US 265927

I'll run the requested searches, treating "265927" literally as US patent number 265927.

Let me run a few more targeted checks on the CAFC/docket side and on the assignee, since those searches came back empty.

Summary — US 265,927 (interpreted literally as US Patent No. 265,927)

Search note: I could not reach a live USPTO PatentCenter/PatentsView record or a CAFC docket through the tools available; the authoritative source I do have is the full text of US265927A as provided (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US265927](/patent/US265927)/en). The two CAFC-2026-specific searches returned zero results — see the litigation section below.

Bibliographic data

Abstract substitute (from the specification's opening paragraph)

"Our said invention consists in certain improvements in the construction and arrangement of parts in that class of milling apparatus known as 'roller-mills,' whereby it is rendered more certain and accurate in its operation, convenient in its adjustments, and perfect in its results."

Plain-language overview of the claims

All 17 claims are in classic 1882 combination form ("The combination, in a roller-mill, of … substantially as set forth"), and — importantly — none refers back to another claim. Under the drafting conventions of the time, each is a standalone (independent) claim, so there are effectively 17 independent claims rather than one independent claim plus dependents. Letter references follow the patent's own key: D swinging roll-supporting arms, E adjustable journal boxes, F tempering rods/springs F, G adjusting rods, H cross-bar, I cam device with cam i and handle 1, J feed-gates, K gate shafts with arms K, L gate bar with lugs l and catches l l, M counter-shaft, N adjustable boxes, O rods, P gear shaft.

1. Claim 1 — Roll-supporting arms D with movable bearings, the two rods F and G (each with adjusting screws), and springs, with the bearings located between the two rods.
2. Claim 2 — Swinging arms carrying one roll of a pair, with rods at both ends of the arm holding the arm/roll toward its mate, plus springs placed on the rods at the ends opposite the roll-bearing end and beyond the arm's pivot, biasing the roll so it is pushed outward only as far as the inward-pulling rods allow.
3. Claim 3 — The same arms but with elongated pivot openings and pivot pins d, rods G, rods F and springs F, so the arms hold grinding position against fixed stops yet can swing back slightly when a hard object passes between the rolls.
4. Claim 4 — Arms plus journal boxes whose spherical seating surfaces match spherical surfaces on the arms, struck from a common center displaced horizontally from the roll center, allowing vertical box adjustment without binding the roll journals.
5. Claim 5 — Journal boxes and supporting surfaces struck from a common center, so shifting the boxes changes the rolls' relative position in the plane through both rolls without journal binding. (Text in the provided copy is partly garbled at the center reference.)
6. Claim 6 — Arms D, rods G, bell-crank levers G, and bar H, the levers pivoted to the frame at a and to the rods at g and linked by bar H, so the long lever arms at both ends of the same roll move the rods and arms simultaneously toward or away from the fixed roll.
7. Claim 7 — The same group (arms D, rods G, bell-cranks G, connecting bar H) plus means for operating them.
8. Claim 8 — Arms D, rods G, bar H, and cam device I with cam portion i, giving the bar a reciprocating motion and operating all rods at once.
9. Claim 9 — Feed-gates J, operating shafts K having arms K, and sliding bar L, enabling both gates to be moved at once.
10. Claim 10 — Feed-gate J with notched arms j, shaft K with projecting lug k, arms K, and bar L adapted to operate those arms.
11. Claim 11 — The combination of the arm-operating mechanism, the feed-gate-operating mechanism, and device I (cam i operating one, handle 1 the other), so that one motion parts the rolls and closes the feed-gates simultaneously.
12. Claim 12 — Counter-shaft M with an adjusting mechanism comprising devices N, rods O, and mechanism connecting the rods so both ends are adjusted simultaneously. (This is the claim addressed in the 1880s–90s litigation discussed below.)
13. Claim 13 — Feed-gates, their operating shafts, and arms K K on those shafts… (the printed/OCR text is truncated here).
14. Claim 14 — Fed forward from claim 13: the feed-gate/shaft/arm-K K and bar L arrangement, to be operated by the inward-projecting end of handle 1, or to be operated without moving the handle.
15. Claim 15 — Feed-gates, operating shafts, arms K K, bar L with lugs l l, pivoted catches l l, and handle 1, so the bar can be driven by the handle's projecting end or moved independently of the handle.
16. Claim 16 — Hopper and feed-gate with stops j' and arms j whose contacting surfaces are, in effect, non-yielding during normal running but yield under added force and return to position (the anti-jamming feature).
17. Claim 17 — Hopper, feed-gate, its spring-carrying arms j, stop surfaces, and stops j'.

Litigation / CAFC 2026 docket check

• No CAFC 2026 docket results were returned for "265927" (both the docket-specific and Federal Circuit-specific queries returned empty result sets). Given that US 265,927 issued in 1882 and its statutory term expired in 1899, it cannot be the subject of a 2026 CAFC appeal, and I found no evidence of any.
• The only litigation I can identify involving this patent is 19th-century: Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25 (C.C.D. Ind.), quoted at https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0039/0039.f.0025.pdf, which expressly quotes claim 12 of "the Marmon and Warrington patent" (the counter-shaft claims N/O combination) and treats it as anticipatory art against the later Marmon patent; and Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0527.1.pdf), a Gray-patent case. The Coombs opinion states the Marmon & Warrington patent is "dated October 10, 1882"—matching this patent.

Uncertainty / caveats

• The text I am working from is OCR of a scanned 1882 print; letters and numerals are corrupted throughout (e.g., "0 6 0" for reference characters, "W" for F in claim 1, "(P" and "9" for screws d and hand-nuts g, and the "0 min"/"to w" line references). Claim wording should be verified against the PDF (http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/2f/61/6d/e3e3e1bb036e59/US265927.pdf) before being relied on.
• Claims 13–14 are truncated/garbled in the provided copy; I flag claim 14's wording as reconstructed and not authoritative.
• Do not confuse this patent with unrelated documents that use the shorthand "the '265 patent." Search results surfaced, e.g., a PTAB petition concerning an NEC "'265 Patent" (priority to JP 2012-048062) and RAI Strategic Holdings v. Altria briefing on a different "'265 patent" (a heater/resistor patent). Those are different patents entirely and have no relationship to US 265,927.
• The Google Patents page lists "US265927D" as an identifier; I have interpreted it literally as an artifact of Google's (non-standard) application-number field rather than a separate document — note that "D" suffixes normally denote design patents, which would be inconsistent with a utility roller-mill patent, so I treat "US265927D" as a data artifact, not a distinct grant.
• The provided page gives no application serial number, inventor addresses beyond Indianapolis, or examiner/attorney data, so I cannot supply those.

I'll search litigation resources for this specific patent number.

The initial results returned a different patent (a modern "265" patent in the Reynolds v. Altria cases). Let me search more specifically.

This is promising — a Federal Reporter case references the Marmon & Warrington patent dated October 10, 1882 (which is US 265,927). Let me dig deeper into whether 265,927 itself was asserted or used in litigation.

Summary

No litigation is known in which US Patent 265,927 was asserted as the patent‑in‑suit. There are, however, two 19th‑century federal cases in which this patent appears in the record — in one of them it was introduced as anticipatory prior art against a different Marmon patent. I found no modern (post‑1980) litigation, which is consistent with the patent having expired in 1899.

Patent identification (literal)

I deliberately did not "correct" the apparent OCR garbling of "Eoller mile"/"265927D"/"265927DA" or of the inventor surnames ("Jesse Parrington/Marrington/Harmon" etc.); US265927 and US265927D are the same record under different identifiers.

Litigation found

1. Consolidated Roller‑Mill Co. v. Coombs — patent used as PRIOR ART, not asserted

Sources: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0039/0039.f.0025.pdf ; https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0039/0039.f.0025.html ; https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/consolidated-roller-mill-co-895475035 ; https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8852666](/patent/8852666)/consolidated-roller-mill-co-v-coombs/

2. Consolidated Roller‑Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co. — same patent family, 265,927 NOT at issue

Sources: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0527.1.pdf ; https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[9310612](/patent/9310612).pdf

3. Related non‑litigation proceeding (Patent Office, not a court case)

In the file wrapper of Marmon's later patent 274,508, the Examiner's letter of December 22, 1882 refused claims 1–3 of Marmon's application on the ground that "an application cannot receive protection in a separate application for matter which was described, claimed, sworn to jointly by himself and another, and jointly patented prior to the filing of the subsequent application." This is an ex parte prosecution/priority dispute between Marmon's later application and the earlier joint Marmon & Warrington US 265,927, as recounted in Coombs. It is frequently miscited as litigation; it is not a lawsuit.

What I checked and did not find

• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — no entry for patent 265927. (Searches also returned a modern "'265 patent" in RAI Strategic Holdings / R.J. Reynolds Vapor v. Altria Client Services, E.D. Va. No. 1:20‑cv‑00393‑LMB‑TCB. That is a different patent — a tobacco‑vaporizer patent — and is not US 265,927. Per your instruction, I am not treating it as a hit.)
• No CAFC or modern PACER docket naming 265,927; this is unsurprising, as PACER coverage is far later than the patent's 1899 expiration.
• No reissue, reexamination, or IPR for this number was found.

Explicit caveats

1. I could not directly query the Unified Patents portal, PACER, or Bloomberg Law/RPX from here; my conclusions rest on Federal Reporter (F. 25, F. 43), CourtListener, and vLex records retrieved by search. A docket‑level search of 19th‑century equity cases is not exhaustive via these sources.
2. Nineteenth‑century opinions sometimes identify defendants by surname only; I therefore cannot state Coombs's full name.
3. There is conflicting numbering in the Coombs text for the Odell reissue — one reporter text shows "10,139" and another "10,189." I am flagging this rather than silently correcting it, per your rule.
4. I found no evidence that US 265,927 was ever asserted by Nordyke & Marmon or its successors against any accused infringer.

Bottom line: the only litigation in which US 265,927 appears is Consolidated Roller‑Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25 (C.C.E.D. Mich. 1889), and there it figured as anticipatory prior art cited against US 274,508 — not as the asserted patent. There is no known case in which US 265,927 itself was the patent‑in‑suit.

I'll verify the structured "no PTAB activity" signal against public sources before writing, since the patent's vintage raises a structural question.

Confirmed the structured signal. One more check on the historical record, since this patent appears in 19th-century infringement litigation rather than PTAB.

One last check — a "265 Patent" appears in active PTAB petitions, and I want to make sure that's not this patent before writing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 265,927: 0. There are no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBMs, and no institution denials — the structured USPTO Open Data Portal block in this prompt returns an empty proceedings list, and my independent search of PTAB dockets, PTAB E2E/P-TACTS materials, and Federal Circuit materials surfaced no petition ever filed against this patent. Because there are zero proceedings, there is no breakdown by status to report, and the usual defensive heuristic — "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs, so silence is a signal" — does not apply here. US 265,927 issued on 1882-10-10 and its legal status on Google Patents reads "Anticipated expiration" as of 1899-10-10. The AIA trial regime was created by the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act and took effect 2012-09-16. This patent's enforceable term ended 113 years before the PTAB could have heard a petition. The bottom line for a defendant is not "the patent is hardened" but "there is no live patent left to attack or to be sued on."

Two threshold matters before the per-proceeding format, which I am adapting because there is nothing to enumerate:

Title/identifier caution. Google Patents renders the title as "Eoller mile" — that is OCR garble of "Roller-Mill." The specification body confirms: "ROLLER-MILL … SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 265,927, dated October 10, 1882," naming Daniel W. Marmon and Jesse Warrington, of Indianapolis, Indiana, assignors to the Nordyke & Marmon Company — the Indianapolis firm that later built Marmon automobiles. Application filed 1882-06-03. Seventeen claims.

Name-collision trap — read this before you rely on any search result. Active PTAB petitions refer throughout to "the '265 Patent." Those are not this patent. In Dell Technologies Inc. v. Cloud Byte LLC, IPR2025-01287, the "'265 Patent" is U.S. Patent No. 9,629,265 (NEC-originated, priority to JP 2012-048062, storage-controller subject matter). See the petition papers at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1558212](/patent/1558212)/download-documents. If a demand letter, infringement chart, or prior-art chart cites a "265 patent," verify the full number. A party citing US 265,927 is citing an 1882 flour-milling patent that expired in 1899.

No proceedings to report

There is no proceeding number, no petitioner, no panel, no institution decision, no final written decision, no settlement, and no appeal for US 265,927. I will not manufacture any. Specifically:

• No IPR. 35 U.S.C. § 311 permits IPR of "a patent"; the Board has, in narrow circumstances, instituted review of expired patents (limited to the claims as issued, with no opportunity for claim amendment). I recall this practice being discussed in Sony Corp. v. Yissum Research Development Co. of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, IPR2013-00327 — I flag that citation as recollection, not verified; confirm it on PTAB E2E before relying on it. It is academic here: no petition was ever filed.
• No PGR. PGR under § 321 is available only for patents subject to first-inventor-to-file, i.e., effective filing dates on or after 2013-03-16. A June 1882 filing is categorically outside PGR.
• No CBM. CBM review was limited to patents claiming a "financial product or service" and was sunset on 2020-09-16. A roller mill is not a financial product.
• No § 315(e)(2) estoppel, no § 315(b) one-year bar analysis, no Fintiv analysis — all of these attach only to filed petitions. Nothing here has been tested, narrowed, or cancelled at the PTAB.

The closest thing to a validity proceeding: 19th-century district court litigation (NOT an AIA trial)

The patent's claims were litigated — in circuit court, under pre-AIA law, in the 1880s–1890s. This is the only adversarial record on the claims, and it matters for historical completeness.

• Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25 (C.C.E.D. Mich. 1889) — opinion at https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8852666](/patent/8852666)/consolidated-roller-mill-co-v-coombs/. Plaintiff sued on four patents, including the Gray patent and a different, later Marmon patent. The court held two patents invalid and sustained claims 2–5 of Gray's patent (No. 222,895). Critically for our purposes, the court addressed the later Marmon patent's claim 1 and held that simultaneous adjustment of both counter-shaft ends "does not call for the exercise of the inventive faculty" — and supported that conclusion by citing US 265,927 itself as the anticipatory prior patent: "there is produced a prior patent to Marmon and one Warrington, dated October 10, 1882 … in which the same adjusting devices shown in Fig. 20 of the Marmon patent are employed. This construction is made the subject-matter of the twelfth claim of the Marmon and Warrington patent." The court quoted claim 12 verbatim.

• Impact on 265,927's own claims: I could not confirm from the available record that any court cancelled or invalidated the claims of US 265,927. What the record plainly shows is the reverse relationship — 265,927 was used offensively as anticipating art against a later Marmon claim. Do not describe 265,927 as "partially invalidated by Coombs"; that would overstate the source.

• Related suits: Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.S.D. Iowa 1890) (same Gray analysis; https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0527.1.pdf), and Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Richmond City Mill-Works, 40 F. 474 (C.C.E.D. Mich. 1889) (provisional injunction denied despite an earlier Michigan merits decree).

• Defensive value: None accrues to a modern defendant from this history — the patent is dead — but the prosecution-style lesson survives: 265,927's claim 12 is quoted in a published federal opinion as anticipating a later patent's broad claim to simultaneous counter-shaft adjustment. If you are litigating a modern roller-mill or roll-adjustment patent and need a § 102(a) printed publication, US 265,927 is a fully enabled 1882 publication with 20 figures, and its face is already in the public record.

Strategic summary

Claims CANCELED: none. Claims SUSTAINED: none. Claims UNTESTED at the PTAB: all seventeen (1–17). There is no surviving-claim list to build because no claim was ever adjudicated — at the PTAB or anywhere else — for validity against issued-claim language. The patent nonetheless carries no enforceable rights: it issued 1882-10-10 with a 17-year term and reached anticipated expiration on 1899-10-10, per Google Patents' status field. Claims 1–17 are expired, not cancelled. The practical distinction matters only for rhetoric: "expired" means the patent owner cannot recover damages for any conduct occurring after 1899, and there is no injunctive relief to obtain.

Estoppel landscape: empty. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel binds only a petitioner that obtained a final written decision. No petition, no FWD, no estoppel — for anyone. Conversely, no third party has ever conceded a ground, so no prior-art theory has been "used up." If you are the target of a demand on this patent, the entire universe of § 102/§ 103 art remains open, though you will never need it: the § 282 invalidity defense is unnecessary when § 286's six-year damages lookback window and the 1899 expiry make recovery legally impossible.

Pattern signals: none, and structurally so. No petitioner exists, so there is no repeat-filer pattern. The patent owner of record is a dissolved-adjacent 19th-century corporation, Nordyke & Marmon Company; there is no successor holding this patent for assertion. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, Allied Security Trust) is in the chain — Unified and its peers did not exist and target modern, asserted, low-quality software patents, not 1882 milling equipment. The absence of PTAB activity here is not a quality signal about the claims; it is a calendar fact. A 143-year-old expired patent cannot be the subject of a commercially motivated AIA trial.

One genuine modern use case. US 265,927 remains citeable as prior art against contemporary patents. Its classification footprint is B02C4/00–B02C4/32 (roller mills; adjusting, applying pressure to, or controlling the distance between milling members) and A23N15/04. If a modern application or issued claim recites swinging roll-support arms, spherical-seated adjustable journal boxes struck from a common center, spring-biased tempering rods with lost-motion take-up, or simultaneous counter-shaft adjustment, this patent's disclosure — particularly the Fig. 15–20 box/arm spherical-seat structure described in the specification and claimed in claims 4 and 5 — is squarely on point and dated 1882. That is where its value now lies: as an anticipatory reference, exactly as the Coombs court used it.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant on US 265,927: there is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote, because no proceeding exists. The dispositive facts are the face of the patent itself: grant date 1882-10-10, "Anticipated expiration" 1899-10-10, status "Expired - Lifetime." The defense is not an IPR and not an invalidity case — it is that the asserted right expired over 125 years ago. Ask opposing counsel to identify the patent number in full and to identify the statutory basis for any asserted right. If the number they meant was 9,629,265, you are in an entirely different case (see Dell Technologies Inc. v. Cloud Byte LLC, IPR2025-01287, petition papers at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/1558212/download-documents), and everything in this memo about US 265,927 is irrelevant to you.

If you are a patent prosecutor or litigator needing prior art: pull the full specification and all 20 figures from https://patents.google.com/patent/[US265927A](/patent/US265927A)/en and the PDF at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/2f/61/6d/e3e3e1bb036e59/[US265927](/patent/US265927).pdf. Note that Google Patents' "Similar Documents" list is a useful lead set of contemporaneous roller-mill art — US 275,055; US 275,835; US 274,508; US 305,320; US 312,048; US 334,460; US 526,795; and reissues USRE10493E and USRE10579E — all dated 1883–1894 and all in the same field.

Verification status, stated plainly. The zero-proceeding conclusion is grounded in (a) the structured ODP block supplied in this prompt and (b) my own searches, which returned no petition. The historical case citations above (Coombs at 39 F. 25; Barnard & Leas at 43 F. 527; Richmond City Mill-Works at 40 F. 474) come from search results and are quoted from the opinions; the Sony v. Yissum expired-patent practice point is my recollection and is flagged as unverified. The AIA-trial reasoning rests on statutory effective dates I state with high confidence: no PGR or CBM is legally available on an 1882 filing, and no IPR petition has ever been filed. If you need a belt-and-suspenders confirmation, run the patent number through PTAB E2E and the CAFC docket directly before filing anything.

I'll verify the assignment record situation and the original assignee's corporate history before writing this up.

Ownership reconstruction — US 265,927 ("Roller Mill")

Scope note: Per the operating rule for this task, this report terminates after the Assignment timeline section. The USPTO assignment databases do not reach this patent's era (see below), so the NPE/troll-signal analysis and verdict sections are not reached.

A caution on the source document itself: Google Patents renders the title as "Eoller mile," the roll references variously as C, C', 0, O, and the application date as "filedJ'une 3,1?82." These are OCR corruptions of "Roller Mill," the roll letter C, and filed June 3, 1882 respectively. Treated literally per the operating rules, but identified here as scanning artifacts rather than patent content.

Inventors

Notes on unusual patterns:

• Not the standard employee-inventor profile. Marmon was not an employee inventor assigning to a corporate employer of convenience — he was a named principal of the assignee firm. Warrington appears to be the professional engineer on the team (8 Nordyke & Marmon patents). This is an owner-and-engineer co-inventorship, common in 19th-century machinery patents.
• Departure-in-12-months signal: not present / not assessable. Marmon's connection to the assignee ran until his death in 1909; there is no evidence either inventor left the assignee within 12 months of the (1882) filing. No fire-sale precursor pattern.
• Do not confuse the witnesses with a correspondent of record. The executed instrument closes "In presence of G. Bradford, C. E. Test." These are attestation witnesses on the 1882 instrument, not modern assignment-recordation correspondents. The task's correspondent field is a modern EPAS phenomenon (see below) and has no 1882 analogue.

Original assignee

The Nordyke & Marmon Company, of Indianapolis, Indiana — named on the face of the patent in the specification heading: "ASSIGNORS TO THE NORDYKE & MARMON COMPANY, OF SAME PLACE." A companion patent in the same family is indexed in the Google Patents family list as "harmon," and the related US 277,525 entry as "warring-ton" (OCR of the assignee/patentee surnames).

• Primary line of business: manufacture and erection of complete flour, corn, cereal, rice and starch milling plants — roller mills, bolting machines, packers, purifiers, elevators. Successor to E. & A. H. Nordyke (1858) / Nordyke, Ham & Co. (1851), Richmond, Indiana; relocated to the "Quaker City Works" in West Indianapolis in the 1870s and became the leading US mill builder, exporting to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, New Zealand, Chile, Italy, Sweden and South Africa.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes. This is not a paper assignee. The specification is written as a production-machine disclosure ("the frame A A' ... is mainly a large hollow casting adapted to support the machinery of a roller-mill"; wood hopper; castings; drive pulleys numbered 1–14), and Nordyke & Marmon catalogues (e.g. Catalogue No. 48, c. 1899) document the roller-mill systems actually built and installed in operating mills. The patent was also litigated and used as prior art — in Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, the court referred to "a prior patent to Marmon and one Warrington, dated October 10, 1882 — or about six weeks before the filing of the application for the Marmon patent," expressly identifying this patent's twelfth claim (counter-shaft adjusting mechanism) as the subject matter of that prior patent. That is contemporaneous third-party recognition of the disclosure as real, practiced mill technology.
• Current status: Dissolved/extinct as an operating enterprise; no corporate continuity to this patent's title is documented. The corporate lineage (as reported by secondary sources, which conflict on the characterization) is:
  • c. 1926 — Nordyke & Marmon ends milling-machinery manufacture. Wikipedia states flatly: "Nordyke Marmon & Company was bought out by Allis-Chalmers in 1926 and discontinued making mills." Other sources describe 1926 as a reorganization into the Marmon Motor Car Co. These two accounts are not reconciled in the sources I could retrieve; I flag it rather than pick one.
  • 1902–1933 — Marmon automobile production at the same Indianapolis works; the Marmon Motor Car Company went out of business in 1933.
  • 1931 — Marmon-Herrington Company founded by Walter Marmon and Arthur Herrington; that separate entity survives today within Berkshire Hathaway's Marmon Holdings. Marmon-Herrington's survival is a brand/corporate-lineage fact, not evidence that it holds title to US 265,927 (which expired in 1899 in any event).

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) has no retrievable records for US 265,927, and this is expected rather than anomalous.

Grounds:

1. The Assignment Search database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO, What are Assignments? webinar deck; same figure given by Finnegan's Prosecution Pointer 119 and by Finnegan/Lexology, "Who owns what," 14 Mar 2016). The research-oriented bulk dataset published on data.commerce.gov similarly documents records "since 1970." Neither window reaches an 1882 grant.
2. Google Patents' legal-events record for US 265,927 contains only three entries — a 1882-10-10 grant/publication, a 1899-10-10 "Anticipated expiration," and current status "Expired – Lifetime" — and no assignment events at all. The Google Patents family record lists a single application (US 265,927 D → US 265,927 A) with no successor entries.
3. The only ownership transfer evidenced anywhere in the record is the pre-database 1882 assignment embedded in the grant itself: the patent issued naming the inventors as "ASSIGNORS TO THE NORDYKE & MARMON COMPANY, OF SAME PLACE," executed 1882-05-30 (signature block: "this 30th day of May, A. D. 1882") and filed 1882-06-03. That assignment was recorded in the pre-EPAS liber/book system; no reel/frame exists for it, and it cannot be retrieved or verified through Assignment Center.

Consequently: no reel/frame entries, no assignors/assignees of record, and no correspondents of record exist to report. Whether any post-1926 successor-in-interest (e.g. Allis-Chalmers) ever recorded a paper assignment against this patent cannot be determined from the assignment databases, and I will not assert one exists.

Verification: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "265927") · https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ · https://patents.google.com/patent/[US265927A](/patent/US265927A)/en (Legal Events / Family tabs)

Stopping here per the no-records rule. Substantively: this is an 1882 patent that expired 1899, owned from grant by a genuine operating manufacturer, so the shell-entity / cascading-transfer / privateering signal set is inapplicable by construction — but that conclusion rests largely on the absence of records, which is why the mandated early termination is the correct output rather than a verdict of "operating-company assertion."

I'll verify the patent record and look for any citation data before drawing conclusions.

The Google Patents record shows a "Similar Documents" list but no "Citations"/"Cited By" data for this 1882 patent. Let me verify that and probe the closest references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 265,927 (literal ID: US265927A / US265927D)

1. Verification of the target patent (the only record I will treat as the target)

Note on the title: per your strict rule I am not auto-correcting the identifier or the title. The Google Patents record literally displays "Eoller mile"; the specification text itself reads "ROLLER MILL." Both are reported as-is.

2. Direct answer to "look at each patent citation for 265927" — there are none on the record

US265927A has no patent citations. This is not an omission on my part; it is a property of the record:

1. The fetched Google Patents page contains no "Citations" and no "Cited By" section. The only related-art block present is "Similar Documents" (25 entries), which is a machine-generated similarity list (classifier/embedding-based), not examiner citations and not "References Cited."
2. A search of the Google Patents record specifically for citation data returned no citation table for US265927A — the only "Citations"-style tables surfaced were for unrelated patents (e.g., US3178724A, which merely happens to have application Ser. No. 265,927 and therefore cross-links the string "US265927A" — see the caution in §5).
3. Historically expected: US patents granted in 1882 were not printed with front-page "References Cited." The 1870 Act practice did not produce cited-reference lists of the modern kind, and no reexamination or post-grant citation event is recorded (legal status: Expired – Lifetime, never reassigned/cited per the record).
4. Statutory frame: 35 U.S.C. §102 did not exist in 1882. The operative provision was §24 of the Patent Act of 1870 (R.S. §4886). Its bars ran to (i) patented or described in a printed publication anywhere before the applicant's invention, and (ii) patented/described in a printed publication more than two years before the application (a 2-year bar; the change to one year came in 1939), plus a 2-year public-use/on-sale bar. §102 is therefore used below as an analytical analogue, and I give both critical dates:

• Modern §102(b) analogue: before June 3, 1881
• Statute-in-force (2-year) analogue: before June 3, 1880
• §102(a) analogue: before the invention date (not of record; on its face no later than mid-1882)

Consequence: any reference dated after October 10, 1882 cannot be prior art to US265927 at all (later documents), and most of the 25 "Similar Documents" fall into that category.

3. Prior art actually documented for US265927

Because the patent record carries no citations, the only substantive, on-the-record prior art for US265927 comes from the infringement litigation over this very patent family, which expressly discusses the patent and its twelfth claim. Two decisions:

• Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25 (C.C.E.D. Mich. 1889/1890) — https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0039/0039.f.0025.pdf
• Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.N.D. Ill., Feb. 10, 1890) — https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[9310612](/patent/9310612).pdf

Critically, in Coombs the court uses US265927 itself as the anticipatory reference against a later Marmon patent, quoting claim 12 verbatim:

"…there is produced a prior patent to Marmon and one Warrington, dated October 10, 1882,—or about six weeks before the filing of the application for the Marmon patent,… This construction is made the subject-matter of the twelfth claim of the Marmon and Warrington patent…" (39 F. at 20)

So US265927's role in the literature is as a citation against others, not as a recipient of citations.

3a. References identified in the litigation record (the real prior-art set)

3b. The patent's own admissions (usable as prior-art-equivalent matter)

The specification contains explicit statements that certain alternatives were already known/equivalent, which operates as an admission bearing on claim 3:

"This could be accomplished… by mounting the arm upon a swinging link or upon an eccentric, as either of these devices would permit the arm to be crowded outward, and so far such devices would be equivalent to that shown" — US265927 spec.

It also concedes the elongated-slot mounting is a preference, not the only form ("but we prefer the elongated opening and pin, as it is simpler"). This weakens claim 3's breadth in view of P2/P8/P9 (cams/eccentrics on the swing-frame pivot).

3c. The "Similar Documents" list — chronological triage (NOT citations)

Google Patents' Similar Documents list for US265927A. I flag each against the eligibility dates in §2. Only four predate the filing date; the other twenty-one are legally incapable of being prior art.

4. Claim-by-claim potential §102 anticipation map

Legend: A = plausible single-reference anticipation under §102; C = combination/obviousness-type (mechanical-skill) attack, i.e., weak as §102 but strong under §103; — = no anticipating reference identified.

Bottom line on anticipation

• The claims most exposed are 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 12, and the exposure is predominantly §103-type (mechanical skill / obviousness) rather than clean, single-reference §102 anticipation. The Barnard & Leas decision is explicit: Mr. Gray "in effect invented nothing," and the Odell counter-shaft device was "but the connection of the two shafts… so as to obtain a simultaneous operation."
• Claims 4 and 5 (the part-spherical, common-center journal-box seating) and claims 9, 10, 13–17 (feed-gate and handle/catch sub-combinations) show no anticipating reference in anything I could retrieve. On the available record these are the probable locus of novelty.
• Claim 12 is the one claim with a documented, verbatim prior-art role — but in the reverse direction (US265927 as prior art against a later Marmon patent).

5. Cautions, non-findings, and what I could not verify

1. No USPTO "References Cited" exists for US265927. I searched for the citation table and did not obtain one. If USPTO PatentCenter or Patent Public Search (ppubs) shows a citation list, I did not see it and cannot confirm one exists; historically none would be expected for an 1882 grant.
2. The "Similar Documents" list is not prior art. It is a machine-similarity output. I have labeled it as such throughout.
3. Identifier collision — do not conflate. The literal string "US265927A" is cross-linked on Google Patents to US3178724A ("Hand guard for gymnasts and others," Perschke), whose application serial number was 265,927 (filed 1963-03-18). Likewise, "US258832A" appears both as an 1882 patent publication and as the application number of US2710493A (1951, flat-glass tongs). These are different documents sharing an alphanumeric string; per your instruction I have not merged or corrected them.
4. Dates inside the court opinions are internally inconsistent. 43 F. 527 prints Gray's US 222,895 as both "December 23, 1879" (syllabus) and "December 28, 1879" (body), and prints US 238,677 as both "238,977" and "238,677." I have preserved these discrepancies rather than resolved them. Verify against the patents themselves before relying on any date.
5. I could not verify the subject matter of US142460A, US155431A, US235517A, or US258832A. They are the only Similar-Documents entries that are even chronologically eligible. Two of the four (142460, 155431) are the only ones that also clear a printed-publication bar; 155431 is a planing machine and therefore likely non-analogous.
6. I did not retrieve the full texts of Gray 222,895, Gray 238,677, Gray 228,525, Odell 250,954, Odell RE 10,189, Clark 174,719, Birkholz 269,628, or the Nemelka Austrian/French/English grants. Descriptions in §3a are drawn from the courts' characterizations in 39 F. 25 and 43 F. 527 (URLs above), which is a secondary source and should be confirmed against the primary documents.
7. The later "Marmon patent" appears in the record at 39 F. 25 with a counter-shaft claim 1 filed ca. November 21, 1882 ("about six weeks before" — actually after — the Oct. 10, 1882 date given). I could not determine its patent number from the retrieved material. Candidates in the similar-documents list granted in 1883 (US274508, US275055, US275835, US277525, US284135) are unconfirmed. I will not assert a number I have not verified.

Recommended next steps to close the gaps

• Pull US265927 from USPTO PatentCenter and Espacenet to confirm whether any cited-reference data exists at all.
• Retrieve and read in full: Gray 222,895; Gray 238,677; Gray 228,525; Odell 250,954; Odell RE 10,189 (and its original); Clark 174,719; Birkholz 269,628; plus the Nemelka 1875 Austrian/French and Lake 1877 English grants.
• Resolve the four chronologically eligible Similar-Documents entries (142460 / 155431 / 235517 / 258832) and, in particular, determine the invention date of record for US265927 — it controls whether the 1880-12-14 and 1882-05-30 documents are available as §102(a)-analogue art.

I'll start by verifying what the "Similar Documents" entries actually are, prioritizing the few that could even qualify as prior art against a June 1882 filing.

Obviousness analysis — US 265,927 ("Eoller mile" / ROLLER-MILL)

Source analyzed: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US265927](/patent/US265927)/en (title rendered literally as listed on the page; the specification itself reads "ROLLER-MILL"). Inventors Daniel W. Marmon and Jesse Warrington, Indianapolis; assignors to Nordyke & Marmon Company. Application filed June 3, 1882; granted October 10, 1882; term expired October 10, 1899 (17 years from grant).

1. Threshold issue: § 103 did not exist in 1882

35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted in 1952 — seventy years after this grant. A patent granted on October 10, 1882 was examined under § 24 of the Patent Act of 1870, whose standard was novelty plus the judicially developed requirement of "invention" as opposed to "mere mechanical skill." Any § 103 analysis is therefore anachronistic and hypothetical (and purely academic, since the patent expired in 1899 and cannot be challenged in an IPR or litigation). I run it anyway, because the modern Graham/KSR factors map well onto the standard the courts actually applied to this very patent family in the 1890s (see § 5), and because the analysis is useful for anybody treating this patent as analogous art today.

Note also that the Google Patents page's "Prior art date 1882-10-10" is the issue date, not a legal prior-art date. The controlling critical date is the June 3, 1882 filing (or, under the 1870 Act's "before the invention thereof" language, the actual date of invention, which is not established by this record). I flag below where that distinction changes the answer.

2. What the "Prior Art section" actually contains — and why that matters

The fetched page contains no examiner citations and no "Cited By"/"Citations" section. What it contains is a machine-generated "Similar Documents" list of 25 US publications. Similarity ranking is not a prior-art statement: a § 103 analysis requires each document to qualify as prior art under the corresponding § 102 provision before its disclosure is even considered.

2.1 Date screening of all 25 listed documents

Bottom line: on the record as furnished, only four documents can serve as § 103 art. Everything from 1883 onward postdates the invention and cannot support an obviousness rejection (post-filing documents may sometimes evidence the level of ordinary skill, but they are weak for that purpose and cannot be combined as art). I could not verify the disclosures of US142460A, US155431A, US235517A, or US258832A — web results for US235517A and US258832A did not surface usable full text (US258832A appears only as a bibliographic row in a CPC listing, https://www.patenthub.cn/cpc/list-35866-17.html). I will not fabricate their contents. The one content-verified hit adjacent to US155431A was US155,359 (Augustus Bean, planing-machine, Sept 29, 1874), https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/22/0a/e4/908f8e5b0d4787/[US155359](/patent/US155359).pdf — same date, different number; I do not auto-correct the identifier, but the Bean disclosure is probative and I use it as such, flagged.

3. The record a real § 103 case would actually use

The contemporaneous litigation over this generation of roller mills supplies date-qualified art that the Similar-Documents list does not, and it is admissible evidence of the state of the art:

• Gray, US 228,525 and the Gray reissues — frame, roll-shafts, a counter-shaft extending end to end parallel with the roll shafts, pulleys and belts giving reversed and differential motion to each pair, plus means to adjust each end of the counter-shaft independently. Admitted in Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25, https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0039/0039.f.0025.pdf.
• Gray's rod-G combination as described in the Gray reissue litigation: (1) movable roller bearing; (2) rod G; (3) adjustable stop limiting inward movement; (4) outside spring urging the bearing inward; (5) means for adjusting spring tension; (6) stop/holding device at the opposite end of the rod from the spring. Reported in volume 156 of the U.S. Reports, https://www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/USReports/USREPORTS-156_PDFA.pdf.
• Nemelka (Austrian patents Jan. 15 and May 22, 1875; French June 23, 1875; English to Lake Feb. 28, 1878; US to Lake Nov. 12, 1878): roll vertically adjustable by set-screw, horizontally adjustable for parallelism by a sliding bracket, an eccentric journal operated by a lever pivoted on the shaft to open the rolls when not in operation, and — critically — forms showing "a capability of yielding to spring pressure by means of an india-rubber buffer located at the lower end of a long descending arm of the movable bearing." The "Die Mühle" exhibit "shows very plainly a spring arrangement similarly located by which the movable roll is made to yield to a sudden pressure." (Id.)
• Odell, US 250,954 — an 1881/1882 roller-mill showing simultaneous adjustment of two short pulley shafts (39 F. 25, supra), and (per the Commissioner's decision on the Odell reissue) "a single through-shaft and a hand-lever rotating it to operate the four transverse shafts simultaneously, and, by moving the pivoted journal-arms, carrying the movable rolls to spread or set the rolls."
• Clark, US 174,719 (coal-breaker) and the Lane & Bodley saw-mill device — both showing simultaneous adjustment of both ends of a shaft for belt tightening (39 F. 25).
• Wegmann, English patent 1879 (US counterpart filed Feb. 10, 1883) — belt drive; on the roll/gate question it was held not to disclose simultaneous roll-and-feed control.
• Woodworth's 1845 amended specification — pressure rollers borne against the work "by means of weights or springs, in a manner well known to machinists," https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[8651778](/patent/8651778).pdf.
• Atwood, US 253,572 (Feb. 14, 1882 — pre-filing) — spring-compressed spindle support with a nut for "graduating the degree of the elastic flexibility," https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/[8860649](/patent/8860649).pdf.

4. Claim-by-claim obviousness assessment

Claim text below is quoted as supplied; note the OCR corruption ("springs W" in claim 1 is presumably springs F'; "COUDBGISlIafU M" = counter-shaft M; claims 13 and 14 are truncated mid-sentence, so their scope as furnished is indeterminate). Claim construction should be confirmed against the printed patent.

Claims 1, 2, 3 — spring-tempered swinging arm. Strongest obviousness (arguably anticipation).
Claim 1 is "roll-supporting arms D, movable bearings therefor, the rods F and G, provided with adjusting-screws, and springs W, said bearings being located between said rods." That is functionally the Gray rod-G combination (movable bearing + rod + adjustable stop + spring urging the bearing inward + tension adjustment + opposing stop), and Gray's patent predates 1882. Claim 3 adds "elongated pivot-openings" so the arm can be crowded outward by a hard substance; the specification itself concedes this effect "could be accomplished… by mounting the arm upon a swinging link or upon an eccentric… equivalent to that shown." Claim 2's spring-beyond-the-pivot geometry is squarely disclosed by the Nemelka/Lake forms and the Die Mühle exhibit, which show a spring at the lower end of a long descending arm of the movable bearing making the roll yield to sudden pressure.
Motivation: preventing journal/roll breakage from tramp metal while keeping grinding pressure constant was a recognized, repeatedly-solved problem in this art (Gray; Nemelka/Lake; Die Mühle), and the result — bias the arm in one direction so lost motion is taken up in a single direction — is a predictable design choice, as the patent itself argues.

Claims 4, 5 — spherical box seats struck from a common center offset from the roll axis. Weakest obviousness case; likely the only genuine locus of novelty.
Nothing in the Similar-Documents list, and nothing I could verify from the contemporaneous art, teaches journal boxes seated on spherical surfaces struck from a common center horizontally removed from the roll center so that shifting the box raises/lowers the roll within the plane of the pair without binding the journal. An obviousness case can be built — self-aligning/spherical seatings and pivot-adjustable boxes were known (Gray's eccentric at the lower end of the swinging bearing; ball-and-socket joints appear in later roller-mill art, e.g., US 641,985), and the specification itself characterizes the motion as "the same as if pivoted at point s," which is an admission that the spherical seat is functionally a pivot — but on this record I would not assert these claims obvious. This is the group where the patent likely had real substance, and any § 103 challenge should be aimed elsewhere.

Claims 6, 7, 8 — arms D + rods G + bell-cranks G + through-bar H + cam i. Strong.
Odell's single through-shaft with a hand lever operating four transverse shafts to move the pivoted journal-arms simultaneously discloses the core of these claims; the bell-crank is a routine substitute for the transverse shaft, and a cam/eccentric for a lever. Motivation: the art's express desideratum — throw all the rolls out of grinding relation and return them to exactly the prior adjustment without re-setting the mill — is recited in the patent's own specification and was the shared aim of Gray, Odell, and the later Poole patent. Claim 6's "same line and same direction" limitation (both ends of a roll moving together to preserve parallelism) is answered by Odell, which moves all four arms uniformly.

Claims 9, 10, 13, 14, 15 — feed gates, rock shafts, weighted arms, sliding bar L, pivoted catches. Moderate — strongest against 13–15 if a specific reference is confirmed.
Adjustable hopper cut-offs and gate linkages were old. The most probative document is one I could not date-qualify: the Odell reissue decision records that the Wegmann English patent (1879) "does not show in the drawings nor describe in the specification simultaneous operation of the roll-controlling and of the feed-controlling mechanism," and that "there is no evidence that prior to Odell's invention the combination of mechanism for simultaneously controlling the gates and the rolls was known or used." If Odell US 250,954 (issued ~Jan. 1882) itself discloses that combination, then claims 11 and 13–15 of US 265,927 are obvious (and possibly anticipated) over Odell alone. This is the single highest-value verification task in this analysis and I cannot resolve it from the material available. Claim 10's specific notched-arm/projecting-lug/sliding-bar arrangement reads as a routine mechanical linkage once the simultaneous-control concept is conceded.

Claim 12 — counter-shaft M, devices N, rods O, and connecting mechanism. Strong — and judicially foreshadowed.
The Coombs court, on functionally identical subject matter, held the sixth element (means for adjusting simultaneously both ends of the counter-shaft) to be "nothing beyond mere mechanical skill… It does not call for the exercise of the inventive faculty," in view of the Lane & Bodley saw-mill, Clark US 174,719, and Odell US 250,954. The same court also noted that the "same adjusting devices shown in Fig. 20" of the later Marmon patent are the subject of claim 12 of the Marmon & Warrington patent — i.e., this very claim — thereby treating the US 265,927 devices as themselves old in the art for that purpose. Separately, US 155,359 (Bean, Sept. 29, 1874) discloses a frame raised and lowered by "two or more screws… connected and caused to revolve simultaneously by means of the bevel-gears d, and shaft h" — the exact mechanism of claim 12's shaft P with gears engaging the rods O.

Claims 16, 17 — yielding (spring-backed) stop for the feed gate. Very strong.
The specification supplies the motivation and the equivalence itself: "the springs j, or such known equivalent therefor—as a weight." Substituting a spring for a weight to obtain a stop that is rigid in normal operation but yields under added force was routine — Woodworth's 1845 specification describes rollers held "by means of weights or springs, in a manner well known to machinists," and Atwood US 253,572 (Feb. 1882) uses a nut to graduate spring flexibility in a bearing support. No unexpected result is asserted for the spring over the weight.

Claim 11 — combination of both mechanisms with one cam-and-handle device. Cut both ways: an aggregation attack is available if the elements do not co-act, but the patent describes genuine joint operation (handle 1 driving bar H via cam i and bar L via catches l), and the contemporaneous Commissioner's decision declined to treat Wegmann as showing simultaneous roll-and-feed control. Same dependency on the Odell question as claims 13–15.

5. Combinations and motivation to combine (KSR-style)

Motivation, stated generally: every listed reference is in the same field of endeavor (grain reduction by rolls) or is a general machine element solving one of the same sub-problems. The patent's own "Definitions"/recapitulation identifies seven recognized desiderata — steady grinding pressure; yielding to tramp material with exact restoration; maintainable parallelism of each pair despite wear; one-point throwing-out and restoration of all rolls; feed shut-off when rolls part; uniform belt tension; clearable feed-gate obstructions without losing adjustment. Combining references that each solve one of those recognized problems, with predictable mechanical results (linkages, springs, cams, screw-and-gear adjusters, rock shafts) is the classic obviousness posture; no claim asserts an unexpected result. The applicant's own admissions ("common to roller-mills"; "in the ordinary manner"; the swinging-link/eccentric and weight-for-spring equivalences) further narrow the remaining distance.

Contemporaneous standard that aligns with this: courts of the era invalidated near-identical claims as mechanical skill — National Harrow Co. v. Wescott ("it required only the skill of the mechanic… it was what any skilled operator would do," https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0084/0084.f1.0673.pdf) and Coombs ("does not call for the exercise of the inventive faculty").

6. What the record does not support / verification tasks

1. Contents of US235517A (1880-12-14), US258832A (1882-05-30, four days pre-filing), US142460A (1873) and US155431A (1874) are unverified. These four are the only Similar-Documents entries that can be § 103 art, and two of them (142460A, 155431A) are likely from a non-analogous field. A § 103 rejection resting only on this list could not be sustained without their full texts.
2. Invention date. Under the governing statute the critical date is the date of invention, not filing. US258832A (May 30, 1882) can be sworn behind by a prior-invention showing; conversely, art published after June 3, 1882 can qualify if it predates the invention.
3. Odell US 250,954 — confirm its issue date and, critically, whether it discloses simultaneous roll-and-feed control. This determines claims 11 and 13–15.
4. Gray US 228,525 and the Gray reissue — confirm issue dates and the full text of the rod-G claims, which appear to reach claims 1–3 almost element-for-element.
5. Foreign publications — Nemelka (Austria 1875; England to Lake 1878), Mechwart (Austria Aug. 3, 1875), Wegmann (England 1879) are all § 102(a)/(b)-quality art and are more pertinent than anything on the Similar-Documents list.
6. US269459A (Poole) is not prior art off the true June 3, 1882 filing date, but if the analysis is run off the page's literal "prior art date 1882-10-10," Poole's Sept. 25, 1882 application would qualify as a § 102(e)-type reference — and Poole (transverse rock-shaft, eccentrics moving the movable bearings without disturbing the spring tension, bell-crank levers pivoting the bearings, hand-wheel screws regulating spring tension) is strikingly close to claims 1–3 and 6–8 of US 265,927. Worth flagging because the literal date on the page changes the outcome.

Overall assessment: claims 1–3, 6–8, 12, 16 and 17 are, on the art I could verify, clearly obvious (several are arguably anticipated) under the 1882 "invention" standard and would be obvious under § 103 today; claims 9–11 and 13–15 turn on the unverified Odell disclosure; claims 4 and 5 are the only claims with a defensible nonobviousness position on this record, and I cannot responsibly assert them obvious.