US 308866

I'll run the requested searches before summarizing. Note up front: the identifier as given, 308866, corresponds to US 308,866 (the 1884 grant), not to a 7-digit 3,088,866-style number — I'll interpret it literally as instructed.

Let me try more targeted searches, including the requested docket check.

Bottom line up front

The identifier 308866 resolves to US 308,866 — an 1884 agricultural implement patent. It is not a live patent, not litigated, and has no Federal Circuit docket presence. Searches of the open web (including the Google Patents USPTO mirror and general docket-facing queries) returned no CAFC 2026 docket entry and no USPTO assignment/litigation record for this number. Everything below is grounded in the authoritative full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US308866](/patent/US308866)/en plus one corroborating index hit.

---

Bibliographic data (US 308,866)

---

Abstract

There is no formal abstract — abstracts were not part of US patent practice in 1884. The Google Patents "Definitions" field supplies an auto-extracted surrogate, drawn verbatim from the specification's opening:

"My invention relates to improvements in devices for cultivating corn and other vegetables planted or drilled in rows, the object of which is to provide an easy, convenient, rapid, and thorough means of cutting, loosening, and leveling the soil, and at the same time to destroy grass, weeds, &c."

---

The claims — verbatim transcription (OCR is corrupt)

The claims appear at the end of the specification in a two-column layout that Google's OCR interleaved incorrectly. Here is the literal text as rendered:

"1. A device for cutting, loosening, and harrowing ground, composed of a wheel, A, having an axle to which is attached a beam, G, and arms for supporting a revolving shaft on which are cutting-disk s E, plows F, attached behind and between said disks, 9. harrow, G, be attached, and placed behind the said plews, said disks, with handles D, all substantially as and for the plows, and barrow having attachments so as purpose specified. to be drawn by the axle of the Wheel A and raised by handles D, all substantially as shown and described.

1. The combination of a wheel, A, with revolving disks E, plows F, and harrow G, said disks, plows, and barrow having attachments to be drawn by the axle of the Wheel A and raised by handles D, all substantially as shown and described."

Reconstructed reading (my best effort; flagged as uncertain because the two text columns are scrambled):

• Claim 1: "A device for cutting, loosening, and harrowing ground, composed of a wheel, A, having an axle to which is attached a beam [C], and arms for supporting a revolving shaft on which are cutting-disks E, plows F attached behind and between said disks, [a] harrow, G, placed behind the said plows, said disks, plows, and harrow having attachments so as to be drawn by the axle of the wheel A and raised by handles D, all substantially as and for the purpose specified."
• Claim 2: "The combination of a wheel, A, with revolving disks E, plows F, and harrow G, said disks, plows, and harrow having attachments so as to be drawn by the axle of the wheel A and raised by handles D, all substantially as shown and described."

Note the OCR prints "beam, G" in claim 1, which conflicts with the specification, where G is the harrow and the beam is lettered C ("This axle supports a beam, C"). The 0s throughout the OCR are mis-scanned Cs.

---

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

There are two claims, both independent apparatus claims (no method claims; the era's convention of "substantially as described" tying claims to the drawings makes them narrow):

Claim 1 — the whole machine. An implement for cutting, loosening, and harrowing ground built around a single large wheel (A) on an axle. The axle carries a beam and arms that hold a revolving shaft fitted with cutting disks (E). Plows (F) are mounted behind and between the disks, so the plows loosen the strip of soil lying between the two disk-cut tracks. Behind the plows rides a harrow (G). The assembled disks, plows, and harrow are hitched so the machine is pulled by the wheel's axle and lifted out of the ground by the handles (D) — i.e., the wheel acts as a fulcrum, per the specification: "the wheel serves as a fulcrum to raise the back part of the device."

Claim 2 — the combination sub-claim. Narrower: it claims the combination of wheel A with revolving disks E, plows F, and harrow G, where those elements are equipped with attachments enabling the assembly to be drawn from the axle of wheel A and raised by handles D. Functionally it covers the same machine, but recited as a combination of the four named elements plus the draw/raise attachments rather than as a "device … composed of" list.

Practical scope: the claim set is directed to a single-horse, walk-behind, row-crop cultivator (explicitly aimed at "tending corn"), with a large ground wheel carrying disks → between-row plows → trailing harrow in series. The specification notes optional variations: the harrow can be detached, or the plows dispensed with ("but it is preferable in general use to have all parts in use at once"), one or more horses may be used, different-sized plows ("Nos. 1 and 2"), adjustable width for row spacing, and a sulky option by adding wheels to the axle ends (that passage is truncated in the OCR: "wheels on the ends of the axle B extendech").

---

About the USPTO / CAFC docket searches you asked for

• USPTO: No adversarial proceeding, reissue, or assignment record surfaced for US 308,866. The only index corroboration found was a patents sitemap listing for 1884: "12/09/1884 | US308866 Jesse w" (http://www.google.com/patents/sitemap/en/Sitemap/Unknown_Category/1884_15.html).
• CAFC 2026 dockets: Nothing found. I want to be explicit about the uncertainty here: I did not query PACER or the Federal Circuit's own docket system directly, only general web search. That said, a live Federal Circuit appeal involving US 308,866 is not plausible — the patent issued in 1884 and its term expired December 9, 1901, roughly 81 years before the Federal Circuit existed (est. 1982). If you are seeing a 2026 docket item under a similar number, it almost certainly concerns a different patent.
• Number-collision warning (do not auto-correct, just be aware): searches for the bare string "308866" surfaced unrelated documents bearing that number or an "'866 patent" shorthand — e.g., an Indian application 308866 (InterDigital), an Irish priority application 308866 P (Medlogic Global), a Japanese priority JP 2008-308866 (Yamaha audio networking), and a Chinese issuer's reference to a blood-oximeter "308 patent." Similarly, "'866 patent" in US litigation (the ImClone/Erbitux inventorship case; the BDSI v. Chemo buprenorphine-buccal-film case) refers to wholly unrelated patents. None of these is US 308,866.

Where I am not authoritative

1. Assignee/chain of title — no assignee is recorded on the document, but I did not verify against the USPTO Assignment database or PatentCenter.
2. Claim text — the OCR column scramble means my reconstruction, not the verbatim transcription, is what a reader should rely on; the verbatim block above should be read against the original PDF (linked from the Google Patents page) before being quoted in any legal or technical filing.
3. The Google Patents title field ("Jesse w") is corrupt — the operative title is the specification heading, "Device for Cutting, Harrowing, and Loosening Ground."
4. If you intended a different number (e.g., a 7-digit US number ending in 866), that is a different patent and I have not analyzed it, per the strict rule to interpret identifiers literally rather than auto-correct.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 308866.

Let me run additional targeted searches on litigation databases.

Let me check the Google Patents litigation tab and CourtListener directly.

Summary: No litigation identified

Based on my searches, I found no record of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 308,866.

Searches run

I searched for the literal identifier "308866" (and variants ""US308866", "3,088,866", "patent 308866"") against litigation-oriented sources, including queries aimed at the Unified Patents litigation caselist and PTAB caselist portal, Docket Alarm, and general web indexes that surface PACER/CAFC/CourtListener material. Nothing returned a case involving U.S. Patent 308,866.

Requested case-by-case table

There is nothing to populate: no district court action, no PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM — these did not exist for an 1884 patent), no ITC Section 337 investigation, and no CAFC appeal involving this patent was identified.

Why this result is expected (not merely a search failure)

Three independent, structural reasons support the "no litigation" conclusion rather than a mere gap in coverage:

1. The patent is from 1884. Per the authoritative patent text, US 3,088,866 issued December 9, 1884 to Jesse W. Alderson of Washburn, Barry County, Missouri, on an application filed April 8, 1884, titled "Device for Cutting, Harrowing, and Loosening Ground."
2. It expired December 9, 1901. The Google Patents record lists an "Anticipated expiration" of 1901-12-09 with legal status "Expired – Lifetime." An expired patent cannot be asserted in the modern courts, and can no longer be the subject of a PTAB validity challenge.
3. The databases you pointed to do not reach back that far. Unified Patents' litigation/PTAB caselists, PACER, and Docket Alarm cover modern proceedings (roughly the 1990s forward, and PTAB only since 2012). Any enforcement of a patent of this vintage would have occurred in 19th-century federal circuit court equity practice — records that are largely not present in these commercial dockets. The absence of hits is therefore consistent with (a) no assertion and (b) the era being outside these tools' scope.

False positives I filtered out (per the "interpret literally, do not auto-correct" rule)

The string "308866" appears in several unrelated contexts. I am flagging these so you can see they are not the patent at issue:

• Indian patent application 308866 (1059/DELNP/2011) — "Maintaining Circuit Switched Continuity…", Interdigital Patent Holdings (IPO Journal listing).
• JP 2003-308866 (Nissan Motor) and JP 2001-308866 — Japanese patent publications.
• U.S. Provisional 60/308,866 — priority application behind the "Applicator for Tissue Adhesive" family (Medlogic Global / Stenton).
• A Czech consumer-loan contract numbered 308866; a Pakistani exam roll number 308866; and a U.S. Patent 7,076,308 ("the '308 patent") in MED-EL v. Advanced Bionics, 1:18-cv-01530 (D. Del.). None of these is US 3,088,866.

Caveats

• I could not complete direct queries against the Google Patents "Litigation" tab and CourtListener before hitting the tool-step limit. Those are the two places most likely to change this answer if anything exists, and I would verify them before treating "no litigation" as final.
• I also cannot rule out a 19th-century infringement suit (roughly 1884–1901) sitting only in un-digitized federal court archives or regional newspaper reports. Nothing in the searchable record surfaced, but pre-1900 federal case records are not comprehensively indexed by the databases you named.
• Note also a date discrepancy: your prompt states April 26, 2026, while the system date I am operating under is 2026-09-27. Neither date affects the conclusion.

Bottom line: On the current record, no known litigation exists for US patent 308866, and given its 1901 expiration, none can arise in the modern venue.

I'll verify the structured data with a couple of targeted searches before writing the analysis.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The canonical structured record from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM petitions against US 308,866 — and my independent web checks (Google Patents family/litigation panels, PTAB decision searches on the "308866" and "3,088,866" strings, and CourtListener) surfaced nothing: no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, no CAFC appeal, and no mention of this patent in any PTAB or district-court document. The breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated by the Board / 0 claims sustained by the Board / 0 settled / 0 institution denials.

The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "hardened patent" and not "claims canceled" — it is something more basic: there is nothing left to defend against. US 308,866 issued 1884-12-09, was filed 1884-04-08, and Google Patents' legal-status data records an "Anticipated expiration" of 1901-12-09 (17 years from grant under pre-1995 law), with the only status entry being "Expired - Lifetime." No reissue, extension, or restoration appears on the record. The patent has been in the public domain for roughly 125 years and has been expired for longer than the AIA (effective 2012-09-16) and the PTAB itself have existed. Any assertion of it today is facially meritless, and any AIA petition against it is commercially pointless.

---

Proceedings

None. No proceeding numbers exist to report, and per your instruction I will not invent any.

For completeness, the three AIA trial vehicles are unavailable as a practical matter on this record:

• IPR — 35 U.S.C. § 311 permits a petition on essentially any issued patent, including one that has expired (the Board has allowed expired-patent IPRs where claim amendment is simply unavailable). But there is no economic or defensive reason to file one here, and no one has.
• PGR — 35 U.S.C. § 321 applies only to patents subject to the first-inventor-to-file regime, i.e., effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. A patent filed 1884-04-08 is categorically outside PGR.
• CBM — limited to covered business-method patents; a horse-drawn cultivator is not a financial product or service, and the CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16 in any event.

One data-quality note that matters if you are reading the claims: Google Patents' title for this record is the truncated string "Jesse w," but the specification identifies the inventor as Jesse W. Alderson, of Washburn, county of Barry, State of Missouri, and the grant line reads "JESSE W. ALDERSON." The page's OCR is also badly interleaved — claims 1 and 2 run together, with artifacts like "plews," "barrow," and "9. harrow, G." Read literally, claim 1 is a device claim ("A device for cutting, loosening, and harrowing ground, composed of a wheel, A, having an axle to which is attached a beam, G, and arms for supporting a revolving shaft on which are cutting-disks E, plows F, attached behind and between said disks, [a] harrow, G, placed behind the said plows, said disks, plows, and harrow having attachments so as to be drawn by the axle of the wheel A and raised by handles D") and claim 2 is a combination claim ("The combination of a wheel, A, with revolving disks E, plows F, and harrow G..."). Do not quote this claim text in any filing without pulling the original two-sheet PDF (patentimages PDF) — the OCR corruption is severe enough that the interlineated text is not a reliable source of claim scope.

---

Strategic summary

Claim status: neither canceled nor sustained — untested, because unimpeachable for a different reason. No claim of 308,866 has ever been before the Board, so as a formal matter claims 1 and 2 are "UNESTED" (there is no adverse FWD). But that framing is a trap for a defendant's risk memo. The correct risk characterization is not "untested claim risk" but "expired right, zero infringement exposure." Expiration on 1901-12-09 means the right to exclude ended before the Wright brothers flew; there is no live claim to infringe and no damages window (§ 286's six-year lookback cannot reach conduct in a period when the patent was already decades expired). Any demand letter citing this patent is either a clerical error, a scare tactic aimed at a non-lawyer recipient, or a sign that the sender mis-scraped a patent database.

Estoppel landscape: empty, and that cuts in your favor. Because no IPR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel was never triggered against anyone. There is no petitioner, no privy, and no set of "grounds raised or reasonably could have been raised" that is now foreclosed. Conversely — and this is the useful part — a defendant has no need for estoppel: the whole 1884 disclosure is a printed publication that has been publicly available since 1884-12-09 and is therefore § 102(a)(1) prior art against any modern claim. The far more likely scenario is the inverse of the one you asked about: a modern cultivator or row-crop implement claim in someone else's patent is anticipated or obvious over 308,866 (wheel-with-axle as fulcrum, gangs of revolving cutting disks, plows between and behind the disks, trailing harrow, adjustment of plow pitch via a frangible wooden safety pin, and detachability of the harrow). Note that Google Patents already lists this document among its "Similar Documents" cluster (US 131,404; US 192,060; US 233,730; US 310,828; etc.), confirming it sits inside the indexed pre-1900 cultivator art corpus — exactly where a defendant in a modern farm-implement case would want it.

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones. No repeat petitioner, so no serial-IPR pattern. No patent owner — Jesse W. Alderson was an individual inventor of the 1880s; there is no assignee entity, no continuation family (the ODP record shows a single family application, ID 2378031), and no modern holder of record. No defensive aggregator appears anywhere in the chain; Unified Patents and its peers have never touched this patent, which is unsurprising given that no one has ever asserted it. No PTAB appeal to the Federal Circuit exists because no PTAB trial exists.

---

Recommended next steps

1. If you have received a demand letter citing US 308,866, treat it as a red flag on the sender, not a liability event. Quote back the expiration date from the record: Google Patents legal status lists "1901-12-09 — Anticipated expiration" with status "Expired - Lifetime" (US308866A). Preserve the letter and correspondence for a potential § 285 exceptional-case or state-bar/consumer-protection angle — the absence of any good-faith basis is unusually stark where the patent expired 125 years ago.
2. Do not file an AIA petition. There is no proceeding to join, no live claim to cancel, and the Board would have nothing to invalidate. Filing would be a waste of filing fees and would not buy you anything an expiration-date citation does not already buy you free of charge.
3. Repurpose the reference. If your real exposure is a different, live patent on row-crop cultivation, disk gangs, trailing harrows, or plow-pitch safety releases, pull the original 308,866 drawing sheets (Figures 1 and 2) and specification from the Google Patents PDF and have your expert credential its public accessibility as of 1884-12-09. That gives you a § 102(a)(1) printed-publication reference, and its 1880s dates make it prior art against essentially any priority chain.
4. Document the negative search. If you need a litigation-ready declaration of no PTAB activity, cite the USPTO Open Data Portal structured record (no AIA trial proceedings as of the most recent ingest) plus a null result from the PTAB Decisions / E2E search and a null result on CourtListener. Put the search date (2026-09-27) in the declaration.

Bottom line: no PTAB activity on file, and none is possible or meaningful. The 866 reference is a public-domain 1884 printed publication — prior art in your favor, not a patent against you.

I'll verify the assignment record landscape for this patent before writing, since the vintage matters a great deal here.

Confirmed the database's 1980 cutoff. Let me check the inventor's commercial history and whether any pre-1980 (microfilm-era) assignment is indexed anywhere.

Found a reference to the pre-1980 "Assignment Historical Database." Let me pin down its coverage and check for any 19th-century commercial exploitation record.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 3,088,866

Critical structural note before the analysis: the USPTO Patent Assignment Search database (Assignments on the Web / Assignment Center) contains recorded patent assignment information only back to August 1980. Per USPTO's own published documentation: "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO Assignment Database Webinar, 2015-01-20), confirmed independently by Finnegan (Prosecution Pointer 119) and by the current Assignment Center itself (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov, assignment.uspto.gov). US 3,088,866 is an 1884 patent that expired in 1901. It therefore sits ~96 years before the earliest record in the primary source you designated. Any conclusion below about "no assignments" is a statement about the online index, and I distinguish that carefully from a statement about 19th-century paper records.

Inventors

Grounding: the specification reads "I, JESSE W. ALDERSON, a citizen of the United States, residing at Washburn, in the county of Barry and State of Missouri, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Devices for Cutting, Loosening, and Harrowing Ground." The application was filed April 8, 1884 and the patent granted December 9, 1884, as a sole-inventor, "(No Model)" filing on two sheets of drawings.

Pattern notes:

• Single inventor, no co-inventors. There is no employment-derived inventorship signature anywhere in the document, so no corporate assignee can be inferred from the face of the patent. For 1884 rural-Missouri farm-implement patents this is overwhelmingly the individual-farmer-inventor pattern, but I am declining to state a specific occupation as fact because nothing in the record establishes it.
• No "all inventors departing within 12 months" signal is even computable — there is one inventor and no employer of record.
• Flagging an OCR name discrepancy rather than auto-correcting it (per the operating rule to interpret identifiers literally): the transcribed Google Patents text renders the inventor's middle initial inconsistently — the masthead shows "JESSE V. ALDERSON," the specification signature block shows "JESSE \V. ALDERSON," and the page title metadata is the truncated string "Jesse w." The \V glyph is a scanned-W artifact, and the litigation section of this analysis previously recorded the name as Jesse W. Alderson. I flag this as an OCR artifact, not a second inventor or a name change. The patent's actual title per the specification is "Device for Cutting, Harrowing, and Loosening Ground"; the "Jesse w" appearing as the Google Patents title is a metadata extraction error.

Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventor in his own name, and no assignee appears anywhere on the document.

• The masthead lists only the inventor and his residence — no "assignor to ___" line, which in 1884 practice would have appeared on the printed patent and in the Official Gazette / Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents if an assignment had been recorded before issue.
• Google Patents' Legal Events for US308866A show exactly three entries — publication 1884-12-09, application granted 1884-12-09, and anticipated expiration 1901-12-09 — and no assignee field, no "Current Assignee," and no "Original Assignee" block. Google's assignment data is seeded from USPTO records, so this is a null result downstream of the 1980 cutoff.
• Product embodiment: not established. The specification is written in prospective, generic terms ("The device may be made of any desired width, and also so as to be adjustable to the width of the row"; "One or more horses may be attached, and different-sized plows, known as Nos. 1 and 2, may be used"). That is a patentee describing manufacturing latitude, not evidence of a manufacturing business. I found no catalog, advertisement, trade-press listing, or brand name tying this implement to a commercial maker.
• Primary line of business / current status: not applicable. There is no entity. SEC-filing cross-referencing (10-K/8-K) is constitutionally impossible for this vintage — the SEC did not exist until 1934, three decades after this patent expired. I did not find any successor entity, and I am not going to manufacture one.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no records for US patent 308866. This is stated plainly, and it is the finding.

I searched the patent number against the Assignment Center and the legacy Assignments on the Web interface (legacy-assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/?db=pat), plus the Reel/Frame, Assignor, and Assignee lookup fields described in USPTO's own walkthrough. Zero hits. No reel/frame, no conveyance type, no correspondent, no execution or recording date exists to report.

Two independent explanations, and both apply:

1. Terminal expiration. The patent's 17-year term ended 1901-12-09 (matching Google Patents' "Anticipated expiration" event). An 1884-vintage patent was never going to have a post-1980 recordation.
2. Database scope. Even a hypothetical 1884–1901 transfer of this patent would not be in the Assignment Center, because the online index begins August 1980. Pre-1980 assignations are recorded on microfilm and indexed by reel and frame; pre-1955 documents were recorded in bound volumes indexed by liber and page — with pre-1955 trademark records transferred to NARA (TMEP §503.08, bitlaw mirror; parallel patent microfilm convention). USPTO's internal IT documentation separately describes an Assignment Historical Database (AHD) holding legacy recorded assignments, and notes that "In addition to the current electronic store of assignment data there are data stores on microfilm and index cards that will need to be assessed" (USPTO OITP ch.2). Critically, USPTO's own compliance filing classifies AHD as an internal records system, with "Assignments on the Web (AOTW) — Non-record" (USPTO IDSS PIA) — i.e., the public AOTW surface is not the complete historical corpus. That is the honest caveat on this null result.

What that absence means in ownership terms: with no recorded post-issuance transfer and no assignment at issue, ownership ran to Jesse W. Alderson personally from grant through expiration. For a pre-1980 patent with no assignment record and no assignee on the face, the operative default is that the original patentee retained title — here, that is the inventor himself. There is no chain to reconstruct because there is no chain.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 308866
    1884 : Application filed by Jesse W Alderson
         : Patent issued to Alderson as sole owner
    1901 : Patent term expires unassigned
    1980 : USPTO online assignment records begin
         : No assignment records found for this patent

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is assessed against the record. Note the governing constraint: an expired 1901 patent cannot be asserted, securitized, or transferred-to-asserter, so most of these categories are structurally unavailable, not merely unproven.

Verdict

Insufficient data (the option defined as "no records, or only the original assignment").

The record contains only the original issuance: US 3,088,866 granted 1884-12-09 to Jesse W. Alderson of Washburn, Barry County, Missouri, on an application filed 1884-04-08, with no assignee named on the document, no assignee block in Google Patents' legal-events data, and zero hits in the USPTO Assignment Center / Assignments on the Web for the patent number. There is no reel/frame, no conveyance type, no assignor/assignee pair, and — most diagnostically — no correspondent of record, so the repeat-counsel test that normally exposes NPE chains cannot be run at all. The "Insufficient data" call is driven by the absence of records, not by any affirmative indication of clean title: pre-1980 assignments live on microfilm and in the internal Assignment Historical Database (USPTO classifies AOTW itself as "Non-record"), so a hypothetical 19th-century transfer would be invisible to the search you directed me to.

Verification links:

• Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Patent Assignment Search by patent number: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Legacy Assignments on the Web: https://legacy-assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/?db=pat
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US308866](/patent/US308866)/en

Corroboration worth doing (outside the online index): the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for 1884 carries an alphabetical list of patentees that cross-references assignees for patents assigned at issue, and 1884 Official Gazette entries likewise note "assignment information that was known at the time of issue." Those paper sources — not the Assignment Center — are where a pre-1984 Alderson transfer, if one ever existed, would surface. I did not reach primary scans of either in this pass, so I state that as an open thread rather than a completed check.

I'll search for the authoritative USPTO/Google Patents record for 308866 and examine whether it lists any patent citations.

Let me verify whether the Google Patents/USPTO record for 308866 contains any citation fields at all.

The record shows no citation field. Let me check whether any of the pre-1884 "similar documents" have retrievable content so I can assess them properly against the claims.

Prior Art Analysis — US 308,866 (Jesse W. Alderson, "Device for Cutting, Harrowing, and Loosening Ground")

Date note: This task states the current date is April 26, 2026. The authoritative Google Patents record I am working from carries a fetch timestamp of 2026-09-27T16:07:31Z. This is the same discrepancy flagged in the previously generated Litigation section; it does not affect any technical conclusion below.

---

1. Bottom line first

There are no patent citations for US 308,866 to analyze. The authoritative record (Google Patents mirror of the USPTO file, fetched above) contains no "Patent Citations" / "References Cited" field of any kind, and no "Cited By" field.

The record's only citation-like sections are:

So the literal instruction "look at each patent citation for 308866" resolves to an empty set. Count of patent citations: 0. I am stating this as a finding, not as a search failure — and I explain in §3 why it is structurally expected for an 1884 grant.

---

2. What the authoritative record actually says

From the fetched record:

• Patent number: US 308,866 A (also US308866D, US308866DA)
• Title as recorded: "Jesse w" (the literal title field on the record; the specification itself is titled "Device for Cutting, Harrowing, and Loosening Ground")
• Inventor / patentee: Jesse W. Alderson, Washburn, Barry County, Missouri
• Application filed: April 8, 1884 (No model)
• Patent dated / published: December 9, 1884
• Publication date listed as "Prior art date": 1884-12-09
• Anticipated expiration: 1901-12-09 (status: Expired – Lifetime)
• Classification: A01B41/00 (Thinning machines) — the only CPC given
• No Model designation; 2 sheets of drawings; Figures 1 (plan view) and 2 (side view)

Contradiction check against earlier sections: none. The earlier Litigation section states issue date 1884-12-09, filing date 1884-04-08, inventor Jesse W. Alderson of Washburn — all consistent with the record above. The earlier section's caution that "no litigation exists and none can arise" is unaffected.

---

3. Why an 1884 patent has zero citations (structural, not a gap)

1. Citation printing practice. USPTO patents did not print "References Cited" on their face in 1884. Any examiner references would exist only in the paper file wrapper for Application filed April 8, 1884 — which is not digitized into this record. The Google Patents "References Cited" field for pre-1900 U.S. patents is normally empty.
2. No forward citations expected. A "Cited By" list only accumulates if later patents/applications cite the document. The record shows none.
3. Statutory mapping caveat (important for the §102 question as posed). For an April 8, 1884 filing, the governing law is the Patent Act of 1870 as amended / Revised Statutes §§ 4886 and 4920 — not the 1952 codification of 35 U.S.C. § 102. There was also no statutory § 103; "invention"/obviousness was a judicially developed "want of invention" doctrine. When I use "§ 102" below, I mean the novelty requirement in its 1884 form (R.S. § 4886(1): patented or described in a printed publication, or in public use or on sale more than two years prior; and known or used by others before the applicant's invention).

---

4. Substitute analysis: the 25 "Similar Documents" (explicitly not citations)

Because no citation list exists, the only cross-references the record offers are its 25 algorithmic "Similar Documents." None of these was cited against US 308,866. I reproduce them literally, with each item flagged against the April 8, 1884 filing date, which is the only date that makes a document potentially anticipatory under R.S. § 4886.

Only items 1–6 are even capable of being § 102 art, since items 7–25 all post-date the April 8, 1884 filing. (Items 7–8, published Nov 11 and Nov 18, 1884, post-date the filing and could only be reached if the applicant's actual date of invention were pushed later than them — an implausible position given a filing a full seven months earlier.)

---

5. The claims of US 308,866 that any reference must meet

Read literally from the authoritative text (which is OCR-degraded where the claim block is interleaved with the testimonium; I flag the reconstruction):

Claim 1 — A device for cutting, loosening, and harrowing ground, composed of:

• a wheel A having an axle to which is attached a beam and arms for supporting a revolving shaft;
• on the revolving shaft, cutting-disks E;
• plows F attached behind and between said disks;
• a harrow G placed behind the said plows;
• said disks, plows, and harrow having attachments so as to be drawn by the axle of the wheel A and raised by handles D, substantially as shown and described.

Claim 2 — The combination of a wheel A with revolving disks E, plows F, and harrow G, said disks, plows and harrow having attachments so as to be drawn by the axle of the wheel A and raised by handles D.

Two structural features are load-bearing and narrow the art sharply: (i) the disks–plows–harrow tandem on one frame, and (ii) drafting from the axle of a single large wheel with the wheel acting as fulcrum and the rear raised by handles D. Claim 2 is the narrower combination claim.

---

6. Reference-by-reference: citation, date, description, potential § 102 target

The required format is below. Critical honesty flag: I was able to retrieve and verify the disclosure text of only one of the six pre-filing documents (US131404) before hitting the tool-step limit. For the other five I have title and date only from the authoritative record, and I therefore give only a title/classification-level description and a candidate claim target — I do not assert what they disclose.

---

Reference A — US 131,404

• Full citation: George Henry Lund, "Improvement in Cultivators," U.S. Patent No. 131,404 (patented Sept. 17, 1872).
• Publication / patent date: 1872-09-17. (Application filing date not retrieved.)
• Brief description (verified from the specification): A wheel-cultivator ("Wheel-Cultivators") having wheels connected by an axle I; drag-bars A hinged or pivoted beneath the axle by perforations through which passes a rod or shaft attached beneath the axle; standards E carrying shovels or plows of any desired form; a curved brace F pivoted to the standard and to the rear end of the drag-bar; a gage D with a slotted arm and rearward foot, bolt-adjustable to set plow depth and standoff; a tongue H; two arms P¹ P² rising from the axle supporting a rock-shaft S with an eccentric wheel K and lever L, catch and serrated head for raising the drag-bars; and links and chains M, N connecting the drag-bars to wheels on the rock-shaft to raise them in going to and from the field. Drag-bars may be pinned together in sections via bolt B.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates under § 102: NONE.
  • Claim 1: Not anticipated. Lund discloses no cutting-disks E and no revolving shaft carrying disks, and no harrow G positioned behind plows. It also does not draw the implement "by the axle of the wheel A" in the claimed single-large-wheel/fulcrum sense — it is a two-wheel, tongue-drawn cultivator. The tandem disk→plow→harrow arrangement, which is the core of claim 1, is absent.
  • Claim 2: Not anticipated. Claim 2 requires revolving disks E in combination with plows F and harrow G. Lund has shovels on drag-bars and no disks and no harrow.
  • Residual relevance: Lund is relevant only as background art to the sub-features of handles/means for raising the ground-engaging elements and depth-adjustment — i.e., support for a "want of invention" (pre-1952 § 103 analogue) attack on those isolated elements, not for anticipation of either claim as a whole.

---

Reference B — US 198,710

• Full citation: "Improvement in Harrows," U.S. Patent No. 198,710 (patented Dec. 25, 1877).
• Publication date: 1877-12-25. (Filing date not retrieved.)
• Brief description: Unknown on the record — title only. By title it is a harrow improvement. Content not verified in this session.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates: Candidate target — the "harrow G" element of claims 1 and 2, and only that element. A harrow alone cannot anticipate either claim, because claims 1 and 2 both require the wheel/axle, the revolving shaft with cutting disks, and plows behind and between the disks. Verdict on the record: no anticipation; verification of disclosure content still required.

---

Reference C — US 192,060

• Full citation: "Improvement in Cultivators," U.S. Patent No. 192,060 (patented June 19, 1877).
• Publication date: 1877-06-19. (Filing date not retrieved.)
• Brief description: Unknown on the record — title only. Content not verified.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates: Candidate target — claim 1 (as a whole) and claim 2. A wheel cultivator is the closest art family for the claimed draft/raise architecture (wheel, axle, beam, arms, handles). However, anticipation of claim 1 or 2 requires disclosure of the disk-on-revolving-shaft element with plows between and behind the disks, plus a trailing harrow. Until the disclosure is read, no anticipation can be asserted. This is the reference I would pull first after 131404.
• Note: The record shows a second, independent pre-filing "Improvement in Cultivators," US 147,616 (1874), below.

---

Reference D — US 133,187

• Full citation: "Improvement in Plows," U.S. Patent No. 133,187 (patented Nov. 19, 1872).
• Publication date: 1872-11-19. (Filing date not retrieved.)
• Brief description: Unknown on the record — title only. Content not verified.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates: Candidate target — the "plows F" element of claims 1 and 2, and only in the abstract. A plow improvement cannot anticipate claims 1 or 2, which are combination claims requiring the wheel/axle, revolving disk shaft, and trailing harrow. Residual relevance: possible support for the proposition that narrow sharp-edged plow blades were old (the Alderson plows F are described as "sharp and narrow" with a "sharp front edge"), which could bear on the "want of invention" inquiry for that element. Verdict on the record: no anticipation.

---

Reference E — US 147,616

• Full citation: "Improvement in Cultivators," U.S. Patent No. 147,616 (patented Feb. 17, 1874).
• Publication date: 1874-02-17. (Filing date not retrieved.)
• Brief description: Unknown on the record — title only. Content not verified.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates: Candidate target — claim 1 and claim 2. Same reasoning as Reference C: it is in the wheel-cultivator family. Anticipation would require it to show the disk-plow-harrow tandem and the axle-draft/handle-raise architecture. No anticipation asserted pending review of the full disclosure.

---

Reference F — US 233,730

• Full citation: "Harrow and Cultivator," U.S. Patent No. 233,730 (patented Oct. 26, 1880).
• Publication date: 1880-10-26. (Filing date not retrieved.)
• Brief description: Unknown on the record — title only. Content not verified. By its title it is the only pre-filing document in the "Similar Documents" set that names both a harrow and a cultivator, making it the most topically aligned single reference in the list.
• Which claim(s) it potentially anticipates: Candidate target — claim 1 and claim 2, because it is the only pre-filing entry whose title spans both the cultivating and harrowing functions. But claims 1 and 2 both require rotary cutting-disks on a revolving shaft with plows between them — a harrow-and-cultivator combination drawn by a tongue would not meet the disk element or the "drawn by the axle of the wheel A" limitation. No anticipation asserted; disclosure retrieval required. (It is also the pre-filing reference whose disclosure would be most worth obtaining if a validity opinion were commissioned.)

---

Interim-period documents (post-filing, pre-issue) — flagged, not prior art

I flag these two specifically because they are the temporally closest documents to US 308,866 in the entire record, and a careless automated search could wrongly treat them as anticipatory. Under the April 8, 1884 filing date, they are not.

---

7. Verified-highest-relevance prior art: consolidated answer

Nothing in this record anticipates US 308,866 on the evidence I could verify. The only reference whose disclosure I actually inspected — US 131,404 (Lund) — is a two-wheel, tongue-drawn wheel-cultivator with drag-bar shovels, a depth gage, and a rock-shaft/lever lifting mechanism, and it lacks both of the elements that define claim 1 (cutting-disks E on a revolving shaft, and a harrow G behind the plows) and both elements that define claim 2 (disks E and harrow G in combination).

---

8. Caveats and what would change this answer

1. Zero citations is a finding, not an absence of search effort. I searched for "308866," "US308866," "3,088,866," Alderson + 1884 + cultivator, and for a "Patent Citations"/"References Cited" field, and separately for retrievable text of the pre-1884 "Similar Documents." The record has no citation field to populate.
2. Four of the six pre-filing candidates are title-only in my analysis (198,710; 192,060; 147,616; 233,730) because I hit the tool-step limit while retrieving full text. Any of them could, in principle, disclose a disk-plus-plow-plus-harrow arrangement; that would be the single fact most likely to change this opinion. Full-text retrieval of US 233,730 and US 192,060 is the priority.
3. The 1884 examiner's references, if any, are in the un-digitized paper file wrapper for Application filed April 8, 1884. Those are the "true" citations for this patent, and they are not available in the source I used.
4. Statutory caveat repeated: § 102 as such did not exist in 1884; the operative provisions were R.S. §§ 4886/4920, and there was no statutory § 103. Any "§ 102 anticipation / § 103 obviousness" table for this patent is an anachronistic overlay used for analytical convenience.
5. The intermediate "Post-filing, pre-issue" and "Post-issue" items (23 of the 25) are, at most, evidence of the later development of the art. They cannot be § 102 art against an April 8, 1884 filing. Several (e.g., US 914,921 "Disk cultivator," 1909; US 474,269 and US 869,834 "Harrow attachment for plows," 1892/1907) are thematically adjacent but chronologically irrelevant to validity.
6. No contradiction was found with the previously generated Litigation section. Its dates, inventor, and title data match this record.

Bottom line: USPTO/Google Patents record US 308,866 lists no patent citations and no forward citations. The most relevant available (algorithmic) cross-references are the six pre-filing documents US 131,404, US 133,187, US 147,616, US 192,060, US 198,710, and US 233,730; none of those, on the evidence verified, anticipates claim 1 or claim 2, and the one whose text I confirmed (US 131,404) affirmatively lacks the disk-and-harrow elements that both claims require.

I'll pull the details of the pre-1884 references in the Prior Art ("Similar Documents") cluster, since only references predating the 1884-04-08 filing can be § 103 prior art.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 308,866 (Alderson, "Device for Cutting, Harrowing, and Loosening Ground")

Built on the previously generated litigation, PTAB, and strategic sections. I do not repeat their content; where they bear on this analysis I cross-reference them.

---

0. Threshold framing: which obviousness statute actually applies

Flagging this up front because it materially changes how you write a rejection.

An 1884 patent was examined and (if ever) litigated under the pre-1952 "invention vs. mere mechanical skill" test. § 103(a) did not exist. The instruction was to analyze under § 103, so I do — but note the 19th-century test is a stricter obviousness standard in one respect and a looser one in another: it demanded a "flash of genius"-like qualitative judgment (later repudiated by § 103's passage and by KSR), yet contemporaneous decisions applied it in exactly the way KSR describes predictable variation of known elements in the same field.

Two contemporaneous decisions surfaced in my searches are directly on point as evidence of how the standard actually operated in this exact art:

• National Harrow Co. v. Wescott, 84 F. 672 (C.C.N.D.N.Y. 1898) — Cobb patent 224,273 (1880) held void for want of invention: "it required only the skill of the mechanic to do with spring-teeth precisely what had previously been done with rigid teeth… he simply took a well-known tooth and fastened it to a well-known frame by well-known means." (CourtListener; 84 F. 672)
• Union Harrow Co. v. Robert O. Reeves Co., 88 F. 702 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1898) — on La Dow patent 301,729, applying the same test but rescuing the patent only on a seven-year failure of others to solve one specific problem. (88 F. 702)

That is the analytic template a 19th-century examiner or court would have used on Alderson, and it is the template I apply below.

Data caveat carried forward: the claim text is OCR-corrupted ("plews," "barrow," "9. harrow, G."). I analyze the claim elements below as reconstructed, per the earlier section's warning that the interlineated text is not a reliable source of scope. Nothing below should be quoted in a filing without the original two-sheet PDF.

---

1. What the claims actually cover

Claim 1 (device claim) — a device for cutting, loosening, and harrowing ground, composed of:

1. a wheel A having an axle;
2. a beam attached to the axle;
3. arms supporting a revolving shaft;
4. cutting disks E on that shaft;
5. plows F attached behind and between said disks;
6. a harrow G placed behind the plows;
7. said disks, plows, and harrow having attachments so as to be drawn by the axle of the wheel A and raised by handles D.

Claim 2 (combination claim) — the same, minus the beam: wheel A with revolving disks E, plows F, and harrow G, with attachments to be drawn by the wheel-A axle and raised by handles D.

Not claimed (specification only), and therefore available to an obviousness analysis only as context: the slotted plow holes f² for pitch regulation; the wooden safety pin f³; the forked arms f⁴; the toothed cross-piece g³; width adjustability to row; the optional sulky. These are unclaimed and, as shown below, separately old.

This matters: the claims are essentially a spatial arrangement plus a functional statement. Element 7 is the only non-structural limitation, and it recites the result of mounting the trailing assembly on the wheel's axle and actuating it with handles — the classic "functional statement" objection that was raised verbatim in the contemporary interference papers I retrieved ("the alleged novelty… lies solely in a functional limitation… too broad, because it would monopolize the novel function of the combination").

---

2. Prior-art availability screen (the "Similar Documents" list)

The Google Patents prior-art list is machine-generated on shared CPC/keywords, not an examiner's search. Only references dated before 1884-04-08 can be § 102(a)/§ 103 art; only those dated before 1883-04-08 get the stronger § 102(b) status.

2a. Available — pre-1883-04-08 (§ 102(b) class)

2b. Available — within one year of filing (§ 102(a) class only)

2c. NOT available — post-filing references in the same list

These appear in the ""Similar Documents" cluster but post-date the 1884-04-08 filing, and several post-date the 1884-12-09 grant. They cannot be § 102/§ 103 prior art against 308,866 (except that § 102(e)/(g) could apply if a pre-1884-04-08 filing date were established — no such date is shown on this page):

US 307,756 (1884-11-11) · US 308,163 (1884-11-18) · US 310,828 (1885-01-13) · US 395,784 (1889-01-08) · US 401,297 (1889-04-09) · US 426,888 (1890-04-29) · US 427,142 (1890-05-06) · US 439,469 (1890-10-28) · US 447,305 (1891-03-03) · US 466,772 (1892-01-12) · US 474,269 (1892-05-03) · US 476,299 (1892-06-07) · US 492,692 (1893-02-28) · US 688,958 (1901-12-17) · US 707,801 (1902-08-26) · US 869,834 (1907-10-29) · US 914,921 (1909-03-09) · US 1,003,481 (1911-09-19) · US 1,241,382 (1917-09-25)

Note for the record: the earlier litigation section's "Similar Documents" description should be read with this screen applied — the cluster mixes 1872–1883 art with 1889–1917 art, and only the former is usable against Alderson.

Their positive use is different and, for a modern defendant, more valuable: they are evidence that the very combination Alderson claimed was the industry's predictable next step (e.g., US 914,921, "Disk cultivator," 1909; US 466,772 and US 476,299, combined cultivators; US 869,834, harrow attachment for plows). That's a KSR-style "design incentive / predictable variation" showing, not a § 102 reference.

---

3. Element-by-element mapping of Claim 1

Claim 2 maps identically; its only difference (no "beam" recitation) removes an element and therefore cannot be more patentable than Claim 1.

---

4. Grounds of obviousness

Ground 1 — Lund (US 131,404) + Jefferson (US 243,705) + Tolle & Wirth (US 198,710)

Teaches: Lund gives elements 1, 2, 3, 5 (wheel-axle-tongue frame, drag-bars pivoted beneath the axle, shovels/standards, gage for depth, rock-shaft and lever for lifting). Jefferson gives element 4 (revolving disks or teeth hung in gangs on a shaft, in holding-frames, with a hand-lever to elevate the gang). Tolle & Wirth give element 6 (trailing toothed bar with adjustable tooth inclination for deep/level work).

Motivation: All three are A01B soil-working implements addressing the same problem — kill weeds, loosen soil, level the surface, in fewer passes with less draft. Lund's own gage and rock-shaft exist to control and lift a ground-engaging gang; substituting a revolving-disk gang for the shovel gang is the very "substitution of one known element for another to obtain the predictable result" that KSR and Hotchkiss treated as unpatentable. Jefferson supplies the express teaching that revolving disks/teeth gang on a shaft with lever elevation, and — critically — that they ride over obstructions and need only spring or gravity to hold them to the soil, solving the draft problem Alderson claims to solve ("lighter on the horse and man"). Adding a trailing harrow to a cultivator was, by 1880, the tritest of arrangements: the art is full of "combined harrows and cultivators" (US 163,523, 1875-05-18; US 177,685, 1876-05-23; US 193,999, 1877).

Ground 2 — Ellwood & Pitcher (US 177,063/RE 7,560) + US 190,104 + Nishwitz (US 225,634) or Low (US 227,551)

Teaches: Ellwood is the closest single frame reference for claim 1's back half — axle, wheels, main frame, drag-bars with plow standards, elevating levers, chains, running-depth adjustment, and a spec expressly contemplating "any of the well-known forms" of axle, tongue, drag-bars, standards, and plows. Reynolds (US 190,104) supplies revolving disks in a plough. Nishwitz (US 225,634) supplies a toothed gang bar hinged in rear of a forward soil-engaging body with vertical adjustment. Low (US 227,551) supplies cutting knives followed by soil-turning blades and the express norm of removing elements "in cultivating corn."

Motivation: Ellwood's drag-bar frame is Alderson's "beam + arms + handles" structure, and it is expressly designed to work with "any of the well-known forms" of plow and standard — an invitation to substitute working tools. Nishwitz's rear hinged tooth gang performs exactly the smoothing/leveling function Alderson attributes to harrow G ("serves to smooth the ground and tear loose the weeds and grass that have been cut"). The forward-cutting/rear-smoothing sequence was the standard two-stage tillage practice of the era, as Alderson's own specification concedes.

Ground 3 — Ganse (1856) + Jefferson (US 243,705) + Tolle & Wirth (US 198,710) — the "one skilled in the art would build this" ground

Teaches: Ganse is a straddle-row corn cultivator — the identical commercial purpose Alderson states ("especially in tending corn"). It has: wheels on an axle; a beam/cross-bar on that axle; plough beams adjustable to any requisite distance from each other with the wheel track narrowed by sliding arms; a lever-and-roller lift; depth regulated by holes in brackets; and a driver's seat behind the axle so that weight is positioned to relieve the team. That last feature is a pre-emptive answer to Alderson's own "sulky" note and to his claim that the large wheel "serves as a fulcrum." Add Jefferson's revolving gang on a shaft and Tolle & Wirth's adjustable trailing tooth bar.

Motivation: For a straddle-row corn cultivator, the problem is symmetric and well-known: cut the weeds in the middle and sides of the row without throwing soil onto the plants, and leave the surface level to conserve moisture. Ganse solves it with fixed ploughs at adjustable width; Jefferson solves it with revolving gangs at adjustable width. Combining a revolving cutting gang ahead of fixed ploughs (the ones between the gangs loosening the strip the disks did not touch) is a straightforward implementation choice for a person of ordinary skill with Ganse in hand, and the count of elements is unchanged — the claims recite a rearrangement, not a new mode of operation.

Ground 4 — US 231,582 (Ives, 1883) in view of US 193,999 (1877) and US 198,710 (1877)

Ives's digest entry (Allen, Digest of Agricultural Patents, claim 5) recites "two sets [of] rotating pointed rods or teeth, E, converging rearwardly, and curved pointed rods or teeth K, arranged at suitable distances apart on the outer side of the set of rotating teeth in planes parallel with the line of draft," with "the sleeve I, supporting the forward ends of the arms H, and made laterally adjustable on the frame," and "curved teeth K, arranged between the several sets of rotating teeth and secured to laterally-adjustable arms L."

That is element 5 (ground-working members between revolving cutting members) plus Alderson's unclaimed width adjustability to the row, in a row-crop cultivator context. Sanders (US 193,999) adds ploughs on a shaft with raised/lowered rear rotary elements. Tolle & Wirth adds the trailing toothed bar.

Motivation: Ives's own specification states the reason for placing fixed teeth between the rotating sets — to work the ground between the several sets without turning it over "on both sides of the same row of plants and between the rows." That is Alderson's stated purpose for the plows. Where the reference itself articulates the same problem and the same solution, the combination is not merely suggested — it is taught.

Caveat: Ivers' rotating "pointed rods or teeth" are not literally "disks," and the digest OCR of its filing date is corrupt. This ground is strongest as a motivation showing; do not rest an anticipation argument on it without pulling the original.

Ground 5 — Utter (US 197,503) for the safety-pin feature (unclaimed, but relevant to a § 103 attack on any later patent reciting it)

Alderson's slotted holes f² and wooden pin f³ ("to regulate the slant or pitch of the plows, and to serve as safety-pins to break") are, in substance: (a) a slot allowing pitch adjustment, and (b) a sacrificial element that yields on overload to prevent damage to more costly parts. Utter's slip-arm h with slot h′ does both in one structure — "changing the pitch of the shovels," and on obstruction "the slot h′ will permit the arm to slide forward, permitting the shovel to swing back to pass or ride over obstructions without breaking… the force required to cause the parts to slip can be regulated by means of the screw-bolt." The replacement of a frangible break-pin with a slotted slip joint (or vice versa) is a classic obvious equivalent. I did not locate a pre-1884 reference claiming a wooden break-pin in a plow standard in this page's list; that is an open item if you need to attack the f³ feature specifically.

---

5. The motivation-to-combine case, stated generally

A § 103 (or Hotchkiss) rejection of Alderson can be built on any of five independent motivation theories, none requiring hindsight:

1. Identical field and identical problem. Every reference above is a wheeled or dragged soil-working implement for row crops; the stated objects (cut, loosen, level, kill weeds, conserve moisture, reduce draft) are recited in the references themselves — Ganse ("cultivating corn, cotton, potatoes, and other field crops"), Low ("In cultivating corn the inner mold-boards F will be removed"), Tolle & Wirth ("break, and level the lumps and heavier clods"), Jefferson (disks "ride over obstructions"), Ives (work the ground "between the rows of plants"). No field-of-endeavor barrier exists to overcome.

2. Known interchangeability of ground-engaging tools on a common frame. Ellwood's specification expressly contemplates "any of the well-known forms" of drag-bars, standards, and plows; Jefferson expressly notes "teeth, fingers, or knives… may be employed with equal success" in place of disks; La Dow's 1877 patent and the Union Harrow record establish that angulated disk gangs were standard. Substituting a disk gang for, or placing it ahead of, a shovel gang is design-choice, not invention.

3. The prior art teaches the spacing, ordering, and adjustment Alderson claims. Ives places fixed teeth between rotating sets and makes the frame laterally adjustable; Sanders places ploughs and rotary wheels in tandem on one frame; Alderson's "behind and between" limitation therefore reads on the prior art's own geometry.

4. The claimed lifting/draft arrangement was a solved, well-documented problem. Ganse 1856 (lever p, fulcrum q, roller r); Lund 1872 (rock-shaft, eccentric wheel K, lever L); Ellwood 1876 (levers H + chains g); Kynett 1877 (lever e + bar F); and the Brown pipe-box line of decisions (arm M rocked on the axle by a spring or the draught itself) all teach exactly Alderson's element 7 — lift the rear assembly by force applied at the axle. Brown's cases even document the reason (relieving the plowman of "considerable strength") and the commercial acceptance of the axle-as-fulcrum solution — which, in the contemporaneous Brown line, was treated as the difference between failure and success, and thus could cut against obviousness if Alderson had been the one to take that step. He was not; he took it in 1884, years after Stover (1870), Brown (1872), Lund (1872), and Kynett (1877).

5. No new result. The claims recite cutting + loosening + harrowing as the result of drawing and raising a combination of old tools. The specification asserts the result (steady, light on the horse and man, moisture retention) but presents no data, no comparative test, and no unexpected property. Cutting, loosening, and smoothing are the ordinary functions of disks, plows, and harrows respectively; aggregating them does not produce a new co-action.

---

6. Where an obviousness case is weakest (be candid)

• No single-reference anticipation located. No pre-1884 document in this list discloses all of (i) wheel/axle prime mover, (ii) revolving cutting disks on a shaft ahead of (iii) plows between and behind the disks, and (iv) a trailing harrow, in one device. This is a § 103 case, not § 102. The earlier section's observation that 308,866 is "a § 102(a)(1) printed publication against any modern claim" remains true — but against 308,866 itself, the pre-1884 art requires combination.

• The specific "between the disks" limitation is thinly supported. US 231,582 (Ives) is the best pre-1884 reference on that point, and its "rotating pointed rods or teeth" are not literally disks, its date needs verification, and the OCR is corrupt. US 193,999 supports ploughs-on-a-shaft followed by rotary elements, but in a different order.

• The frangible wooden pin f³ has no clean pre-1884 counterpart on this page. Utter's slotted slip-arm is an equivalent, not an identity. Diligent search of the 1870s–80s plow-standard art (and of agricultural periodicals such as Rural Affairs, which surfaces in these results) would be needed before asserting this feature would have been obvious.

• Claim-construction risk. Because "plows F" and "harrow G" are not defined structurally in the claims beyond "sharp and narrow" and "one or more rows of teeth," a patentee could argue that the claim is limited to the specific forked-arm/f⁴ and toothed-cross-piece/g³ structures shown — which would narrow the claim and change the prior-art mapping. Get the original PDF.

• No objective evidence of nonobviousness is available either. No assignee, no commercial-success record, no copying evidence, no long-felt-need narrative attributable to Alderson individually. In the contemporaneous decisions, that absence was decisive against validity (see National Harrow Co. v. Wescott) except where a documented years-long failure of others existed (Union Harrow Co. v. Reeves).

---

7. Bottom line

On this record, claims 1 and 2 of US 308,866 would have been held unpatentable for want of invention under the standard in force in 1884, and are obvious under a modern § 103 analysis by at least four independent combinations:

The strongest single motivation is not any one reference but the corpus itself: a dozen A01B references between 1856 and 1883 that individually and collectively disclose a wheel/axle frame, gangs of revolving ground-engaging members on a shaft, fixed ground-working members between them, trailing toothed bars, lever-on-the-axle lifting, and width adjustment to the row — with the same stated objects Alderson recites.

Two practical consequences, tying back to the prior sections:

1. For a defendant facing a modern row-crop implement claim, this analysis should be inverted and used offensively: 308,866 plus any two of US 131,404, US 177,063, US 198,710, US 225,634, US 227,551, US 231,582, and US 243,705 form a pre-1884 combination that makes most disk-plus-shovel-plus-harrow arrangements obvious. Have your expert credential each as a printed publication as of its issue date.
2. For a recipient of a demand letter citing 308,866, the expiration answer (1901-12-09) remains the complete and simpler answer; this § 103 analysis is a belt-and-suspenders alternative, and it is also the framing you would use if a later, live patent is asserted against the same structure.

---

Verification notes and open items

• Dates I confirmed this session: US 131,404 (1872-09-17); US 198,710 (1877-12-25, filed 1877-10-05); US 225,634 (1880-03-16, filed 1879-09-17); US 227,551 (1880-05-11, filed 1880-04-13); US 227,862 (1880-05-18, filed 1880-02-18); US 177,063 (1876-05-09) / RE 7,560 (1877-03-20); US 192,922 (1877-07-10, filed 1877-06-20); US 193,362 (1877-07-24, filed 1877-05-14); US 187,392 (1877-02-13, per Union Harrow); US 301,729 (1884-07-08 — post-filing, unusable); Ganse specification dated 1856-04-05.
• Dates NOT verified (number- or digest-based; verify before citing): US 197,503; US 243,705; US 190,104; US 193,999; US 231,582 (its digest entry shows a filing date of "May 8, 1889" against an 1883-08-24 grant — irreconcilable; resolve from the original).
• Carried-forward data-quality warning: the Google Patents record titles this patent "Jesse w"; the specification identifies Jesse W. Alderson of Washburn, Barry County, Missouri; application filed 1884-04-08; granted 1884-12-09; anticipated expiration 1901-12-09. The OCR of the claims is severely interleaved.
• Date discrepancy noted previously (prompt date vs. system date) is immaterial to this analysis and is not repeated here.
• I was unable to run a dedicated pre-1884 search for the wooden break-pin/safety-pin feature (element f³) — flagged in § 6.

Assertion: no statement above should be filed as a validity contention without first pulling the original two-sheet PDF and the original specifications of US 131,404, US 177,063, US 198,710, US 225,634, US 227,551, US 231,582, and US 243,705; the OCR of every one of these pre-1900 records contains corruptions that go to claim-scope precision.