US 363106

I'll verify against live sources before summarizing.

US 363,106 — Verification and Summary

Search results note: Targeted searches for the number in the context of litigation and Federal Circuit dockets returned no records of any CAFC 2026 (or other) proceeding involving US 363,106, and no USPTO litigation/assignment records beyond the patent document itself. The only database-visible activity is the Google Patents record and two later patents citing it (US 2,960,163 — Handley, 1960; US 3,031,907 — Stewart, 1962, both perforating devices). I found no evidence that this patent has ever been asserted. The authoritative source used below is the full patent text at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US363106](/patent/US363106)/en.

Careful on the number: US 363,106 (issued 1887) is a 19th-century patent, not the 8-digit "3,363,106" of the 1960s. I did not find any "3,363,106" in the searches either, and I have not substituted one for the other.

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Bibliographic data

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What the patent covers (plain language)

Problem addressed: Disk/ring armatures (Brush, Schückert type) have their bobbins wound in pockets formed by "cheeks" of laminated iron projecting beyond the core proper. The prior practice was to wind band iron spirally and insert separate laminated cheek-strips or gap-pieces between layers. Because the space between adjacent bobbins is wedge-shaped, each successive layer needs a differently sized filler piece — hard to make accurately, and it leaves gaps. Wynne's fix: shape the band iron itself, by punching it as it is wound, so that the winding builds the pockets directly (a rib-and-gap strip rather than separate filler pieces).

Machine: Shaft E drives crank A → connecting rod f → arm F (pivoted on shaft end G) carrying pawl f′, which drives ratchet wheel J on shaft H (the core-winding mandrel). Detent L holds J on the return stroke. Band iron N is drawn under tension from drum M (brake, or weight/spring, plus rollers P P). Punch Q sits between drum and mandrel and is driven by crank R off the same shaft E, with hand-wheel/screw S for lateral adjustment. Cranks A and R are phased so punching and winding are mutually exclusive: while the pawl advances J, Q lifts; on the pawl's return, L holds J and Q descends to punch. Ratchet J has as many teeth as there are desired pockets, spaced in the same angular proportion. Result: punched gaps in successive coils stack one above the other, with small discrepancies from increasing core diameter corrected by moving Q via screw S. The patent also discloses an alternative non-synchronized mode: coil a half-circumference, mark it, uncoil under tension, punch, re-coil permanently, and repeat.

Fig. 1 also shows a narrow strip T (about the width of the core between pockets), taped/insulated as it passes through a rotating disk t″ carrying a tape bobbin t, laid alternately between convolutions of wide strip N.

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Independent claims (1, 3, 4; claim 2 is an incorporated-element combination claim)

• Claim 1 — Machine (apparatus combination). A machine for making cores of this type consisting of the combination of (a) a shaft or carrier for the ring/holder of the armature core, (b) a drum or holder for the strip to be wound, and (c) an intervening punch — the punch and the core-support rotation being driven by mechanism that operates one and then the other alternately. In plain terms: a winding machine whose punch and winding drive are interlocked so the strip is punched only while the core is momentarily stationary, and indexed forward only while the punch is clear.

• Claim 2 — Machine plus separator-strip feature. Takes the same combination (core carrier + strip drum + intervening punch, alternately operated) and adds a holder for an additional strip plus means for winding a tape/separator around it, that additional strip being laid between the convolutions of the first strip. In plain terms: the same interlocked winding/punching machine, plus a tape-lapping feed that inserts an insulated strip between layers for insulation and air spaces.

• Claim 3 — Apparatus combination (ratchet-driven). In apparatus for winding strip metal into armature cores, the combination of a ratchet and pawl, a carrier for the ring or core support, and a punch, so relatively arranged and operated that parallel slots may be formed between radiating cheeks for winding the coils. In plain terms: the indexing mechanism (ratchet/pawl) that steps the core by exactly one pocket-to-pocket angle, coordinated with the punch that cuts the slot, producing the projecting cheek/pocket geometry. Note this claim is not expressly tied to the "alternating operation" limitation of claim 1.

• Claim 4 — Method (process claim). The method of forming dynamo-machine disk armature cores with projecting cheeks defining pockets for the coils, its essential features being the alternate winding of the strips and punching of the same at unequal distances, determined by the changing radius of the wound strip. In plain terms: the process of winding a little, punching, winding a little, punching — where the punch spacing is not constant, because as the core's radius grows the arc length between successive pockets grows, so the strip must be advanced farther between punches. This is the heart of Wynne's advance over the separate-cheek-piece approach.

Claim dependency note: Claim 1, 3, and 4 are independent in form. Claim 2 re-recites the claim-1 elements in "combination, with… of…" form, so it functions as a combination claim that carries forward claim 1's elements rather than depending from it under modern practice.

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Points of uncertainty

• Title: Google Patents lists the title as "Frank wynne" (an index artifact); the specification's true title is "Method of and Apparatus for Forming Armature-Cores." I treat the specification heading as authoritative.
• OCR corruption: The provided text contains OCR errors ("checks" for "cheeks," "Letters Patent 310,363,106," "dated May 17, 18187," garbled foreign priority dates). I have not silently corrected the patent number; I flag these as OCR artifacts rather than substantive errors in the original.
• No abstract, no assignee, no litigation: These are absences in the record, not findings of fact I can strengthen. I could not confirm any current owner, and I found no CAFC or district court activity.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 363106.

Let me run additional targeted searches to be thorough.

Bottom Line

No litigation is known — in any forum — involving U.S. Patent No. 363,106. My searches identified no district court case, no Federal Circuit or regional circuit appeal, no ITC Section 337 investigation, no PTAB proceeding, and no Unified Patents / RPX-style litigation record asserting or challenging US 363,106.

If you need a negative assertion for a clearance opinion or IDS-adjacent diligence memo, it should be phrased as: "Counsel is not aware of any litigation, ITC investigation, or post-grant proceeding involving U.S. Patent No. 363,106. No such proceeding appears in the publicly searchable dockets and patent-litigation databases searched."

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1. The patent at issue (from the authoritative full text)

Two OCR artifacts in the source should be flagged rather than silently "corrected": the specification prints the patent number as "310,363,106" and garbles the foreign-patent paragraph ("January 21, 1855 … June 5, iesa'no. mesa"). The bibliographic data confirms the German patent is No. 32,990, dated January 21, 1885 and the British patent is No. 6,883, dated June 5, 1885. The printed filing date of September 19, 1886 is what the document says; it is internally inconsistent with the 1885 foreign priority dates, but I am reporting it as printed.

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2. Why the null result is expected, not merely unfound

Three independent structural reasons:

1. The term expired in 1904. Under the law then in force, the term ran 17 years from the May 17, 1887 grant. A patent that expired in 1904 cannot support an infringement claim in any modern docket. It could in principle appear defensively as prior art, but it is a winding-machine / armature-core reference — not a claim in any live patent family that I could identify.
2. No assignee. The patent issued to Frank Wynne individually; the text shows no assignment to a corporate entity, and no assignee appears in the bibliographic record. Litigation is overwhelmingly driven by corporate patent holders, and there is no corporate successor in the record to sue on.
3. It is cited only by unrelated modern art. The two forward citations are US 2,960,163 (Handley, "High speed perforators for recording information," 1960) and US 3,031,907 (Stewart, "Sheet perforating devices," 1962) — both routine examiner citations on punch/perforator technology, not evidence of any adversarial proceeding.

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3. Important trap: "363,106" is not the same identifier as "Ser. No. 363,106"

This is the single most likely source of a false positive, and I want to be explicit because your instructions require literal interpretation of identifiers. My searches repeatedly surfaced documents where 363,106 is an application serial number, not a patent number:

• US 3,261,624 (Hackman, "Duct joint," Southwest Products Co.) — "Filed Apr. 28, 1964, Ser. No. 363,106." This is a different patent with an unrelated serial number that happens to share the digits. Notably, Google Patents' own family table for US 3,261,624 lists "US363106A" as the application number — which is exactly how a naive search would conflate the two.
• US 2,279,093 (Peters, "Vending machine") — "Filed Oct. 28, 1940, Serial No. 363,106."

Neither is US Patent No. 363,106, and neither is litigation. I have excluded them.

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4. What I searched, and its limits

I ran searches against general web indexes surfaced from patent-litigation-adjacent sources (Google Patents full text, CourtListener RECAP dockets, PTAB/PTACTS filings, TTABVUE, Docket Navigator-style results, and docket PDFs indexed from courtlistener.com storage), using the exact strings US363106, "363106", "363,106", "3,363,106", and inventor-name queries ("Frank Wynne" + armature / 1887 / infringement) and courtlistener "363,106" patent Wynne armature.

Every hit was either (a) the patent document itself, (b) an unrelated application-serial-number match as described in §3, or (c) unrelated modern litigation (ePlus v. Lawson Software, GoPro v. Contour, Bonutti, Cytek) where "363" or "106" appeared as part of a different patent's shorthand or a rule citation. Nothing matched US 363,106 as a patent-in-suit.

Limits on this answer, stated candidly:

• I could not retrieve a live, queryable result page from https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist directly; my coverage of that portal comes via indexed search results rather than an interactive query, so treat it as searched-but-not-exhaustively-confirmed.
• Pre-1900 U.S. patent litigation is very poorly digitized. Nineteenth-century circuit court equity cases, especially in England (the inventor's home jurisdiction, where he held GB 6,883), are largely absent from PACER-era databases and Docket Navigator. If a Wynne enforcement or infringement action occurred in the 1887–1904 window, it would most plausibly appear in printed Federal Reporter / Federal Cases volumes or English law reports, not in any of the databases I can search. I did not find any such case, but I cannot rule out that one exists in non-digitized print sources.
• Accordingly, "no litigation known" here means no litigation found in the sources I could search — a genuine negative as to modern and digitized records, and an unresolved question as to 19th-century print records.

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5. Recommendation if this must go in a formal opinion

State the negative, then scope it precisely:

"Searches of publicly available U.S. patent litigation databases (including CourtListener/RECAP, Unified Patents' litigation portal, PTAB/PTACTS, and ITC EDIS-indexed results) identified no case, investigation, or post-grant proceeding in which U.S. Patent No. 363,106 was asserted or challenged. The patent expired on or about May 17, 1904, before the existence of any of the modern dockets searched. No litigation is known. Note: this search does not extend to non-digitized nineteenth-century circuit court records; if a historical enforcement action between 1887 and 1904 is material to the analysis, a manual search of Federal Reporter / Federal Cases and English law reports is recommended."

If your actual target was the duct-joint or vending-machine patents (US 3,261,624 / US 2,279,093) that share the "363,106" application serial number, tell me which — the litigation picture for those is a different and separately-worth-checking question, and I would not want the identifier treated as interchangeable.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 363,106: zero. Breakdown by status: 0 active / 0 with claims invalidated / 0 with claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent, and two independent web searches (PTAB/FRANK WYNNE ARMATURE-CORE docket queries and a quote-form query for "363,106" + PTAB + Federal Circuit) surfaced no IPR, PGR, CBM, derivation, or CAFC appeal tied to this patent number. The correct defensive posture is not "the patent is hardened" or "the claims are canceled" — it is "there is nothing left to defend against: US 363,106 expired in 1904."

Before going further, the single most important fact for any defendant receiving a demand letter citing this patent: the prescribing record shows "Anticipated expiration — 1904-05-17" and legal status "Expired - Lifetime." The patent issued 1887-05-17 with a 17-year term measured from grant. It has been in the public domain for roughly 122 years. There is no live claim scope to invalidate, and no PTAB activity to report — which is why the "no PTAB activity" signal here is not the standard "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" signal. It is a structural impossibility rather than an oversight.

Proceedings

None on file

• Type: N/A — no Inter Partes Review, Post-Grant Review, or Covered Business Method review docketed.
• Filed: N/A.
• Status: Verbatim from the structured data: "The USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest." Plain-English gloss: no petitioner has ever challenged this patent at the PTAB.
• Judge panel: N/A — no panel has been constituted, so there are no APJ names to report.
• Petition grounds: N/A.
• Institution decision: N/A.
• Final Written Decision: N/A. Note that the two entries shown on the Google Patents page under "Cited By (2)" — US2960163A (Handley, High speed perforators for recording information, 1960-11-15) and US3031907A (Stewart, Sheet perforating devices, 1962-05-01) — are later patents citing this disclosure, not PTAB proceedings or IPR prior art of record. Do not read them as challenges; they are scholarly/art citations only. See US363106A on Google Patents and USPTO PatentCenter.
• Settlement / termination: N/A.
• Appeal: None found. No Federal Circuit docket number associated with this patent surfaced. I cannot rule out a pre-1983 CCPA or regional-circuit appeal given the era, but nothing is indexed and I will not invent a docket number.
• Defensive value: A demand letter asserting US 363,106 is presumptively baseless on expiration alone — the patent's own record shows it expired 1904-05-17. An IPR would be a waste of fees and, more importantly, an IPR petition is not the right tool: the better response is a Rule 11 / § 285 posture letter quoting the expiry date, plus a check of whether the letter-writer is actually asserting the eight-digit patent US 3,631,06x-style modern numbers or a different Wynne-family patent by mistake.

Strategic summary

Claim status — everything is expired, nothing is canceled or sustained. There is no FWD to parse, so I cannot and will not tell you that claims 1–4 were canceled or upheld. What the record does establish is that all four claims — claim 1 (the machine combination of core carrier, strip drum, and alternating punch), claim 2 (adding the additional-strip holder and tape-lapping means), claim 3 (the ratchet-and-pawl / carrier / punch combination arranging "parallel slots ... between radiating cheeks"), and claim 4 (the method of alternately winding and punching at distances determined by the changing radius of the wound strip) — lapsed together at the end of the term on 1904-05-17. Claims 1–4 are expired, which is a categorically different status from canceled or sustained. Every claim is simultaneously "untested by the PTAB" and "unavailable for enforcement." See PTAB Decisions portal if you want to verify the null result yourself.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2) is not in play. Because no IPR was ever instituted, no petitioner or privy is subject to estoppel, and no prior art is "off the table" through a prior PTAB challenge. That said, estoppel is irrelevant here: without a live claim there is no infringement case to mount a defense against. The only prior art that matters is the historical record used by the examiner in 1886–87, which is not useful for a 2026 dispute except as background.

Pattern signals — none. No serial petitioner, no repeat patent owner activity, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) in the chain. There is also no PTAB appeal history. The record's most useful signals are artifacts you should be wary of, since they can mislead a quick search: the Google Patents page renders the title field as "Frank wynne" (the inventor name substituted for the title) rather than "Method of and Apparatus for Forming Armature-Cores"; the reported classifications are H01G13/02 ("Machines for winding capacitors") and Y10T29/49012 ("Rotor"), which are modern reclassification artifacts rather than the original 1887 classification; and the specification text itself contains OCR corruption (e.g., "Letters Patent 310,363,106," "PntOlliCd in Germany January 21, 1855," "armature 0'"). Treat the Google Patents page as the authoritative full text for this analysis, but sanity-check any date or number against the printed patent PDF before relying on it.

Recommended next steps

1. Treat the expiry date as the whole defense. Confirm 1904-05-17 against the printed patent (the specification states the application was filed 1886-09-19, Serial No. 213,943, and the patent is dated May 17, 1887, with foreign counterparts GB No. 6,883 of 1885-06-05 and DE No. 32,990 of 1885-01-21). A demand letter citing US 363,106 in 2026 cannot rest on § 271 infringement of an expired patent; at most it could implicate pre-1904 conduct, which is time-barred under 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year damages lookback by more than a century.
2. Check for patent-number confusion before you respond. The likeliest explanations for a 363,106-based demand are (a) a mis-keyed number that should be a modern patent (e.g., 3,631,06x / 6,631,06x / 10,363,106), or (b) an assertion of a different Wynne-family or late-19th-century armature patent. Pull the number from the demand letter verbatim and compare against the record before drafting.
3. If a PTAB proceeding is filed later, re-run this analysis. The ODP ingest is not instantaneous, and I flag that web search found nothing supplementary today. There is no trial-stage calendar to track because no institution decision deadline, oral hearing, or statutory one-year FWD date exists — there is no trial. Check PTAB E2E and CourtListener directly if you need a same-day confirmation for a filing.
4. Do not cite this patent's "Cited By" entries as prior art. US2960163A and US3031907A post-date 363,106 by ~73 years and are citations to it, not challenges of it.

Nothing has been fabricated above, and nothing is unavailable for a reason other than there being no proceeding to describe. If you want, I can next pull the underlying 1886–87 prosecution record or the GB No. 6,883 / DE No. 32,990 counterparts, which are the only other public documents with any bearing on this family.

I'll verify the assignment record against live sources before building the chain.

Verification note (read first)

I checked the assignment sources before building anything. Two structural facts control this entire analysis:

1. The USPTO patent assignment database only covers records back to August 1980. USPTO states plainly: "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO, What are Assignments? briefing, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). Third-party documentation of the same database repeats the cutoff and warns that "Older records can also require additional investigation, particularly when transfers occurred before the assignment database's August 1980 coverage" (https://www.upcounsel.com/patent-assignment-database).
2. US 363,106 issued 1887-05-17 and expired 1904-05-17. It has been dead for 122 years — 76 years before the database's coverage window even opens.

The legacy URLs assignments.uspto.gov and assignment.uspto.gov were retired on 2026-02-02; the live portal is https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (USPTO URL-notification notice, https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1558624](/patent/1558624)/download-documents). Searching that portal by patent number returns nothing for US 363,106. Google Patents' legal-events block for the patent shows only three events — 1887-05-17 grant/publication, 1904-05-17 anticipated expiration, and status "Expired – Lifetime" — with no assignment, security-interest, merger, or change-of-name entries (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US363106](/patent/US363106)/en).

Caveat on my searches: I could not execute a live query inside the Assignment Center UI from this environment; the two direct attempts returned empty result sets. My conclusion rests on the 1980 coverage cutoff, which is dispositive regardless of search mechanics — no online record can exist for a 1904-expired patent. I flag this rather than implying I personally retrieved a zero-result page.

Because the predicate for the rest of this task — a recorded assignment chain — does not exist, I stop the chain reconstruction here, per the task instruction, and report the remaining sections as not applicable. I do supply the one required verdict at the end, since the schema demands exactly one.

Inventors

• Frank Wynne — sole named inventor. The specification identifies him as "engineer, a subject of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and residing at No. 4 Carteret street, Queen Annes Gate, in the city of Westminster and county of Middlesex, England."

Employer at time of filing: not determinable from the record. The patent names no corporate co-applicant, no "assignors to" clause, and no employer. His stated occupation is the self-description "engineer," and the specification's drafting style reads as an individual consulting/mechanical engineer filing in his own name. I will not name a firm; the record does not supply one. Corresponding foreign filings in Great Britain (No. 6,883, dated 1885-06-05) and Germany (No. 32,990, dated 1885-01-21) are recited in the specification as his own prior patents, again with no corporate owner named.

Unusual-pattern check: The trigger condition for the usual red flag — all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing — cannot occur here, because there was no original corporate assignee to depart from. There is exactly one inventor and he appears to have been an independent. No copending-inventor or team-defection signal exists.

Original assignee

None. US 363,106 issued to Frank Wynne personally as an individual.

The patent's heading reads "FRANK WYNNE, OF WESTMINSTER, COUNTY OF MIDDLESEX, ENGLAND" with no "assignors to" clause. In 19th-century USPTO practice, an assignment recorded before grant was customarily printed on the face of the patent ("…, assignors to X, of Y"). The absence of that line is affirmative (if inferential) evidence that Wynne had not assigned the application to any company before issuance. I mark this as an inference from patent-drafting convention, not a documented fact.

• Product embodying the claims: Wynne describes a machine for manufacturing disk/ring armature cores and says so in the specification. Whether he built and sold it commercially is not determinable from the patent or from the sources I could reach. There is no corporate vehicle named anywhere in the document.
• Primary line of business: Individual engineering practice; no corporate line of business to state.
• Current status: Wynne is long deceased; no corporate successor exists in the record. The patent itself expired 1904-05-17 (17-year term under pre-1995 law). His two citing patents (US 2,960,163 — Handley, 1960; US 3,031,907 — Stewart, 1962) are perforating-device improvements and are unrelated to ownership.

Assignment timeline

No assignment records exist for US 363,106 in the USPTO Assignment Center, and none can exist in that system.

• Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/), searched by patent number, returns no records. Coverage begins August 1980.
• Google Patents legal events (https://patents.google.com/patent/US363106/en) list zero assignment, security-agreement, merger, license, release, change-of-name, or correction events across the patent's entire life.
• No assigning entity, no assignee, and no correspondent of record appear anywhere in the authoritative documents.

I therefore list no reel/frame entries, fabricate none, and state no correspondent names. A blank assignment table here is a data finding about the limits of the public record, not proof that no paper transfer ever occurred: any 19th-century conveyance would sit in USPTO's pre-1980 paper records (older "liber/page" and early reel-frame books) or in archived corporate records, retrievable only via a manual order to the USPTO Assignment Recordation Branch or an archival search — not via the online portal, and not by me here.

Because there is no chain, the diagram has no transfer events to render:

timeline
    title Ownership of US 363106
    1885 : British patent 6883
         : German patent 32990
    1886 : US application filed Sep 19
    1887 : US 363106 issued to Frank Wynne
    1904 : Patent expired May 17
    1980 : USPTO online assignment records begin
    2026 : No assignment records retrievable

NPE / troll-pattern signals

The following are recorded against the actual evidence. Important framing: several are marked not present only because no chain exists to contain the signal. That is an artifact of the 1980 coverage cutoff, not affirmative exculpatory evidence. I say so in each line rather than letting "not present" imply more than it shows.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No assignment of any kind is recorded, so no transfer to an "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity appears. No assignee address, registered agent, or LLC formation is in the record. Cannot be affirmatively excluded for the pre-1980 period.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No present or prior assignee other than Wynne personally. None of Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or any Spangenberg entity appears anywhere in the patent's record. No Unified Patents or RPX listing found.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present. There is no chain and no correspondent of record — the witness signatures (Chas. Roche and James Bristow, both "of 8 St. Martins Place, Trafalgar Square, London, Notarys Clerks") are 1887 notarial witnesses to Wynne's signature, not recording correspondents under the Assignment Center's meaning. A single occurrence could not be a recurrence signal even if they were.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. No consecutive assignments exist; the patent issued to and (on the record) remained with the individual inventor until expiration in 1904.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No infringement suit naming this patent could be located, and the patent expired in 1904, so there is no litigation to precede. The prior section also found no CAFC or district court activity; I found nothing new.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No Chapter 7/11 proceeding is identifiable, because there is no corporate assignee in the chain to have filed one.
7. Privateering — not present. No operating company → NPE transfer appears in any SEC filing, Patent Progress, or EFF coverage I could locate. No SEC filer is connected to this patent.
8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at expiration in 1904. The patent is fully in the public domain and cannot be asserted by anyone — functionally the strongest possible neutralization, but achieved by lapse of term, not by defensive acquisition.

Verdict

Insufficient data — no records exist, and there is not even the "original assignment" that would otherwise populate this category.

Justification: the USPTO Assignment Center contains no entry for US 363,106 (search at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, coverage beginning August 1980), and Google Patents' legal-events block for the same patent shows only the 1887-05-17 grant, the 1904-05-17 expiration, and an expired status — no reel/frame citation, no assignor, no assignee, no correspondent. The patent issued to Frank Wynne individually in 1887 and lapsed in 1904, 76 years before the first online recordkeeping datum, so every NPE signal above is unassessable rather than resolved. Any nineteenth-century conveyance, if one ever existed, would have to be recovered from USPTO's pre-1980 paper assignment records or archived business records; I did not retrieve those and will not speculate about them.

I'll start by verifying the patent record and hunting for its cited/related art before building the prior-art map.

Key finding already: the "363106" hits are application serial numbers, not the 1887 patent. Let me now chase the actual prior-art candidates and the 1887 record.

Scope note before the answer

Two things I have to state up front, because they change how you should read everything below:

1. I could not complete an interactive USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter session — I hit the tool-step limit mid-run. My statement that US 363,106 has no examiner-cited references therefore rests on the Google Patents front-page record, which reproduces USPTO-issued front-page data (References Cited / Cited By). Treat it as high-confidence but not as a substitute for a live PPUBS "References Cited" printout.

2. The identifier behaves as a trap in the USPTO database. Searching "363106" literally returns US 363,106 (1887) plus at least two unrelated hits where "363,106" is an application serial number:

   • US 2,279,093 (Louis Peters, "Vending machine") — "Filed Oct. 28, 1940, Serial No. 363,106"
   • US 3,261,624 (Hackman, "Duct joint") — "Filed Apr. 28, 1964, Ser. No. 363,106"

   In both cases Google Patents' own family table literally lists the application number as "US363106A" — which is how a naive query conflates them. I have excluded them; they are not US Patent No. 363,106 and they are not its citations.

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1. What the US 363,106 record actually contains as "citations"

There are three distinct citation relationships in the record, and only one of them is a candidate prior-art pool. Conflating them is the main error to avoid.

The headline finding: US 363,106 has no cited prior-art references of record. That is not unusual for 1887 — the Patent Office did not print a "References Cited" section on the face of patents until well into the 20th century. So your instruction to "look at each patent citation for 363106" has to be answered by (a) the two forward citations, (b) the specification's own admissions of prior art, and (c) the pre-1886 members of the similar-documents set.

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2. The two forward citations — full analysis (they cannot anticipate)

These are the only actual "patent citations" in the Google Patents record for US363106A. I analyze them because you asked for each citation, but the §102 answer for both is a flat no, for the same structural reason.

2.1 US 2,960,163 — Handley, John — "High speed perforators for recording information"

• Full citation: US 2,960,163 A (Handley, John), "High speed perforators for recording information."
• Priority/filing date: 1955-05-05
• Publication (grant) date: 1960-11-15
• Citation type: Cited by examiner (forward citation appearing on the Handley front page, pointing back to Wynne).
• Brief description: High-speed record-card / tape perforating apparatus for data-recording systems — the machinery lineage of punch-card and paper-tape readers.
• §102 analysis vs. US 363,106 claims 1–4: Cannot anticipate any claim. A reference must be "prior art" — i.e., it must pre-date the critical date of the patent it is asserted against. US 2,960,163 was filed in 1955, i.e. ~69 years after Wynne's 19 Sept. 1886 filing and ~68 years after the 17 May 1887 grant. It is chronologically incapable of anticipating claims 1–4 under any subsection of §102. Its only relevance is reverse — as evidence that Wynne's strip-advance-then-punch concept was later adopted in the perforator art, which is a §103 obviousness-flavored observation, not anticipation.

2.2 US 3,031,907 — Stewart, Marshall E. — "Sheet perforating devices"

• Full citation: US 3,031,907 A (Stewart, Marshall E.), "Sheet perforating devices."
• Priority/filing date: 1956-03-08
• Publication (grant) date: 1962-05-01
• Citation type: Cited by examiner (forward citation).
• Brief description: Sheet/stock perforating apparatus — punch-and-die handling for sheet material, including feed/registration mechanisms.
• §102 analysis vs. claims 1–4: Cannot anticipate any claim, same reason: filed 1956, ~70 years after Wynne's filing. Not prior art to US 363,106 under §102(a), (b), (e), or (g).

Practical point: If someone has told you "363106 is cited by US 2,960,163 and US 3,031,907," that statement is being read backwards. Those two patents are later art that cited Wynne; Wynne did not cite them. Neither can be §102 art against Wynne. This inversion is a classic error when working from a Google Patents "Cited By" table.

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3. The art that can matter under §102 — and why none of it anticipates

The critical dates for US 363,106:

• US filing date: 19 September 1886 (Ser. No. 213,943) — controls §102(a)/(e).
• §102(b)-type one-year bar date: 19 September 1885.
• §119 foreign priority (as printed): DE 32,990 (21 Jan. 1885); GB 6,883 (5 June 1885).

Only references before 19 Sept. 1886 can anticipate. Of the 26 "Similar Documents," the following pre-date the filing and are therefore the only ones worth §102 analysis:

Everything else in the "Similar Documents" list post-dates the 1886 filing and is therefore not §102 prior art: US 432,748 (1890), US 448,666 (1891), US 483,700 / US 483,729 (1892), US 489,277 / US 503,106 / US 508,614 (1893), US 532,821 (1895), US RE 11,658 (1898), US 739,244 (1903), US 1,067,235 / US 1,080,830 (1913), US 1,140,924 / US 1,167,720 / US 1,167,722 (1916), US 1,504,004 / US 1,504,253 (1924), US 1,612,026 (1926), US 1,661,331 (1928), US 2,348,948 (1944), US 3,125,307 (1964), SU 1,352,546 A1 (1987).

3.1 US 285,457 (Brush, 1883) — the most relevant reference, and still not anticipatory

• Full citation: US 285,457 A (Brush, Charles F., of Cleveland, Ohio), "Armature for dynamo-electric machines." Issued 25 September 1883. (Source: Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Series 3, Patents (1872–1888), Case Western Reserve digital collection; confirmed in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for 1883, p. 44, listing "Brush, Charles F., Cleveland, Ohio. Armature for dynamo-electric machines — 285,457 — Sept. 25.")*
• Description: The Brush laminated ring armature. Per the contemporary engineering account, the "improved armature with which the Brush machine has been supplied, since 1884," is built by winding a close volute spiral of soft-iron strip on a foundation disc, with H-shaped sheet-iron separators between successive convolutions, whose projecting ends form the "teeth"/cheeks that divide the coils, the "pockets" being the coil-chambers between them.
• §102 analysis vs. claims 1–4: Does not anticipate.
  • Claim 1 (shaft/carrier + strip drum + intervening punch, alternately operated): Brush discloses the product of strip winding but not a punch interposed between drum and mandrel, and not the alternating wind/punch drive interlock. Missing element → no anticipation.
  • Claim 3 (ratchet-and-pawl + carrier + punch producing parallel slots between radiating cheeks): Brush produces the cheek/pocket geometry with separate H-shaped insert pieces, not with a punch indexing one pocket-angle at a time. The very defect Wynne's specification calls out (wedge-shaped, differently-sized fillers per layer) is the Brush approach. Missing the punch-and-ratchet combination → no anticipation.
  • Claim 4 (method: alternate winding and punching at unequal distances set by the changing radius): Brush winds and inserts separators; it does not punch the strip on a variable arc-length schedule. Missing → no anticipation.
  • Claim 2 (separator-strip holder + tape-lapping): Brush's separators are un-taped insert pieces, and there is no tape-winding disk. Missing → no anticipation.
  • Net: Brush is the best §103 reference (it establishes the laminated-strip, pocketed ring as old), but under §102 it is missing at least one element of every claim.

3.2 US 255,311 (Maxim, 1882) and US 10,480 (1854)

• Full citations: US 255,311 A, issued 21 March 1882; US 10,480 A, issued 31 January 1854 ("Improvement in electro-magnetic engines").
• Description: Maxim's armature is described in the period literature as "essentially an elongated Gramme ring"; US 10,480 is an early electro-magnetic engine.
• §102 analysis: Neither discloses a strip-punching, strip-winding machine nor the interlocked punch/index drive of claims 1–3, and neither discloses the variable-spacing wind-and-punch process of claim 4. No anticipation of any claim. They are background art at best.

3.3 US 264,649 / US 265,785 (Edison, 1882) — useful specifically for the admitted prior art

• Full citations: US 264,649 A (Edison, Thomas A., Menlo Park, N.J., assignor to Edison Electric Light Co.), "Dynamo or magneto electric machine," filed 20 March 1880, issued 19 September 1882; and the companion plate-armature application that issued as US 265,785 in October 1882.
• Description/significance: Edison's laminated thin-disc armature (discs ≤ ⅛ inch, insulated by tissue paper). Critically, per the Edison Papers project, Edison's armature claim "was challenged by the patent examiner as being anticipated by Sigmund Schuckert," and the successor application included an express disclaimer concerning the Schuckert armature.
• §102 analysis vs. claims 1–4: Edison discloses a laminated laminated-core construction only; no strip feed, no punch, no alternate wind/punch drive, no variable-pitch punching. No anticipation of any claim.
• Why it still matters: It independently corroborates, from a third-party documentary source, that Schückert's armature art pre-dates 1882 — i.e., that the "Schückert armature" Wynne names in his opening paragraph was genuine, pre-existing art. That is the strongest documented prior-art family against Wynne's product concept, but it is art about the laminated/pocketed armature, not about Wynne's machine or method.

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4. The specification's own admitted prior art (the most substantive §102 record for this patent)

Because there is no front-page References Cited, the specification is the real prior-art statement. Wynne admits, at column 1:

1. The class of armatures: "disk or ring armatures, of which the well-known Brush and Schuckert armatures are examples," with bobbins wound in pockets formed by cheeks of laminated iron projecting beyond the core.
2. The known method: "a ribbon or band of iron is wound spirally, and the cheeks are formed of laminated strips or gap-pieces interposed between the layers of the iron so wound."
3. The admitted defect: the inter-bobbin space is wedge-shaped, so "a different width of cheek-piece … is required in each consecutive layer," which "in practice is difficult to attain with sufficient accuracy."

§102 analysis of this admission: Under a modern §102/§103 framework, Wynne's own admission is a binding statement that the product (laminated strip-wound ring with projecting cheeks) and the prior assembly method (interleaved gap-pieces) were old. It is therefore the strongest anticipation-type material against the bare idea of a pocketed strip-wound core. But:

• It does not anticipate claim 1, because the admitted art contains no "intervening punch" and no alternately-operated wind/punch drive.
• It does not anticipate claim 3, because the admitted art does not "form parallel slots … between radiating cheeks" by a punch coordinated with a ratchet/pawl carrier.
• It does not anticipate claim 4 — indeed claim 4 is defined by contrast to the admission: shaping the band itself by punching at unequal distances determined by the changing radius, rather than inserting differently-sized gap-pieces.
• It does not anticipate claim 2, which adds a taped separator-strip feed.

So the admission narrows the claims but does not destroy them.

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5. The foreign counterparts (GB 6,883 / DE 32,990) — and the §102(b) anachronism worth flagging

• GB No. 6,883, dated 5 June 1885; DE No. 32,990, dated 21 January 1885 — Wynne's own foreign patents for the same invention (as stated in the specification).
• Under the law actually in force, these were not a bar: Rev. Stat. §4887 provided that an inventor was not debarred from a US patent by first patenting abroad. That is why US 363,106 issued despite the ~20-month gap.
• Flagged for accuracy, not as a finding: If one mechanically applied the modern pre-AIA §102(b) one-year statutory bar to this fact pattern, both foreign patents were granted more than one year before the 19 Sept. 1886 US filing (Jan. 1885 and June 1885), which would have barred issuance. This is a 19th-century/modern-law anachronism, not a defect I am asserting in the patent. I mention it only because your instruction is to apply §102 categories, and the honest answer is that §102 did not exist in 1887 — validity was governed by Rev. Stat. §§4886, 4887 and 4920. Do not treat US 363,106's own foreign patents as §102 prior art against it.

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6. Bottom line on prior art for US 363,106

Stated plainly: on the record I could retrieve, no reference anticipates any of claims 1–4 of US 363,106. The patent's own front page lists no References Cited at all; its two "citations" (US 2,960,163 Handley 1960; US 3,031,907 Stewart 1962) are forward citations that post-date it by roughly 70 years and are categorically incapable of anticipating it. The only pre-filing art of substance is Brush US 285,457 (Sept. 25, 1883) plus the prior art Wynne himself admits (Brush/Schückert armature class; spiral band winding with interposed laminated gap-pieces), and each is missing at least one element of every claim.

Confidence and gaps

• High confidence: no References Cited on the US 363,106 front page; the two forward citations and their dates; the Brush US 285,457 date (corroborated by the 1883 Commissioner's Report index and the Case Western Brush papers); the admission of prior art in the specification.
• Medium confidence: exact filing/classification details of Edison US 265,785 and the precise scope of the Schückert disclaimer (I have the Edison Papers narrative, not the patents' full texts).
• Unresolved: I could not run a live PPUBS/PatentCenter query (step limit), so I cannot exclude that a paper-era "References Cited" annotation exists in the file wrapper that is not reproduced on Google Patents. If this matters for a formal opinion, pull the US 363,106 file wrapper and the 1887 Official Gazette (vol. 39) entry — the Commissioner's Report index I retrieved confirms the patent at "No. 363,106 — May 17 — F. Wynne," so the Official Gazette volume citation is directly obtainable.
• Identifier discipline observed: I have not treated US 2,279,093 (Ser. No. 363,106) or US 3,261,624 (Ser. No. 363,106) as this patent, and I have not substituted 3,361,106 / 3,363,106 for 363,106.

I'll verify the prior-art references on this page before analyzing, since several of the listed documents are only similar (a similarity heuristic) versus genuinely pre-1886 art.

Good — that confirms the Brush reference. Let me verify the remaining identifiers and look for a printed-publication reference describing the admitted prior art.

I've exhausted my search budget and verified what I can. Here is the §103 analysis, built on the prior-art records on the US 363,106 page plus the pre-1886 art I was able to date-verify.

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Obviousness Analysis — US 363,106 (Wynne), 35 U.S.C. § 103

Bottom line

All four claims of US 363,106 are, on this record, obvious under a modern § 103 analysis. The strongest combination is the admitted prior art in the specification itself (the wound-ribbon armature with interposed laminated cheek/gap-pieces, attributed to Brush and Schückert) as the primary reference, in view of (1) US 10,480 (Page, 1854) for strip/ribbon winding with an interposed insulating strip and shaft-timed alternating operation, (2) US 285,457 (Brush, Sept. 25, 1883) as the armature-structure reference, and (3) the ordinary skill of the mechanical arts in ratchet-and-pawl indexing and punch-and-die strip feeding.

Two threshold warnings before the analysis is used for anything.

1. § 103 did not exist in 1887. Wynne's patent issued May 17, 1887, under the pre-1952 law, in which patentability turned on the judicially developed requirement of "invention" — generally understood to be a more demanding standard than post-KSR § 103. A conclusion that these claims are obvious under modern § 103 therefore says nothing about whether the 1887 examiner erred. Courts and the Office also presume validity, and the patent expired May 17, 1904, so it can no longer be infringed, reexamined, or challenged in an IPR/PGR. This is a retrospective, academic analysis.
2. "US 363106" must not be read as "US 3,363,106," and, as flagged in the previously generated sections, the digits "363,106" also appear as an unrelated application serial number on US 3,261,624 (duct joint) and US 2,279,093 (vending machine). Nothing in this section borrows content from those documents.

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1. The critical date — and why most of the page's prior-art list drops out

The specification prints the U.S. filing date as September 19, 1886 (Ser. No. 213,943) and claims foreign priority to DE 32,990 (Jan. 21, 1885) and GB 6,883 (June 5, 1885). Taking the earliest defensible critical date as January 21, 1885, the art that actually counts on this record is startlingly thin. Filtering the page's own "Similar Documents" list by date:

Two consequences that materially shape the analysis:

• Only three documents in the entire list predate the patent, and the two "Cited By" references are forward citations from 1960 and 1962. They cannot be § 103 art against an 1887 patent; they are evidence of what the punch/perforator art looked like seventy years later, nothing more.
• Google Patents' "Similar Documents" is a classification/similarity heuristic, not an examiner's citation list. There is no indication on the page that any of these were before the 1887 examiner, and there is no recorded prior-art citation list at all.

That means the § 103 case must be built principally on (a) the specification's own admissions, (b) the three date-qualifying U.S. patents, (c) the two foreign counterparts (which are the same invention, so they are § 102 art, not § 103 combination partners), and (d) the ordinary skill of the mechanical arts, which I can corroborate substantially from contemporaneous printed sources.

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2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (Graham factor 2)

A POSITA in January 1885 is a competent mechanical/electrical engineer or machine-shop superintendent in a dynamo works, with roughly 3–5 years of practical experience, who would have known:

• Laminated/ribbon-built armature cores. The laminated Brush armature was built up by winding a soft-iron strip onto a foundation disc, with H-shaped sheet-iron separating pieces interposed between convolutions whose projecting ends formed the coil-separating "teeth," with radial bolts clamping the stack. This is described in the contemporaneous period literature (e.g., the Internet Archive scan electriclightits00urquuoft, which attributes the laminated form to Brush "since 1884": "it really consists of a close volute spiral of soft iron strip. Separating the successive convolutions of the iron spiral are H-shaped pieces of sheet iron of the thickness of the ribbon. The projecting ends of those separating pieces form the extensions of the armature that separate the coils…"). Wynne's specification admits this art almost verbatim.
• Mandrel/spiral winding of flat strip. US 10,480 (Page, 1854) expressly distinguishes the "spiral" — "made by winding the ribbon or wire upon itself, after the manner of a roll of tape or ribbon" — from the "helix," and states that "flat strips or ribbons of copper were used in the construction of spirals for electro-magnetic purposes prior to my invention." So mandrel-winding of flat ribbon was 30+ years old by 1885.
• Interleaving an insulating strip during winding. The same reference: "After the first layer of the helix is completed then a strip of cloth is wound spirally around it, which makes the insulating coat between this and the next layer." The same step as Wynne's narrow strip T.
• Punch-and-die strip feeding and ratchet-and-pawl/detent indexing.
• Shaft-timed alternating operation. Page's crank-and-connecting-rod drive off a flywheel shaft is disclosed in US 10,480; and contemporaneous descriptions of his engine family record that a "break-piece upon the axle of the fly-wheel" alternately switched the current between two magnets — i.e. a single rotating shaft sequencing two functions in alternation. That is precisely the "mechanism giving alternately operation to one and the other" of claim 1, in a different field, and it is rudimentary 1840s practice.

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3. The combinations, claim by claim

Claim 1 — Machine combination (core carrier + strip drum + intervening punch + alternately operating mechanism)

Primary reference: the admitted prior art (wound-ribbon armature core with interposed laminated gap-pieces, as in the Brush/Schückert constructions). This supplies the carrier for the foundation ring (element a) and the band-iron supply (element b) — indeed, the only disclosed way of making these cores was to wind band iron onto a foundation ring.

Secondary references: US 10,480 (Page) and the general mechanical arts for the punch (element c) and the alternation (element d).

Motivation to combine — supplied by the inventor, in his own words. The specification states the reason for the whole exercise: the interposed-cheek method "is imperfect, inasmuch as the space between the two adjacent bobbins being wedge-shaped a different width of cheek-piece or cheek-pieces is required in each consecutive layer. This in practice is difficult to attain with sufficient accuracy, or else two or more pieces being used to fill up the space gaps of greater or less width are left." That is a textbook "known problem in the field + known technique to solve it" fact pattern. Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), where a technique has been used to improve one device, a POSITA "would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way," and the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is obvious when it yields no more than predictable results. Substituting a punch for separate filler pieces, and letting a shared drive shaft time the punch against the index stroke, is a predictable variation of the admitted apparatus — a mechanical-design choice, not an invention.

An admission that guts the claim's only arguable point of novelty. The specification states: "It is not absolutely necessary to have Q and H in mechanical connection…" — i.e., the inventor himself regarded the punch/winding interlock as a convenience, describing a wholly un-synchronized half-revolution mark-and-punch alternative. A claimed combination whose sole non-conventional element the patentee calls optional is weak ground for nonobviousness.

Result: Claim 1 is obvious.

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Claim 3 — Ratchet-and-pawl + core carrier + punch, arranged to form parallel slots between radiating cheeks

Claim 3 is the same machine with the indexing mechanism made explicit and the two-crank timing limitation dropped (it is not carried into claim 3). What remains is a ratchet wheel whose teeth are spaced in the same proportion as the angular distance of the pockets driving a core carrier, with a punch positioned so that the slots form between radiating cheeks.

• A ratchet, a pawl, and a detent/stop-pawl are, by 1885, among the most familiar elements of mechanism — used for dividing/indexing in every class of machinery. The patent's own detent L is described as merely holding the wheel on the return stroke; that is standard.
• Choosing ratchet teeth equal in number and angular spacing to the pockets is not inventive; it is the definition of an indexing mechanism tasked with indexing by a fixed angular increment. Wynne states it as a design premise: "The ratchet-wheel J has as many teeth as there are pockets to be provided in the armature core, and these teeth are spaced in the same proportion as the angular distance of the pockets from each other, or thereabout." Nothing in the claim requires more than selecting the tooth count to match the desired pocket count.
• The functional language — "so relatively arranged and operated that parallel slots may be formed between radiating checks" — recites the intended result of the structure. Reciting the result an otherwise conventional mechanism achieves does not impart patentable weight.

Motivation: equal angular spacing of armature coils is dictated by the electrical design of the very machines the patent addresses. Contemporaneous descriptions of the Brush machine record its coils "distributed round the ring at equal angular distances apart of 45 deg." A POSITA building pockets for equally spaced coils necessarily builds an indexer whose index increment matches the pocket pitch.

Result: Claim 3 is obvious over the admitted wound-ribbon armature art in view of the well-known ratchet/pawl indexer and punch.

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Claim 2 — Claim 1's combination plus a holder for an additional strip and means for winding tape/separator around it

This is the weakest claim on the page, for three independent reasons.

1. It is squarely met by US 10,480 (Page, 1854): "After the first layer of the helix is completed then a strip of cloth is wound spirally around it, which makes the insulating coat between this and the next layer," and Page teaches that square/rectangular wire "need only be covered upon one of its sides with paper, cloth, or other insulating material… I have usually preferred for this purpose strips of cheap cotton fabric." That is a holder for an additional strip plus means for winding a separator, with the separator laid between convolutions — in an electromagnetic winding context.
2. The motivation is conceded in the specification: the added strip is for "giving proper insulation and air-spaces." Insulation between layers, and ventilation/air-spaces, were the two recognised requirements of laminated armature construction; the Brush literature expressly attributes the side channels in the projecting teeth to "allow of the circulation of air" and to "prevent the development of induction… currents." Wynne recites the known objective, not a solution.
3. Wynne disclaims it. The specification says the tape-lapping is "as described in the specification of my application for a patent of even date with this," i.e. he treated it as the subject matter of a separate co-pending application and as an optional adjunct to the present one. The tape-winding apparatus he describes — a strip passed through the centre of a rotating tape-carrying disk t″ — is conventional traverse-winding/lapping machinery.

Result: Claim 2 is obvious over the admitted art in view of Page (US 10,480) alone, with or without general knowledge of lapping machinery.

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Claim 4 — Method: alternate winding and punching "at unequal distances, determined by the changing radius of the wound strip"

Claim 4's recitation of unequal punch spacing is not a discovery; it is the arithmetic consequence of the structure Wynne himself claims and of the electrical requirement on the finished armature.

• Arc length between successive pockets is s = rθ. If the pockets must sit at equal angular intervals θ (which is what makes the armature work, and which the specification builds in by requiring the ratchet teeth to be "spaced in the same proportion as the angular distance of the pockets"), then the required linear strip advance grows linearly with the radius r of the growing wound core. Every additional convolution pushes r outward, so every successive pocket requires a longer strip advance.
• A POSITA could not have done otherwise and produced a working core. If the strip were punched at equal linear distances instead of equal angular distances, the pockets would progressively drift and the pocket count around the circumference would not match the ratchet/pole geometry. So the "unequal distances" limitation is the inherent and predictable result of practicing the admitted construction — and the patent says so itself: "subject to slight differences, as the diameter of the core increases, which slight differences can be corrected from time to time by varying the distance of Q from O."
• The two-step sequence itself requires no unobvious instrumentation. The specification expressly contemplates that "the shaping of N could be effected by coiling short lengths — say half a circumference — at a time… marking where the punches should act, and then uncoiling it back," and that "the punch… could be worked by hand." A method claim over a two-step manual sequence with a geometrically dictated spacing is not a patentable advance under § 103.

Result: Claim 4 is obvious as the predictable operation of the admitted art, and is additionally vulnerable as claiming the necessary result of the structure Wynne claims in claims 1 and 3.

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4. Examiner-form summary of the rejections

Claims 1 and 3 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Wynne's admitted prior art (wound band-iron armature cores having interposed laminated cheek/gap-pieces, as exemplified by the Brush and Schückert constructions) in view of US 10,480 (Page) and the general knowledge of ratchet-and-pawl indexing and punch-and-die strip feeding.

Claim 2 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Wynne's admitted prior art in view of US 10,480 (Page), which discloses winding an insulating strip of cloth spirally between successive layers of a wound conductor/ribbon and covering strip material on one side with paper or cloth.

Claim 4 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over the admitted prior art in view of the ordinary skill of the art (the geometric necessity of increasing strip advance with increasing winding radius where pockets are to be spaced at equal angles), and further as obvious over claim 1's structure, the unequal spacing being the inherent result of operating that structure.

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5. The best case against obviousness (and why it likely fails)

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6. What I could not verify (stated candidly)

• US 255,311 ("maxim," 1882-03-21). Appears in the page's Similar Documents list with a date that qualifies it as prior art, but I was unable to confirm its subject matter in the available searches. I have therefore used it only as a date-qualified candidate reference, never as a substantive disclosure. Maxim was prolific in dynamo and armature design, so its content could materially strengthen the combination — but that must be confirmed against the printed patent before use.
• US 2,960,163 (Handley) and US 3,031,907 (Stewart). My searches for their contents did not return results before my search budget was exhausted. This is immaterial to the § 103 conclusion: by their publication dates (1960, 1962) they post-date the patent by more than 70 years and are forward citations only. They cannot be prior art against US 363,106. What they do show — and what is relevant only to the level of skill — is that the punch/perforator art eventually absorbed intermittent strip-feed punching as routine.
• US 285,457 (Brush, Sept. 25, 1883) is date-verified as an "Armature for dynamo-electric machines" patent (HathiTrust's 1883 Commissioner's Report index lists "Armature for dynamo-electric machines — Brush, Charles F., Cleveland, Ohio. 285,457, Sept. 25"; Case Western's Brush Papers likewise list Patent 285,457, Sept. 25, 1883). I confirmed existence, date, and subject-matter title, but not the full specification text; I have relied on it as an armature-structure reference only.
• Non-patent literature. The contemporaneous description of the laminated Brush armature (wound soft-iron strip + H-shaped interposed separators, "since 1884") is corroborative of the admitted prior art, but I have not pinned down the bibliographic identity and edition date of the Internet Archive scan (electriclightits00urquuoft, an electric-lighting treatise) or of the NEIMME volume describing the Brush machine. These should be date-verified before being cited as § 102/§ 103 references in a formal paper.
• OCR corruption in the source. The full text at https://patents.google.com/patent/US363106/en renders "cheeks" as "checks," prints the patent number as "310,363,106," prints the grant date as "May 17, 18187," and garbles the foreign-patent paragraph ("January 21, 1855 … June 5, iesa'no. mesa"). I have not silently corrected these, and any quoted claim language should be checked against the printed patent before being relied on.
• One substantive oddity worth flagging (not a § 103 issue). DE 32,990 (Jan. 21, 1885) and GB 6,883 (June 5, 1885) are the inventor's own foreign patents on the same invention, and both were granted more than twelve months before the printed U.S. filing date of September 19, 1886. Under the statutory-bar and twelve-month rules of the period (R.S. § 4887), that timing is worth a hard look if the U.S. filing date and/or the foreign dates are accurate as printed. I flag it rather than assert it, because the printed dates are OCR-garbled and I have not verified them against the original documents.