made "invention" requirement (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood; and at the time, Cuno Engineering v. Automatic Devices' "flash of creative genius" gloss, which Graham and § 103 later repudiated). A § 103 analysis as requested is therefore a modern-law construct applied retrospectively, and it is somewhat harsher on the patentee than the law actually in force in 1943. I flag this because it is a legitimate patentee-side argument, not a technicality.

1. Prior-art set that actually qualifies

I reached the tool's step cap before retrieving the disclosures of US 2,191,906, US 1,772,340, US 1,536,839, US 1,848,821, and US 2,187,103. I therefore do not rely on any of them substantively, and I expressly do not assert what they disclose. Note in particular that US 2,274,085A — which a modern reader might reflexively treat as § 102(e) art — is not available here.

No anticipation. No single qualifying reference discloses all of claim 1 (a selectively compressed vamp with two contrasting coatings). US 1,806,673 compresses and perforates but does not color; US 1,834,919 and US 1,990,595 are machine references and cannot anticipate an article claim; US 2,069,381 and US 2,024,180 involve color but no selective compression. This is a § 103-only case.

2. Level of ordinary skill (Graham factor 2)

A shoe-upper patternmaker or process engineer at a 1940 New England shoe manufacturer (the assignee, Endicott Johnson, was exactly such a firm — hence the patent's cost figures of "$0.10 material / $0.04 labor" per pair). PHOSITA is fully familiar with: die-cutting and clicking; heated embossing/pressing of leather; "press-perf" ornamenting; the punch/perforating machine and its dies; masking and spray-dyeing of leather; and the conventional construction of a stitched-on two-tone wing tip, including its pinked (serrated) edge and its rows of stitching flanking a line of brogue perforations.

3. The central combination: admitted press-perf + selective embossing + through-perforating + two-tone dye

The patent's own specification does most of the work. It admits that "press-perf" was "heretofore" used "to produce thereon imitation perforations and stitchings in imitation of wing-tips and heel foxings on shoes of inexpensive construction." That admission concededly supplies the entire inventive concept — the idea of faking a wing tip on a single-piece upper — and concedes the field was already working on precisely this problem. The specification itself then identifies the only three things press-perf lacked:

1. Raised imitation wing tips (i.e., selective compression);
2. perforations extending entirely through;
3. contrasting colors.

Each of the three is separately disclosed in the qualifying art:

(a) Selective compression of a shoe part to create a raised simulated structure — US 1,834,919 (Altvater). This machine for ornamenting shoe parts is adjustable "to cut entirely through the shoe parts, or to produce demarcations upon or in the surfaces of the shoe parts, as desired." A demarcation produced in the surface, by a die, is a compression/emboss of a defined area — which is structurally the "compressed portion" of claim 1. The reference is directed to shoe parts flat on a support, i.e., the same workpieces and same operation the patent claims.

(b) Embossing a shoe part to simulate a different, separately-made structure — US 2,015,656 (Bazzoni). Bazzoni teaches embossing a cover on a heel blank so as to "simulate a leather-covered heel," and expressly does so because the old method of applying a real separate cover was slow. This is the same motivation the Crannell patent asserts: avoid the cost and labor of a separate applied piece by simulating it structurally. Same problem, same field of endeavor, predictable solution.

(c) Through-perforation of a shoe vamp — US 1,806,673. This reference presses a united vamp and vamp lining between (preferably heated) presser members, then "perforat[es] a mass of fine apertures or perforations completely through the united vamp materials, as well as through the stiffener layer." It supplies the "perforations extending entirely through" feature that the specification admits press-perf lacked, and does so on a vamp, i.e., the exact claimed article.

(d) Selective application of color to a shoe upper, and contrasting colors on one upper — US 1,990,595 and US 2,024,180 / US 2,069,381. US 1,990,595 shows a combined marking and cutting die (27) with an inking roll (28) positioned so that "the resulting mark on the work may be either light, heavy or medium," over a work support with a backing paper fed beneath the work — i.e., a single machine that both applies color to a selected area and cuts through the workpiece, over a backing sheet. US 2,024,180 discloses a shoe upper having "portions of contrasting colors whereby to enhance the ornamental effect." US 2,069,381 (Morgan) goes further: a shoe whose "main vamp section" is "usually made of a material of neutral color" with a removable top vamp section supplied in several colors to match a dress — an explicit teaching of a two-color vamp where the color boundary delineates a simulated top-vamp/wing-tip zone, and where the top vamp section is "the part most noticeable on the wearer."

Motivation to combine. (i) The problem was known and commercially quantified — the patent itself frames it purely as cost: eliminating a $0.10 leather piece plus $0.04 of labor per pair. (ii) All references are in the same field of endeavor (shoe-upper manufacture) and are reasonably pertinent to the problem of ornamenting a single-piece upper. (iii) Each element performs the same function in the combination that it performs in the references: pressing → raises; die-cutting → perforates; dyeing/inking → colors. (iv) The result — a raised, perforated, two-tone zone on a single-piece vamp — is exactly the predictable sum of those functions. Under KSR, "a combination of familiar elements according to known methods [that] does no more than yield predictable results" is obvious, as is the simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results.

Claim 1 is thus the most vulnerable claim in the patent, precisely because it claims only the two-zone compressed/uncompressed two-tone structure and expressly does not claim the perforations, serration, or stitching — it captures the merest aggregation of three known, separately-verified expedients.

4. Claim-by-claim results

Design-choice framing for claim 4: serration of a wing-tip or brogue edge boundary is ornamental variation, not a functional advance. Where the reference teaches a die-formed demarcation and the specification concedes the shape is arbitrary, the burden falls on the patentee to show that the serrated boundary produced a result that would not have been expected — and the specification's only asserted consequence is visual ("the appearance of a separate wing-tip"), which is the expressed purpose of the variation, not an unexpected result.

5. Patentee's best counterarguments, and how they fare

• "Teaching away." The specification describes press-perf as merely inadequate, not as teaching against adding compression or color. Failure to achieve a result is not a teaching away; a teaching away requires a reference that criticizes, discredits, or otherwise discourages the proposed modification. None does.
• Criticality of "original thickness" / raised effect. The applicant asserts novelty in the raised wing tip. But raising is the inherent, foreseeable consequence of embossing one zone and not the other — and US 1,834,919 already discloses producing "demarcations upon or in the surfaces of shoe parts," i.e., a surface-level step. No criticality argument is supported by data in the specification.
• Unexpected results. The specification asserts that dye on buck leather gave good wear and that tests "have shown that the Wearing qualities are good." This is a durability assertion about a dye, with no comparative data against any prior-art two-tone construction. It does not rebut obviousness of the claimed structure.
• Secondary considerations / cost. The only advantage asserted is cost reduction (leather saved, labor saved). Cost reduction achieved by eliminating a part while retaining the same appearance is the paradigm of obvious simplification, not a secondary consideration. There is no evidence of long-felt but unmet need, failure of others, industry acclaim, licensing, or copying in the record.
• The 1943 legal standard. The strongest patentee argument is historical: in 1943 the test was "invention," glossed in that era by Cuno Engineering's "flash of creative genius" — a higher bar than § 103. A 1943 court could conceivably have sustained claim 1 under that standard notwithstanding the analysis above. This is a real but purely defensive point: it does not survive the 1952 Act, Graham, or KSR, and it cannot revive the patent.
• Claim-drafting protection. The claims are drawn to the article (vamp), not the method, despite the specification's repeated promise of "a novel method." No method claim issued. This narrows the enforceable footprint but does not save the article claims from § 103.

6. Bottom line

No single qualifying reference anticipates any claim. But on the qualifying art, claim 1 is obvious over the admitted press-perf method in view of a selective embossing/ornamenting disclosure (US 1,834,919 or US 2,015,656) further in view of a selective coloring disclosure (US 1,990,595, US 2,069,381, or US 2,024,180), with through-perforating supplied by US 1,806,673. Claims 2, 4, and 5 are strong or stronger. Claims 3 and 6 are the most defensible, but only marginally so, and chiefly because I could not verify in this session a reference showing actual stitching rows flanking a perforated, contrast-colored zone — not because the concept is anything other than a conventional decorative expedient the specification itself describes as "customary in the usual shoe."

The practical significance is the one noted in the earlier section: this analysis matters today only because US 2,312,078 is still being cited as prior art against modern footwear filings (e.g., the Cole Haan knit wing-tip family), where its own § 103 vulnerability would be fodder for a challenge to any later claim that leans on it as the sole differentiating reference.

Explicit uncertainties: (i) I did not verify the disclosures of US 2,191,906, US 1,772,340, US 1,536,839, US 1,848,821, US 2,187,103, or the exact issue date of US 1,990,595 — the search tool's step cap was reached; (ii) the "press-perf" method rests solely on the applicant's own admission in the specification, as I found no independent documentary source for it; (iii) I treated the "Similar Documents" list as a candidate set only, not as adjudicated prior art.