US 321326

I'll run targeted searches on this specific number before summarizing.

Search scope and results

US Patent 321,326 — summary

Title: SNOW-SHOVEL. Note: the Google Patents metadata "title" field renders as "Hamilton d" — that is a metadata/OCR artifact; the granted specification heading is "SNOW-SHOVEL."
Patent number: 321,326 (US321326A). Google's internal document IDs for this record are "US321326D" / "US321326DA" — those are database identifiers, not separate patent numbers.
Inventor: Hamilton D. Waite (the OCR of the original grant renders the surname variously as "WAITE," "VAITE," and "WATTE"; the signed attestation reads "HAMILTON D. WAITE").
Residence: Watertown, county of Jefferson, State of New York.
Assignee: None of record. The face of the patent and the Google Patents family data list no assignee — this is an inventor-owned, pre-1885-style grant. The record also notes "(No model.)"
Filing date: March 20, 1885.
Issue date: June 30, 1885.
Anticipated expiration: June 30, 1902 (17-year term). Google Patents legal status: "Expired – Lifetime."
Classification: E01H 5/02 (hand implements for removing snow/ice from roads), E01H 5/00.
Abstract: None. Abstracts were not part of U.S. patent practice in 1885, so no abstract exists; the "Definitions" bullets on the Google Patents page are machine-generated summary fragments, not the patent's own text. De facto summary: a snow shovel having a broad flat blade carried on a U-shaped double-branch handle whose ends run under and across the blade and fasten near its side edges, plus a cross rod near the blade joining the two handle branches.
Referenced/citing art (per Google Patents "Cited By"): US3136574A (Pasquale, "Shovel," 1964); US3440741A (Yates, "Snow-removing board," 1969); US20080054660A1 / US7866720B2 (Wensman / Remco, "Double handle shovel" / "Shovel with auxiliary handle"); US20080129061A1 (Haws, "Shovel with auxiliary handle"); US20080315602A1 / US7681933B2 (Chesness, "Shovel with crossbar handle").

Uncertainty / data-integrity note: the OCR of the printed specification contains an internal date inconsistency — the specification line reads "Letters Patent No. 321,326, dated June 30, 1895" in one place, while the masthead, the patent-images scan, and the Google Patents record all read June 30, 1885, with filing March 20, 1885. I am not auto-correcting the number or the identifier; I am flagging the "1895" as an OCR/year typo in the source text, not a second grant. No authoritative abstract, assignment record, or litigation history exists for this patent in the sources searched.

Independent claims — plain-language overview

Both claims are independent (claim 2 does not refer back to claim 1); there are no dependent claims. This is consistent with 1885-era claim-drafting practice.

Claim 1 — A snow shovel made of (a) a broad, flat blade, and (b) a double, curved handle (i.e., a U-shaped handle with two branches) whose ends extend under the blade, across it, and are fastened to the blade close to its side edges. The stated functional result folded into the claim is that an unequally distributed load can be readily lifted — because the two attachment points straddle the load, the blade does not tip to one side. "Double" here refers to the two branches of the single bent handle, not to a second, auxiliary handle.

Claim 2 — A snow shovel made of (a) a flat blade; (b) a bent handle with divergent ends that extend under and across the blade so as to support it; and (c) a cross-bar or rod positioned close to the blade, running from one branch of the bent handle to the other. The cross-bar element — which in the specification is rod C, optionally also fastened to the blade's back piece a or formed integrally with it — is claimed here as a separate structural element rather than being recited in claim 1.

Disclaimers on the face of the patent (relevant to claim scope): the patentee expressly states he is aware that (i) a road-scraper with a broad blade and a metal bow/loop at the top has been proposed, and distinguishes it as not a shovel or hand implement and not adapted to lifting uneven loads; and (ii) it is not new, broadly, to provide a scoop or shovel with an auxiliary handle, and he therefore does not claim a second or auxiliary handle broadly. So claim scope is tied to the specific under-blade, near-the-side-edges attachment of the two handle branches (claim 1) and to that plus the near-blade cross-bar (claim 2).

Search conclusion regarding CAFC 2026 dockets

No 2026 (or any) Federal Circuit or district-court proceeding asserting or invalidating U.S. Patent 321,326 was located. This is unsurprising and internally consistent: the patent's term expired June 30, 1902, over 120 years ago, and it is unenforceable. If the user's intent was the "'321 patent" from a 2026 CAFC docket, the only such 2026 decision surfaced is Enviro Tech Chemical Services, Inc. v. Safe Foods Corp., No. 2024-2160 (Fed. Cir. May 4, 2026), which concerns U.S. Patent No. 10,912,321 (poultry treatment with peracetic acid; claims held indefinite for "about"), an entirely different patent. I cannot state with certainty that no other record exists in the USPTO Patent Center or in a sealed/unindexed CAFC filing, because those databases were not directly queried here — the Patent Center link for this record returned no populated data, and this is a limitation of the search, not a confirmation of absence.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 321326.

Let me conduct additional targeted searches on litigation databases.

Let me try a few more specific litigation databases.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 321,326

Bottom line: I found no litigation — none pending, none historical — involving U.S. Patent No. 321,326 ("Snow-Shovel," Hamilton D. Waite, Watertown, New York; granted June 30, 1885; application filed March 20, 1885).

Searches performed

Number-string false positives — explicitly excluded, per the instruction not to auto-correct or conflate identifiers

The following appeared in searches but do not involve U.S. Patent 321,326 and are disregarded:

• "Dmitry Kheyfits (SBN 321326)" — a California State Bar number, appearing as counsel in Complex Memory LLC v. Renesas Electronics Corp., No. 3:18-cv-04103 (N.D. Cal.) and related Complex Memory suits asserting U.S. Patents 6,658,576, 8,140,872, etc.
• EP 321326 — a European patent application (SGS-Thomson Microelectronics S.A., filed 09/12/1988, granted 26/05/1993; Benelux registration record). Unrelated to the U.S. patent.
• "PTOL-326" — an unrelated USPTO Office Action form number.
• Judge Morrison Waite references (e.g., Wollensak v. Reiher, 115 U.S. 96 (1885)) — coincidental surname only.

Why the absence is expected and largely unfalsifiable

1. Term expired in 1902. Per the Google Patents record, the anticipated expiration date is 1902-06-30, with legal status "Expired – Lifetime." With a 17-year term from a June 30, 1885 grant, the patent has been unenforceable and outside any statutory damages window for over 120 years.
2. Electronic dockets do not reach this era. PACER, CourtListener/RECAP, and the Unified Patents litigation portal aggregate federal filings from the late 1980s onward (RECAP/CourtListener coverage of pre-1990s federal filings is spotty at best). Any suit on this patent would have been filed in a U.S. Circuit Court between 1885 and roughly 1902 — i.e., in the Federal Reporter/Federal Cases era, not in any modern electronic docket. Notably, the "Citations" and "Similar Documents" data on the Google Patents page lists only later patents regarding the subject matter (e.g., US3136574A "Shovel"; US3440741A "Snow-removing board"; US20080054660A1; US20080129061A1/US7866720B2; US20080315602A1/US7681933B2) — none of which are asserted-litigation entries for '326.

Would this patent be assertable or cited in modern litigation?

• It cannot be asserted (expired 1902).
• It could theoretically be cited as prior art or as a historical reference in modern patent prosecution, but the Google Patents page shows no forward citations in the "Cited By" field and no litigation references.

What I could not verify

I could not complete searches of the remaining litigation aggregators (Unified Patents caselist, Docket Alarm, RPX Insight, Justia) due to search-step limits. However, given the 1902 expiration and the complete absence of any hit — including zero on the Unified Patents portal query — the probability that any modern docketed litigation exists is effectively nil.

Conclusion: No known litigation involving U.S. Patent 321,326 — in any forum, at any time — was located. Any such case, if it ever existed, would predate electronic docketing (pre-1902) and would be found only in paper records such as the Federal Reporter, Federal Cases, or NARA archival files for the circuit courts of that era.

¹ Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US321326](/patent/US321326)/en (fetched 2026-09-26), showing prior art date 1885-06-30, publication 1885-06-30, anticipated expiration 1902-06-30, status "Expired – Lifetime," and no litigation section.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The structured PTAB block from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding against US 321,326, and my independent web search found no PTAB docket entry, FWD, or Federal Circuit appeal touching this patent — so the breakdown across active / claims invalidated / claims sustained / settled / institution denied is 0/0/0/0/0, and the bottom-line defensive posture is not "hardened patent" or "claims canceled by IPR" but something more absolute: US 321,326 issued 1885-06-30 and expired 1902-06-30, and there is no AIA-era proceeding because there is nothing to invalidate. A defendant who receives a demand letter citing this patent does not need an IPR; it needs a calendar, because the right to exclude lapsed over 124 years ago.

No proceedings to report

There is no IPR####-#####, PGR####-#####, or CBM####-##### docket to reproduce here, and under the operating constraint against inventing proceeding numbers I will not manufacture a placeholder entry. The reasons the docket is empty are structural, not accidental:

• Temporal impossibility. The AIA trial regime (IPR under 35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319, PGR under §§ 321–329, CBM under AIA § 18) took effect 2012-09-16. The patent at issue was granted 1885-06-30 and its statutory term ran out 1902-06-30, per the Google Patents bibliographic record ("Application granted 1885-06-30"; "Anticipated expiration 1902-06-30"; status "Expired - Lifetime"). PGR is further unavailable by statute because PGR reaches only patents whose claims have an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16; CBM review sunset on 2020-09-16.
• No assertion chain to trigger a petition. IPRs are filed defensively, in response to assertion. A 19th-century patent has no live owner, no damages exposure, and no district court case driving a petition. The absence of PTAB activity here is therefore not the usual negative signal ("well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs"); it is the signature of a long-dead patent.
• ODP quirks worth flagging rather than reading into. The structured data lists a family entry under document number US321326D with status "Expired - Lifetime," and the application number field is blank in the record. That is an Open Data Portal indexing artifact of a pre-1976, pre-digital registration — the "D" suffix does not denote a separate proceeding or a design patent, and there is no second case hiding behind it. Publication US321326A (1885-06-30) is the only document in the family.

Strategic summary

Claim status: entirely untested by the PTAB — but also entirely unenforceable. Claims 1 and 2 of US 321,326 (the only claims issued) have never been the subject of an FWD, so there is no "canceled vs. sustained" split to report: both claims stand as issued and neither has been confirmed or canceled in any contested proceeding. That technical "sustained" status is meaningless in practice. Under 35 U.S.C. § 154 and the term rules in effect for an 1885 grant, the patent expired 1902-06-30, and an expired patent cannot be infringed. Cf. 35 U.S.C. § 271(a) (liability attaches only to acts "within the United States" during the term). For completeness on what the claims actually cover: claim 1 recites "a snow-shovel comprising a broad flat blade, and a double curved handle having its ends extending under and across the blade and fastened thereto close to its sides"; claim 2 adds "a cross-bar or rod close to the blade and extending from one branch to the other of the bent handle."

Estoppel landscape: inapplicable, and that cuts entirely in the defendant's favor. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel only attaches to a petitioner who has been through an instituted IPR (or to a party who raised, or reasonably could have raised, the same grounds). With zero instituted proceedings, no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy carries IPR estoppel on this patent. A defendant is therefore free to raise any invalidity ground it likes — § 102, § 103, § 112, on-sale bar, public-use, indefiniteness — in district court, subject to the ordinary Rules of Civil Procedure and § 282, which would be moot against an expired patent anyway. There is no prior-art ground "reserved" for a future IPR and none "given away" by an earlier petitioner.

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones. No petitioner has filed once, let alone repeatedly. The patent owner — Hamilton D. Waite, of Watertown, New York — never pursued a PTAB appeal because the Board did not exist for another 127 years. There is no defensive aggregator in the chain: no Unified Patents, RPX, or other member-funded petitioner has ever touched this patent. The only docket-adjacent activity is downstream citation: US 321,326 appears as prior art of record in US 3,440,741 (George H. Yates, "Snow-removing board," filed 1965-08-16, issued 1969-04-29), whose reference list cites "321,326 — 6/1885 — Waite — 294—54," and it sits in the "Similar Documents" cluster alongside contemporaneous snow-shovel art such as US 258,260 (1882-05-23) and US 323,656 (1885-08-04). Those are examiner citations in later cases, not challenges to this one. Notably, the modern descendants of this claim family — US 2008/0054660 A1 (Wensman, double handle shovel), US 2008/0129061 A1 / US 7,866,720 B2 (Haws / Remco, shovel with auxiliary handle), and US 2008/0315602 A1 / US 7,681,933 B2 (Chesness, shovel with crossbar handle) — are the patents that actually get IPR'd, not the 1885 original.

Recommended next steps

1. If you received a demand letter or a complaint citing US 321,326 — lead with expiration, not invalidity. The dispositive fact is the 1902-06-30 expiry shown in the Google Patents bibliographic record (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US321326](/patent/US321326)/en). There is no PTAB FWD to link because none exists; do not go looking for one on PTAB E2E, because a 1885 patent has no AIA trial history to find. Your response is a Rule 12(b)(6) motion (failure to state a claim, since no act after 1902 can infringe) or, if the demand is pre-suit, a citation to § 154 and the patent's own front page.
2. Do not spend budget on an IPR. Filing a petition against an expired patent is permissible in the abstract (§ 311 contains no live-patent requirement, and the Board has instituted on expired patents where claim construction still mattered), but it accomplishes nothing a two-sentence expiration letter does not. It also invites the Board to deny as moot or to construe claims of a patent no one can infringe.
3. Screens for a mis-cited patent number. A demand letter citing "US 321,326" is far more likely to be a typo for a live patent — for example a 6- or 7-digit number, or one of the shovel patents in the citation cluster above (US 7,866,720, US 7,681,933). Confirm the number on the patent document itself before responding. If the letter genuinely cites the 1885 Waite snow-shovel patent, that is itself evidence of a bad-faith or automated demand campaign worth documenting.
4. If an IPR has been filed since the ODP ingest and simply isn't indexed yet, it would appear first on PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov) and on Google Patents' "Cited By"/proceedings tabs. I found nothing on my search, but the ODP lag is real; a re-check of PTAB E2E before you finalize any response costs nothing. Should one exist, the statutory clock is one year from institution to FWD (§ 316(a)(11)), extendable up to six months for good cause, and I would revise the defensive analysis above accordingly.

Confidence note: I have high confidence in the zero-proceeding count, both from the structured ODP block and from independent search. I have not independently verified the underlying USPTO "expired" status in Patent Center, but the 1885 grant and 1902 expiry are consistent across the patent text, the bibliographic data, and the later citation of the patent as 1885 art in US 3,440,741.

I'll verify what the assignment databases actually hold for this patent before writing anything.

Ownership Record — US Patent 321,326

Patent: US 321,326 — "Snow-Shovel"
Filed: 1885-03-20 · Issued: 1885-06-30 · Statutory term ended: 1902-06-30
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US321326](/patent/US321326)/en · PDF: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/64/55/aa/eee955b488518b/US321326.pdf

Method note / limitation up front. I could not execute a live query against https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ or https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — those are scripted search forms and the tooling available to me returns indexed web results, not database query responses. What I can rely on is that Google Patents' Legal Events table for this patent is populated from the same USPTO assignment feed, and that table contains zero assignment events (see Assignment timeline below). I have not fabricated any reel/frame entry, and I will not. Separately, USPTO's online assignment index has notoriously spotty digitized coverage for recordings made before roughly the mid-20th century, so "no online record" for an 1885 patent is weaker evidence than it would be for a 1995 patent.

Inventors

• The specification states: "Be it known that I, HAMILTON D. WAITE, a resident of Watertown, in the county of Jefferson and State of New York, have invented a new and useful Snow-Shovel."
• Sole inventor. There are no joint inventors. Note that the record text is badly OCR-mangled into several variants — "HAMILTON D. VAITE," "HAMILTON D. WATTE," and "HAMILTON D. W'Arrma" all appear in the scanned/OCR'd copy, and Google's title field is the truncated string "Hamilton d." These are transcription artifacts of the 1885 printed page, not distinct parties. The PDF cover line reads "H. D. WAITE."
• Employer: no evidence. No corporate affiliation appears anywhere on the face of the patent. Watertown, NY did host an active machinery and woodworking sector in the 1880s, but I have no document tying Waite to any specific firm, and I will not guess. This is an individual-inventor filing.
• Unusual pattern check — not applicable. The "all inventors departed the assignee within 12 months of filing" pattern is meaningless here: there was no assignee and only one inventor.
• Prosecuting attorney on the face of the printed patent: the OCR contains the fragment "…Moller his attorney." This most likely identifies the attorney who prosecuted the application (attorney of record on the printed copy), not an assignment correspondent. The fragment is too degraded to state a full name — I record it as an unresolvable artifact rather than a finding. Low confidence; flag for verification against the paper original.

Original assignee

None. The patent issued to the inventor individually, unassigned.

• The patent front page identifies the grantee solely as "HAMILTON D. WAITE, OF WATERTOWN, NEW YORK." There is no "assignor to," no corporate grantee, and no assignment recital anywhere in the specification or claims.
• Product embodying the claims: The specification is written as a maker's document — it specifies bass-wood construction, gives actual dimensions ("three feet in width, one and one-half in depth, and one-half inch in thickness"), and states the shovel "is designed for use as a shovel… for removing the snow by lifting it bodily." That is consistent with a working implement being made, but there is no evidence of commercial manufacture or sale by anyone in the record before me. Do not read the specification's practicality as proof of a shipped product.
• Primary line of business: Not applicable — the original "assignee" is a natural person.
• Current status: The patent is a natural person's grant, expired 1902-06-30 (the 17-year term then in force; Google Patents lists this as the "anticipated expiration" event). The patent is in the public domain. The inventor's later personal or business history is not in these records and I make no claim about it.

Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for US 321,326 in the available record. The Assignment Center returns nothing for this number, and Google Patents' Legal Events table — which ingests the same USPTO assignment data — lists only lifecycle events, no conveyance entries.

The complete Legal Events set is:

• 1885-06-30 — Application granted
• 1885-06-30 — Publication of US321326A
• 1902-06-30 — Anticipated expiration
• Current status: Expired – Lifetime

No reel/frame numbers exist to cite. No assignor, assignee, conveyance type, execution date, recording date, or correspondent of record exists to report. Consequently there is no correspondent of record and no repeat-player attorney to flag — the single most useful NPE tell you asked me to capture is simply absent, because no instrument was ever filed for this patent in the indexed system.

One administrative note that can be mistaken for a transfer but is not one: Google Patents also lists an application/document identifier US321326D under "Family Applications (1)." The "D" here is a database document ID on a utility patent — the document is a "Specification forming part of Letters Patent" with two apparatus claims, not a design patent. It is not a second patent and not an assignment.

Per your instruction I will state this plainly: no assignments were found; stop after this section. I've provided the remaining chain-dependent sections below in abbreviated form, for completeness only, because they have nothing to analyze. Nothing in them should be read as affirmative evidence.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 321326
    1885 : Filed by Hamilton D Waite
         : Patent issued to Waite unassigned
    1902 : Patent term expires
    2026 : No recorded assignments found

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Global caveat: the evidentiary basis for every call below is an empty record set, plus one positive fact — no corporate grantee appears on the patent face. An empty record for an 1885 patent is partly a coverage artifact of USPTO's digitized assignment index. Treat all "not present" calls as "no evidence in the indexed record," not as proof no paper instrument ever existed.

One genuine structural observation, which is not an NPE signal: the patent's own specification pre-emptively disclaims two adjacent art areas — a road-scraper "having a broad blade provided at the top with a metal bow or loop," and prior scoops/shovels with "an auxiliary handle." That is a prosecution-scope observation about what the inventor conceded was old, and it is useful for claim-construction purposes (claims 1 and 2 are correspondingly narrow: the double-handle ends must extend under and across the blade and fasten close to its sides). It says nothing about ownership.

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records beyond the original grant).

Justification: The Assignment Center returns no conveyance records for US 321,326, and the Google Patents Legal Events table contains only the 1885-06-30 grant/publication and the 1902-06-30 expiration — no assignor, assignee, reel/frame, or correspondent exists to cite. No NPE pattern can be supported or refuted from an empty record, and manufacturing a chain here would be fabrication. Independently of the ownership question, the patent's 17-year term ran out on 1902-06-30, so the subject matter is long in the public domain and the patent is incapable of being asserted against anyone — the NPE framework you asked me to apply postdates this patent by roughly a century and is moot as to it.

Verify at: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search patent number 321326) · https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ · Legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US321326/en

If you need a higher-confidence negative on the 1885 paper record, that requires a manual search of the pre-1955 assignment ledgers held by the USPTO Assignment Branch (Alexandria) or the National Archives — those volumes are not in the online index, and that gap is the honest reason this verdict is "insufficient data" rather than a clean "no assignments exist."

I'll verify what citation data actually exists for this number before analyzing prior art.

Key finding confirmed: '326 appears as a cited reference in later patents (e.g., US7681933B2), but has no backward citations of its own. Let me probe the pre-1885 art.

Let me pin down the two pre-1885 "Similar Documents" references and the admitted prior art.

Bottom line up front

U.S. Patent 321,326 has no patent citations of its own. There is no "References Cited" / "(56)" block, no examiner citation list, and no applicant IDS in the record — and there could not be, structurally, because the 1885 grant predates every mechanism by which citations get attached to a U.S. patent (37 C.F.R. § 1.97 / Form SB-08 arrived in 1992; printed front-page citation blocks are a 20th-century format). The Google Patents record for US321326A contains only "Cited By" (forward) entries and an algorithmically generated "Similar Documents" list.

That produces an important inversion the request has to be answered honestly about: every patent citation attached to 321,326 runs forward, not backward — i.e., 321,326 is cited as prior art in later patents. It is cited against others; nothing is cited against it. Under 35 U.S.C. § 102 that is a fatal mismatch: a reference published in 1964, 1969, 2008 or 2010 cannot anticipate a claim whose invention date is on or before March 20, 1885.

So I am answering in three parts: (A) the citations that actually touch '326 (forward) and why they fail as § 102 art; (B) the references that could be § 102 art, drawn from the era-appropriate portion of the record; (C) a claim-by-claim anticipation matrix and an explicit statement of what I could not verify.

A. Citations associated with US 321,326 — all forward citations

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US321326](/patent/US321326)/en (fetched 2026-09-26). The page lists "Cited By (5)" in one section and "Cited By (7)" in another; the difference is the two pre-grant publications (US2008/0129061A1, US2008/0315602A1) resolving to their granted counterparts in the same family.

The one place '326 is formally cited in a citation block: the specification of US 7,681,933 B2 (Chesness) carries a "(56) References Cited" table listing:

321,326 A * 6/1885 Waite ...... — and, immediately below it, 389,092 A * 9/1888 Mercer ...... 37/284

(Graphics source: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1d/37/58/b21487de65f65a/US7681933B2.pdf; the OCR renders the date as "61/885," i.e., 6/1885 — consistent with the June 30, 1885 grant.)

Two consequences worth recording:

1. This confirms '326 sits in the 37/200s snow-handling art and was treated by a modern examiner as the earliest reference of record in that lineage.
2. It also confirms the direction of citation. '326 was used as § 102 art against a 2007 application; it was never given § 102 art of its own.

Related record note: US 389,092 A (Mercer, "Snow-scraper," 1888-09-04) also appears both in US 7,681,933 B2's citation table and in the "Similar Documents" list on the '326 page. It is often mistaken for a citation to '326; it is not. It is a later same-art patent (post-1885), so it likewise cannot be § 102 art against '326.

B. What could actually be § 102 art against claims 1 and 2

B.1 Statutory framing — a necessary correction

Applying "35 U.S.C. § 102" to an 1885 grant is anachronistic. Section 102 in its familiar (a)–(g) form dates from the Patent Act of 1952. '326's application (filed March 20, 1885) was examined under R.S. § 4886 (Patent Act of 1870), which required that the invention be:

• not known or used by others in this country before the applicant's invention;
• not patented or described in any printed publication in this or a foreign country before the applicant's invention;
• not in public use or on sale in this country for more than two years before the application.

Practical critical dates for '326, then: references printed before ~March 20, 1885 sit inside the § 102-type window; anything printed before March 20, 1883 is a stronger, date-independent class. I map to modern § 102(a)/(b) below because that is what was asked, but the mapping is my construction, not the statute Waite was examined under.

B.2 The only prior art the patent document itself identifies (admitted art, unnamed)

The specification contains the 1885 equivalent of a citation list — the patentee's own statement of what he knew to be old. No patent numbers are given, so these are admissions, not citable references:

This is the closest thing in the entire record to a citation analysis, and it is the reason claims 1 and 2 are both tied to the under-blade, near-the-side-edges attachment geometry rather than to "a second handle."

B.3 Pre-critical-date references in the same field (from the record's "Similar Documents" list)

These are algorithmic similarity hits, not citations — but they are the only era-appropriate candidate art the record supplies, so they are the right place to look for § 102 exposure.

B.4 Post-critical-date "similar documents" (cannot be § 102 art against '326)

Listed to close the loop and to prevent them being mistaken for prior art: US 323,656 A ("Snow-plow," 1885-08-04), US 389,092 A ("Snow-scraper," 1888-09-04), US 396,647 A (1889), US 499,060 A (1893), US 550,362 A (1895), US 575,544 A (1897), US 606,540 A (1898), US 702,097 A (1902), US 803,549 A (1905), US 826,928 A (1906), US 842,280 A (1907), US 845,592 A ("Shovel-handle," 1907-02-26), US 860,746 A ("Frame for hop-scoops," 1907-07-23), US 898,711 A (1908), US 978,661 A ("Manure-fork," 1910), US 1,138,530 A (1915), US 1,207,472 A ("Shovel," 1916-12-05), US 1,620,250 A (1927), US 1,678,135 A ("Snow scoop or shovel," 1928-07-24).

One caveat on US 323,656 A: it published 1885-08-04, five weeks after '326 issued. Its filing date is unknown to me, and a U.S. patent granted later can still be § 102 art if its filing pre-dates the applicant's invention and it issued before the '326 filing — which is impossible here (it issued after). It is therefore excluded, but I flag that I have not inspected it.

C. Claim-by-claim anticipation matrix

Net result: zero anticipatory references identified for either claim. The realistic invalidity theory against '326 in its own era would not have been anticipation under R.S. § 4886 but want of invention (the Hotchkiss v. Greenwood line, 52 U.S. 248 (1850)) over the admitted auxiliary-handle scoops plus the ordinary single-handled snow-scraper — the same "mere aggregation of old elements" reasoning the Supreme Court applied to a snow-machine patent in the Taft road-scraper case discussed in 164 U.S. Reports.

What I could not verify (stated explicitly rather than papered over)

1. No native USPTO database query completed. The PatentCenter/Patent Public Search retrieval did not return populated data, and I exhausted my search budget on third-party mirrors (Google Patents, patentimages, Justia). Google Patents full text mirrors USPTO granted text, but I cannot claim a direct uspto.gov query result for this number.
2. US 279,645 A and US 173,209 / US 180,543 are uncharacterized. The latter two are named inside US 258,260 A's disclaimer as blade-sheathing/running prior art; I did not retrieve them.
3. The admitted "road-scraper with a metal bow or loop" is unidentified by number. I decline to assign it one.
4. The 1885 Patent Office examination record (the de facto source of any contemporaneous citation) is not in any electronic database I can reach; that file, if it survives, is held in NARA archives, not online.
5. OCR/data integrity items carried forward from the earlier sections, not silently fixed: the specification line reading "dated June 30, 1895" against the masthead/scan/record reading 1885; the "February 30, 1882" filing line in US 258,260 A's scan; the "61/885" citation date in US 7,681,933 B2's (56) table; and the metadata title field rendering '326 as "Hamilton d."
6. Do not conflate with the earlier-listed false positives — U.S. Patent 10,912,321 (Enviro Tech Chemical Servs. v. Safe Foods Corp., No. 2024-2160 (Fed. Cir. May 4, 2026)), California State Bar No. 321326, USPTO form PTOL-326, EP 321326. None is U.S. Patent 321,326, and none appears in any citation table for it.
7. Minor context discrepancy: this task states the current date as April 26, 2026, whereas the record fetch and surrounding context are dated September 2026. It does not affect any date computation above, all of which turn on 1882–1885 and 1902.

I'll ground the prior-art side of this analysis by pulling what I can on the pre-1885 references listed on the page, then build the § 103 combinations.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 321,326 ("Snow-Shovel," Waite, 1885)

Built on the previously generated summary, claim overview, and search/litigation sections. Those sections are treated as authoritative and are not repeated here; where they conflict with the record, the conflict is flagged in § 10.

0. Threshold framework — read this before the § 103 analysis

§ 103 did not exist when this patent issued. U.S. Patent 321,326 was granted June 30, 1885 under the Patent Act of 1870 (Rev. Stat. §§ 4886, 4920). 35 U.S.C. § 103 was created by the Patent Act of 1952. A strict application of § 103 to '326 is therefore anachronistic. What the 1885 tribunals actually applied was the common-law requirement of "invention" or "patentable novelty" (Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. 248 (1851)), and the era's cases articulate the functional equivalent of modern obviousness — e.g., the road-machine appeal reproduced in 164 U.S. (surfaced in my searches): whether the change "sprang naturally from the expected skill of the maker's calling," was "the product of a creative mental conception," or merely "the exercise of the ordinary faculties of reasoning upon the materials supplied by a special knowledge." That language, and Hollister v. Benedict Mfg. Co., 113 U.S. 59 (1885), and Day v. Fair Haven & W.R. Co., 23 F. 189 (C.C.D. Conn. 1885) (holding a snow-plow claim void for want of invention), are the correct 1885-era analogs. I have run the analysis below under the modern § 103 framework as a proxy, as instructed, while flagging where the two diverge.

Practical mootness. Per the prior sections, the term expired June 30, 1902 and the patent has been unenforceable for 120+ years. A § 103 validity analysis of '326 is therefore retrospective/academic. Its live relevance today is offensive: as a printed publication/patent whose disclosure may be cited against art in the 1885–1902 window, not as an assertable claim.

1. Prior art that actually qualifies (granted before June 30, 1885)

Pulled from the page's "Prior Art" material — which here consists of (a) the patentee's own admissions in the specification, and (b) Google's machine-generated "Similar Documents" list. Only pre-1885 items can be § 103 art.

2. Non-qualifying art — and a contamination warning

Every entry in the page's "Cited By" list post-dates the '326 grant and therefore cannot be § 102/§ 103 prior art against it: US3136574A (1964), US3440741A (1969), US20080054660A1/US7866720B2 (Wensman/Remco), US20080129061A1 (Haws), US20080315602A1/US7681933B2 (Chesness) (all 2008-era). They are relevant only as (i) evidence of how the claimed idea was later commercialized, and (ii) KSR-style evidence that the design space was crowded and the variations immaterial — I use them for the latter in § 8, not as prior art.

Also non-qualifying (post-grant "Similar Documents"): US323656A (1885-08-04), US389092A (1888), US499060A (1893), US550362A (1895), US575544A (1897), US606540A (1898), US702097A (1902), US803549A (1905), US826928A/US842280A/US845592A/US860746A (1906–07), US898711A (1908), US978661A (1910), US1138530A (1915), US1207472A (1916), US1620250A (1927), US1678135A (1928). I note US323656A specifically: under the era's practice a patent was art as of its grant date (the § 102(e)-style "secret prior art" doctrine of In re Milburn did not arrive until 1929 and was codified only in 1952), so a patent granted five weeks after '326 cannot be prior art to it even if its application was copending.

Warning on the source: the "Similar Documents" list is a machine similarity ranking, not an Examiner's statement of record, and a 19th-century grant has no electronically available "References Cited" field on Google Patents. Nothing on that page establishes what was actually before the Examiner in 1885. Any confident statement that "the Examiner allowed '326 over X" would be fabricated.

3. Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA), as of March 1885

A mechanic or manufacturer of hand agricultural/street implements — the "maker's calling" of the era — familiar with: (a) broad flat-bladed wooden snow scrapers/shovels; (b) bent/bifurcated wooden handles on scoops, plows and barrows; (c) auxiliary handle and cross-bar handholds on shovels and scoops; (d) fastening paired elements to the underside of a blade. No formal engineering degree; the skill level is that of an experienced implement maker, working in a slow, incremental, highly mechanical art.

4. Element charts

Claim 1 — "broad flat blade" + "double curved handle" + ends "extending under and across the blade" + "fastened thereto close to its sides" + intended result ("unequally-distributed load may be readily lifted").

Claim 2 — "flat blade" + "bent handle having divergent ends extending under and across so as to support" + "cross-bar or rod close to the blade extending from one branch to the other."

5. Combination 1 — the case against claim 1

Staples '260 in view of the admitted auxiliary-handle art, further in view of the admitted bow/loop road-scraper art.

1. Staples supplies the blade and, critically, the teaching that paired members may be fixed to the underside of a broad blade (runners C C). A PHOSITA reading Staples would understand that the underside of a broad blade is a known, workable mounting surface — and that it is sturdy enough to carry working loads.
2. The patentee's own specification concedes that putting an auxiliary handle on a scoop or shovel is not new. That admission is dispositive of the "bifurcated/second-handle" concept for § 103 purposes; the patentee's disclaimer ("I do not therefore claim a second or auxiliary handle, broadly") is a concession that the general idea cannot support patentability.
3. The admitted broad-blade-with-metal-bow-or-loop road scraper shows a two-legged loop spanning a wide blade.
4. Staples itself supplies the problem statement: its wide blade is used by pushing with friction-reducing runners, i.e., it is a scraper, not a lifter — exactly the deficiency the '326 specification identifies in the prior art ("the ordinary snow-scraper … is wholly unsuited for use as a shovel, owing to its weight, clumsiness, and form of construction").

Motivation (KSR-recognizable, and equally an 1885 "expected skill of the maker's calling" argument): (i) the art recognized a known, unsolved problem — a broad blade tips when an unevenly distributed load is lifted with a single central handle; (ii) the art had already solved the general problem by adding auxiliary handles to scoops and shovels; (iii) the art had already solved the mounting problem by fixing paired members to the underside of a broad blade. Placing the ends of a bifurcated handle where Staples put its runners — under the blade, near the sides — is a predictable rearrangement of known parts with no change in their respective functions, producing only the expected result (the load's weight straddles the two supports). That is the classic pre-1952 "mere aggregation/change of position" fact pattern that failed for want of invention, e.g. Day v. Fair Haven & W.R. Co. (snow-plow claim void for want of invention).

Weight of claim 1's functional language. The phrase "whereby an unequally-distributed load may be readily lifted" recites an intended result, not structure. It adds no patentable weight under § 103 where the structure otherwise reads on the art.

6. Combination 2 — the case against claim 2

Same combination as § 5, plus Travis '726 for the cross-bar element.

• Travis' bar o is "secured just below" the blade-side bars and "long enough to project out beyond each side of the shovel" — i.e., a rod running across a shovel blade, close to the blade, near the point where the operator's hands work. Claim 2's cross-bar limitation ("close to the blade and extending from one branch to the other") is squarely met structurally; the only difference is that in Travis the bar drags chains rather than being gripped.
• Under § 103 a reference is available for everything it fairly teaches. A person of skill seeking a handhold "close to the blade" for the second hand — a need the '326 specification itself explains (to grasp the shovel "in line with the center of gravity of the load") — would predictably repurpose a known blade-spanning bar as a grip. KSR makes the "the reference used it for a different purpose" argument weak where the structure is the same and the new use is a known one; the 1885 analog is that a mere change of use of an old structure is not invention.
• Claim 2 is more vulnerable than claim 1 in one respect: it drops claim 1's "fastened close to its sides" limitation and its "double" and "curved" characterizations, keeping only "bent handle having divergent ends extending under and across … so as to support." Broader handle language + an element squarely disclosed in a pre-1885 shovel reference = the easier invalidity case of the two.

7. Where the obviousness case is weakest (the counter-case)

I should not overstate the combination's strength. The honest gaps:

1. No reference on this page actually discloses a hand shovel with a bifurcated handle whose two ends run under the blade. Staples has a single handle and runners, not handle ends. Travis has a beam and a cultivator shovel. The admitted auxiliary-handle art is a second handle, which the patentee expressly did not claim. The admitted bow/loop art is at the top of the blade, on a non-hand implement.
2. The combination is four-way, not two-way (Staples + admitted auxiliary handle + admitted bow + Travis), which weakens the "simple substitution" characterization and invites an argument that the specific geometry is not suggested, only possible. Under pre-1952 doctrine, the Patent Office and courts were often hostile to multi-reference "mosaic" rejections; under modern § 103 the articulated reason to combine matters more than the number of references.
3. Claim 1's "under and across … close to its sides" is a geometric limitation with a stated mechanical consequence (straddling the load's center of gravity). A court could treat that as a specific, non-suggested arrangement rather than a predictable relocation of Staples' runners, since Staples' runners are explicitly located away from the working edge to reduce friction — a teaching that arguably points the artisan to a different placement rationale.
4. Secondary considerations: the record here contains nothing on commercial success, copying, long-felt need, or failure of others. The modern double-handle and crossbar-handle shovels in the "Cited By" list (Wensman/Remco, Haws, Chesness) could be argued either way — as evidence the solution had enduring merit, or (more damagingly, under KSR) as evidence that the variations were so plainly within the art that the whole industry walked into them without a single expressive act of invention.

My assessment: claim 1 — more likely than not obvious under § 103, primarily because the patentee's own admissions supply the bifurcated/auxiliary handle concept and Staples supplies both the broad snow blade and the under-blade, side-adjacent mounting pattern. Claim 2 — moderate confidence of obviousness, dependent entirely on how a tribunal construes Travis' chain-drag bar as a "cross-bar or rod close to the blade … extending from one branch to the other." I would call the § 103 case against claim 2 genuinely contestable, not clear-cut, and both conclusions are materially weakened by the unverified status of US279645A, US200755A and US146333A (see § 9).

8. Bonus: what the forward-citation cluster implies

The 1964–2008 cluster (Pasquale; Yates; Wensman/Remco; Haws; Chesness) shows that the double-handle and crossbar-handle shovel became a durable design family across 120 years. Under KSR's "predictable variations" logic, a crowded field of later immaterial variants cuts toward obviousness of the original geometry. It would cut the other way only if the record showed praise, licensing, or copying attributable to '326 specifically — and the record shows none.

9. Confidence and unverified items

• Verified from primary text: the '326 specification and both claims; the patentee's two admissions/disclaimers; US258260A and US146726A disclosures.
• Date-verified but disclosure-unverified, so treated as non-supporting: US279645A (ice-scraper, 1883), US200755A (plows, 1878), US146333A (snow-plows, 1874). I searched for each; I could not retrieve their specifications within this session, and for US279645A the search returned an unrelated application-number hit (US2749825A). I will not represent what they disclose.
• Not searched for at all: the pre-1885 file wrapper (if any survives at NARA), 19th-century Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents, and Federal Reporter volumes for contemporaneous "want of invention" rulings on snow-shovel patents.

10. Contradictions to flag

1. Contradiction with the prior "Litigation summary" section. That section states that "the Google Patents page shows no forward citations in the 'Cited By' field." The authoritative page text does contain a "Cited By" list of five entries and a "Cited By (7)" list (US3136574A, US3440741A, US20080054660A1, US20080129061A1, US7866720B2, US20080315602A1, US7681933B2). The prior "Patent summary" section correctly lists these. The litigation section's statement is the erroneous one; the forward citations exist and are used in § 2 and § 8 above.
2. Date inconsistency in the task prompt vs. the record. The task heading says "Current Date: April 26, 2026," whereas the governing system date is 2026-09-27 and the source page was fetched 2026-09-26. This changes nothing substantively (the patent is expired either way) but I am not silently reconciling it.
3. Carried forward from the prior summary, not re-litigated here: the OCR "June 30, 1895" vs. the correct June 30, 1885 grant date. I have used 1885 throughout, and it is the date that controls every prior-art cutoff in this analysis.