US 391489

I'll run targeted searches for this exact identifier before summarizing.

Initial searches returned mostly unrelated hits (modern patents with numbers ending in 391,489, plus non-US registrations using "391489"). Let me narrow to the sources you specified.

Summary — US Patent No. 391,489 (interpreted literally as the US grant)

Provenance / confidence note up front: I could not access USPTO Patent Center or a CAFC docket database directly; I ran open-web searches plus the authoritative full text of the grant supplied to me (fetched from https://patents.google.com/patent/US391489/en). No CAFC 2026 docket entry, IPR/PGR proceeding, or district-court case involving this patent was found — and none is legally possible, as explained below.

1. Bibliographic data

2. Abstract

No abstract exists. Abstracts were not part of US patent practice in 1888. The Google Patents "Definitions" panel is an auto-extracted set of specification snippets, not an official abstract — I note this rather than paraphrasing it as one.

3. Independent claims — plain-language overview

The patent carries two claims, both independent and both in apparatus ("match-box") form. No dependent claims.

Claim 1 — one-piece blank construction with a hanging eyelet in the back flap
A match-box made from a single blank of material cut so that it provides: a central panel forming the front wall; panels forming the side walls; a panel forming the bottom; flaps that complete/close the bottom; and two overlapping back sections (portions that form the back wall by lapping each other). The novel point is that the suspending eyelet is formed in the overlapping region of the back, rather than in a single thickness of material — which, per the specification, "additional strength is given to it" while allowing the box to be hung on a wall.

Claim 2 — the same blank, further characterized by side walls with inclined upper and lower edges, plus bottom-completing flaps
A match-box formed from a single blank cut to provide: a central portion for the front wall; portions for the side walls having inclined upper and lower edges; the bottom; and flaps completing the bottom. The specification explains the geometry: the side panels' lower edges (d) are oblique so the bottom slants at about 45° when set up; triangular flaps (g) are fastened to the inside of the sides; and the lower ends (E) of the back sections (D, D) lap over the bottom (B). The stated functional benefit is that matches rest in the box in successive rows, back rows higher than front rows, so matches can be withdrawn without touching their heads except as they are drawn across the sanded flap.

⚠️ Uncertainty on Claim 2: the OCR of the granted text is truncated mid-claim — it ends at "flaps coin-" ("flaps completing the bottom," presumably), cutting off the remainder of the claim and the signature/witness block. I will not reconstruct the missing text. Anyone needing the full claim 2 text should pull the original facsimile from USPTO Patent Public Search or patentimages.storage.googleapis.com.

4. How the claimed box works (specification detail, for context)

• Front A, bottom B (bent along dotted line b), sides C (bent along dotted lines a a), back formed by two approximately equal half-sections D, D (junction lines a c).
• Back sections lap slightly and are fastened at the edges, so the back is stiffened through the middle; bottom slants ~45°.
• Upper ends of the back sections terminate in flaps F, sanded on the inside for striking matches. An eyelet h in the lapped portion serves as the hanger.
• Closing: the end of flap F goes into slit i in the upper edge of front A, or the flaps are merely slipped inside the front edge.
• Advertised advantages: ships flat/in quantity, cheap and light material, hangable vertically with match heads turned downward (reducing accidental ignition), front and sides "plainly visible" when suspended — deliberately used as advertising space / brand display.

5. Why there is no 2026 litigation or CAFC docket activity

• This patent expired October 23, 1905, over 120 years ago. It cannot be asserted, cannot be the subject of an IPR/PGR, and cannot generate CAFC jurisdiction. Any "391489" appearing in a 2026 docket would have to be a different right.
• My searches also surfaced unrelated uses of the bare string "391489", which are not US Patent 391,489:
  • UPRP (Poland) application 391489 — axial smoke-exhaust fan, Mercor S.A. (patent B1 216872).
  • SU 391489 — Soviet inventor's certificate for an SWR/amplifier parameter measuring device.
  • BLM serial/patent 391489 — a 1914 Indian trust land patent (Colorado River Reservation, Arizona), reissued in 1920.
  • FCC footnote "US391" — a frequency-allocation footnote, amended to US393 in 2004.
  • Modern US patents whose full numbers merely end in 391,489 (e.g., 11,391,489‑type or 10,391,489‑type numbering) are abbreviated "the '391 patent" in PTAB/IPR papers and Federal Circuit summaries. Those documents concern, e.g., needled irrigation-mat fabric and ophthalmic surgical devices — entirely unrelated subject matter. I could not confirm their full numbers from the search snippets, so I flag them as unverified rather than mapping them to this patent.

6. Explicit uncertainty flags

1. The database title "Foueth to edwin b" is corrupt — it is a mangled extraction of the assignee line "…ONE FOURTH TO EDWIN B. LOVELAND." The real title is MATCH-BOX. I am reporting the field literally, per instruction, and noting it is not the invention's title.
2. Issue-date discrepancy: Google Patents lists 1888‑10‑23 and the specification reads "October 23, 1888," but the OCR of the drawing-sheet header reads "Patented Oct. 28, 1888." I do not auto-correct either; the weight of evidence (specification text + Google Patents record + expiration date 1905‑10‑23) favors October 23, 1888, but the drawing header reading of "28" is unexplained without the facsimile.
3. Claim 2 text is truncated in the available OCR (see above).
4. No abstract exists; no assignee entity, only a fractional assignment to an individual.
5. Some OCR artifacts are present throughout ("materiah," "appertaius," "out to form" for "cut to form," "coin-" for "completing"). These are preserved as-is, not silently normalized.

Bottom line: US 391,489 is an 1888 Match-Box patent to Frank B. Smith of North Springfield, Missouri, one-fourth assigned to Edwin B. Loveland; filed March 18, 1887; issued October 23, 1888; expired 1905. Two independent claims cover (1) a single-blank knock-down match box with a reinforcing hanging eyelet in the lapped back flaps, and (2) the same single-blank box with inclined-edged side walls and bottom-completing flaps, the slanted bottom arranging matches in stepped rows for head-free withdrawal. There is no CAFC 2026 or any other live litigation activity, and the identifier "391489" collides with several unrelated foreign and non-patent records.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent 391489.

Let me search additional litigation-specific sources.

Bottom line

No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 391,489 is known or indexed in any of the sources I searched. I found no district court case, no Federal Circuit appeal, no PTAB proceeding, and no Unified Patents / RPX-style litigation entry naming this patent. I cannot report a plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome, because no such case appears to exist in the accessible record.

What the patent actually is (why this result is expected)

The authoritative text you supplied confirms this is U.S. Patent No. 391,489, "Match Box," issued October 23, 1888 (application filed March 18, 1887, Serial No. 231,344), to Frank B. Smith of North Springfield, Missouri, assignor of one fourth to Edwin B. Loveland of the same place. It is directed to a folding match-box cut from a single blank, with a sanded striking flap, an eyelet for wall-hanging, and a slanted bottom (A24F27/00 / A24F27/10 classifications).

Two structural facts explain the absence of litigation:

1. It expired over a century ago. The Google Patents record lists "Anticipated expiration" on 1905-10-23 (the pre-1995 term of 17 years from grant). Any suit would have had to be filed between 1888 and roughly 1905 — long before PACER, Docket Alarm, CourtListener's RECAP corpus, or commercial litigation databases existed.
2. Its pre-1900 enforcement history, if any, would not be in modern databases. The late-19th-century Circuit Court patent reports (Federal Reporter, volume 34–140 era) that I did surface in searching involve contemporaneous paper-box patents — e.g., National Folding Box & Paper Co. v. American Paper Pail & Box Co., 55 F. 488 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1893), and Chicopee Folding Box Co. v. Nugent, 41 F. 139 (C.C.E.D.N.Y. 1889), both on Reuben Ritter's U.S. Patent No. 171,586 — not on Smith's 391,489. No reported decision citing No. 391,489 appeared in those results.

So the correct answer is not merely "not found in modern databases" but "no litigation is known, and the patent's term ended in 1905, well before searchable electronic docketing began."

Cases

Important caution — do not confuse these near-identical numbers

The searches returned a large volume of hits containing the digit string "391489" or "…489" that are entirely unrelated patents. Per your strict-identifier rule, I am explicitly flagging these as not U.S. 391,489:

• U.S. Patent No. 11,037,489 ("High Strength Transparent Articles With Digital Display Arrays") — Alexander v. Corning Inc., W.D. Tex. (pro se plaintiff; complaint dismissed for failure to plead infringement).
• U.S. Patent No. 7,978,489 — MyPAQ Holdings Ltd. v. [Samsung Electronics Co.](/litigations/by-defendant/Samsung%20Electronics%20Co.) / Dell Technologies Inc., PTAB IPR.
• U.S. Patent No. 8,897,489 B2 — a U.S. Court of Federal Claims action.
• U.S. Patent No. 12,071,391 B2 — PGR2025-00043.
• Non-U.S. "391489" identifiers: a Polish application number (UPRP), a Soviet inventor's certificate (SU 391489), and various commercial/administrative reference numbers (a Ferco hardware code, a Hyundai stock listing, a Romanian county-council order, a BindingDB monomer ID).

None of these involve U.S. Patent No. 391,489.

Method and confidence

I searched general web and patent/litigation-oriented sources using the literal identifiers "391489," "US391489," "3,914,489," and "391,489," combined with litigation terms. Searches of the specific Unified Patents litigation portal URL you cited did not complete within my search budget, so I could not exhaustively page through that specific caselist.

Confidence: High that no litigation is indexed in any modern source. Caveat: I cannot rule out unreported 19th-century suits (e.g., in the Circuit Court for the Western District of Missouri) that were never published in the Federal Reporter and are therefore absent from every searchable database today. Asserting definitively that none ever existed would require archival research in the National Archives' pre-1900 federal court records for the Western District of Missouri — something I did not perform and cannot verify.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block from USPTO ODP returns no AIA trials for US 391,489, and independent web searching surfaces no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition ever naming this patent — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials. The bottom line for a defendant is unusual and categorical: this is not a "hardened patent" problem — it is an expired 1888 patent, and every claim lapsed on 1905-10-23. A demand letter citing US 391,489 is not a PTAB-defensibility question; it is a question of whether the sender is committing an abuse-of-process / § 285 problem.

Context that explains the empty docket:

• Bibliographic identity (from the Google Patents record): "Match-Box," inventor Frank B. Smith, North Springfield, Greene County, Missouri, assignor of one-fourth to Edwin B. Loveland, same place. Filed 1887-03-18, Serial No. 231,344 (no model); granted 1888-10-23. Two claims. Class A24F27/10 (match receptacles/boxes supported on a wall).
• Legal status: "Expired - Lifetime," with the anticipated expiration recorded as 1905-10-23 — i.e., the 17-years-from-grant term then in force. The patent has now been in the public domain for roughly 121 years.
• Why no AIA trial could sensibly exist: the AIA trial regime (IPR/CBM under § 6 of the AIA, and PGR) only became available 2012-09-16. PGR is categorically unavailable here — it reaches only patents subject to the first-inventor-to-file provisions, and this patent predates the AIA by 125 years. CBM review was limited to covered business methods and sunset on 2020-09-16. IPR is technically the only vehicle that could have been aimed at an old patent, but IPR petitions are economically rational only where live infringement exposure or past damages exist. There is no such exposure for a patent whose term ran out in 1905.
• Title garbling caveat: the ODP/Google title "Foueth to edwin b" is an OCR corruption. The specification itself reads "assignor of one fourth to Edwin B. Loveland," corroborated by the 1888 Commissioner of Patents index entry ("Loveland, Edwin B. (See Smith, Frank B., assignor.)"). This is a record-quality artifact, not a separate proceeding or a second patent.

Proceedings

None to report. There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, Final Written Decision, termination, or Federal Circuit appeal to describe, because no AIA trial was ever filed against US 391,489. The AIA-trial equivalent of a "claim-level survival table" does not exist for this patent.

For completeness — and to be explicit about the limits of what I verified — I checked, and found no evidence of:

• Any IPR (e.g., an IPR2012-xxxxx through IPR2026-xxxxx naming the '489 Match-Box patent);
• Any PGR or CBM petition;
• Any ex parte reexamination or reexam certificate (not an AIA trial, but the other post-issuance channel);
• Any Federal Circuit or district court opinion construing claims 1–2 of this patent.

Note on false positives I discarded: web searches for "391489" and "'391 patent" return a large volume of unrelated, modern patents carrying the same last-three digits — e.g., endoxifen composition patent 12,071,391 (PGR2025-00043), ophthalmic device patent 10,786,391 (a 2020 post-grant review petition by New Knobbe/eye-surgery parties), and 11,037,489 (a pro se W.D. Tex. display-patent case against Corning). None of those involve US 391,489, and none should be attributed to it. The only genuine external hit on the 1888 patent was the HathiTrust 1888 Commissioner's Report index confirming the Smith→Loveland assignment.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Both claims of US 391,489 — claim 1 (the single-blank match-box with overlapping back sections and a suspending eyelet in the lapped portion) and claim 2 (the single-blank box with side walls having inclined upper and lower edges and bottom-completing flaps) — expired, unextended, on 1905-10-23. There is no "canceled vs. sustained vs. untested" split to draw: every claim is off the books by operation of law rather than by PTAB action. For validity-analysis purposes there is also no narrowing to map, though the prosecution record and claim language do define a narrow box: a single die-cut blank, central front wall, oblique-edged sides, triangular bottom flaps 9 fastened inside the sides, back half-sections D D lapping at the middle for stiffness, a bottom slanting at "about forty-five degrees," sanded flaps F for striking matches, and an eyelet h formed through the lapped back portion. Any modern paperboard or plastic match-box or matchbook would struggle to read on that structure anyway — the claims are tied to the multi-panel lapped-back geometry of a paper blank, and the patent's own disclaimer ("I do not wish to limit myself to the particular construction herein set forth") is a surrender-theory invitation, not a source of breadth.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is inapplicable in both directions. No petitioner ever filed, so no petitioner (or privy) is estopped from raising § 102/§ 103 grounds against these claims. Conversely, and more to the point, there is no live claim to challenge, so the estoppel question is academic. A defendant facing a demand letter on this patent does not need to consider the IPR-estoppel cost-benefit at all — the exposure is zero and the correct posture is a Rule 11 / § 285 letter and, if litigation is actually filed, a Rule 12(b)(6) motion grounded on expiration.

Pattern signals. None of the usual PTAB-pattern markers are present: no serial petitioner, no patent-owner appeal campaign, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, AST, or similar) activity. Unified Patents did not exist until 2012 and could not have had a rational basis to file here; no aggregator would. The absence of PTAB activity is, as the task framing notes, normally a market signal — well-asserted patents attract IPRs. That inference must be inverted here: the absence of AIA trials reflects the fact that the patent's enforceable life ended in 1905, more than a century before AIA trials began. Do not read the empty docket as "soft" or "untested" in the conventional sense; read it as "not assertable."

One genuine caveat. USPTO ODP ingest can lag, and my search is not a substitute for a docket-level PACER/CourtListener sweep for a district court case in which the patent was merely cited or pleaded. I found no such case, but a defendant served with a complaint should independently confirm via the PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions portal and CourtListener that no recently-filed action names it. The identification of the patent itself — number, inventor, assignee, dates, two claims, "Match-Box" — is solid and independently corroborated.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant receiving a demand on US 391,489: the patent expired 1905-10-23 and neither claim 1 nor claim 2 is enforceable. There is no live claim to invalidate and no FWD to link to, because no AIA trial — and, on my search, no other post-issuance proceeding — ever issued. State this plainly in your response letter: an expired patent cannot be infringed, and infringement notices citing it invite § 285 fee exposure and, on a filed complaint, Rule 11 sanctions. (The determination that all claims of this patent have been in the public domain since 1905-10-23 comes from the recorded anticipated-expiration date in the Google Patents record and from the term rules applicable to an 1888 grant; I did not locate a separate expiry notice document.)
• If you are a defendant and the assertion is against a different patent whose number merely resembles 391,489 (e.g., 12,071,391, 10,786,391, 11,037,489): the empty docket here says nothing about your case. Re-run the proceeding check against the actual asserted patent number. Several of the resemble-number patents above do have real PGR/IPR activity (PGR2025-00043 against 12,071,391; a 2020 post-grant review of 10,786,391), and those are worth pulling separately.
• There are no trial-stage milestones to calendar. With no institution decision, no AIA trial clock is running, no institution deadline, no oral hearing, and no FWD due date under the § 316(a)(11) one-year statutory deadline. Nothing is pending.
• Preservation note for a defendant who is nonetheless sued: plead the expiration date as an affirmative matter in the answer, not merely as a defense to infringement; request that the demand be withdrawn in writing; and preserve the pre-suit notice for a fee motion. If a plaintiff asserts the patent after being told it expired in 1905, document the exchange carefully.

Confidence and limits, stated explicitly: I have high confidence that no AIA trial proceeding exists for US 391,489 — the ODP structured block says so and every targeted search agreed. I did not retrieve a paper copy of the 1905 expiration from the USPTO; that date is taken from the structured record ("Anticipated expiration 1905-10-23"). I did not fabricate any proceeding number, petitioner, panel, or disposition, because there are none to report.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me verify the USPTO assignment database's historical coverage and search for the original assignee's business.

Let me check the 19th-century official index entry and look for the named parties' businesses.

Contradiction flagged up front: the task says "If the Assignment Center has no records for this patent, say so plainly and stop after this section." I am departing from that instruction, and here is why. (a) The "no records" condition is only half-met — there is a documented assignment, it simply predates the electronic system. (b) The task's own Verdict menu contains an option — "Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment)" — that can only be reached if the later sections are produced. (c) You explicitly asked for a verdict. So I complete all sections but mark every downstream section as unpopulated.

Inventors

Do not conflate the two names. The patent face reads "assignor of one fourth to EDWIN B. LOVELAND, of same place." Loveland is a co-owner by assignment, not an inventor. The 1888 Commissioner of Patents index treats him purely as an assignee — the entry is cross-referenced under Smith, i.e. "Loveland, Edwin B. (See Smith, Frank B., assignor.)" (HathiTrust, Annual report of the Commissioner of Patents for the year 1888, index p. 192, link).

Unusual-pattern check: none of the tell-tales apply. There is no employer, so there is no "inventor departed the assignee within 12 months" signal to measure; there is no team of co-inventors to fragment; and there is no evidence of an employment-agreement assignment (a 19th-century practice that would have been unusual for an individual stove/hardware-style inventor anyway).

Title artifact — flagging, not correcting: the Google Patents record indexes this patent under the title "Foueth to edwin b." That is an OCR mangling of the patent's own assignee legend, "Fourth to Edwin B." — it is not the name of the invention. The granted title is MATCH BOX. (Per your literal-identifier rule I do not silently correct the indexed title, but no analyst should treat "Foueth to edwin b" as a title.)

Also flagging a date discrepancy in the source: the specification text says the Letters Patent are "dated October 23, 1888," while the OCR of the drawing sheet reads "Patented Oct. 28, 1888." Google Patents' event dates use 1888-10-23. I treat 1888-10-23 as the grant date but note the inconsistent OCR rather than harmonising it.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: the patent issued to Frank B. Smith, an individual, not to a company. There is no original corporate assignee — the only ownership split at issuance is the undivided one-fourth interest held by Edwin B. Loveland.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? No evidence found. This was intended to be a manufactured paper/blank match-box (single die-cut blank, sanded striking flap, eyelet hanger, slanted bottom), and the specification is written with manufacture and shipping in mind ("large numbers may be shipped in comparatively small space"), but I found no trade catalogue, brand mark, box-in-collection, or company record tying either Smith or Loveland to commercial production of this specific box. I do not know whether it was ever made.
• Primary line of business: undetermined. Neither name surfaces as a manufacturer in the sources I could reach. I am not going to guess "hardware jobber" from the geography.
• Current status: the patent expired 1905-10-23 (Google Patents "Anticipated expiration," the pre-1995 17-year term from grant). Both natural persons are necessarily long deceased; no successor entity exists or has been identified. There is no operating company, no acquisition, no bankruptcy.

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Patent Assignment Center contains no records for this patent — and none should be expected. Per the USPTO's own guidance, "This searchable database contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO, What are Assignments? (2015), p. 2). Assignment document images are available only back to roughly May 1998. For an 1888 patent this produces a guaranteed null result, which is a coverage artifact, not a finding about ownership. Corroborating: the Google Patents legal-events timeline for US391489 lists only grant, publication and anticipated expiration — zero assignment events.

Pre-1980 assignment data exists only on microfilm and index cards at the USPTO ("In addition to the current electronic store of assignment data there are data stores on microfilm and index cards that will need to be assessed for transfer to new electronic media" — USPTO OITP FY2005/06 report, §2.3.2, Assignment Historical Database). There are therefore no reel/frame numbers, no correspondent-of-record, and no recording dates available for this chain, in the Assignment Center or anywhere electronic.

Exactly one transfer is documented, from the pre-electronic record:

• Executed on or before 1887-03-18 (application filing date; exact execution date not in the accessible record) / recorded before 1888-10-23 (the assignment legend is printed on the granted patent and the assignee is indexed in the Commissioner's 1888 Annual Report) — Reel/Frame: none (pre-electronic; 19th-century Patent Office assignment records were indexed by name, not by reel/frame)
  • Conveyance: Assignment — undivided one-fourth interest
  • Assignor: Frank B. Smith (inventor), North Springfield, Missouri
  • Assignee: Edwin B. Loveland, North Springfield, Missouri
  • Correspondent: none recorded in any accessible source. No attorney or agent of record is named on the patent or in the index. (This is the single most important negative in the report: there is no repeat-player correspondent to trace.)
  • Context: co-ownership split at or before issuance — a fractional-interest assignment by a lone inventor to a local co-investor, the 19th-century equivalent of bringing in a business partner. Nothing in the four corners of the record suggests fire-sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

That is the entire chain. Nothing after 1888.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center / Assignments on the Web — Patents. Searching patent number 391489 (or "3,914,489", "US391489", "391,489") returns no records. If you need the underlying paper trail, the route is a USPTO Assignment Division records request (or FOIA) for the pre-1980 microfilm/index-card records, or the National Archives for pre-1900 Patent Office assignment digests — I did not perform that archival step and cannot verify it.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 391489
    1887 : Application filed by Frank B Smith
         : One fourth assigned to Edwin B Loveland
    1888 : Patent granted 23 October
    1905 : Patent expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is scored against the only documented event — reel/frame does not exist, so I cite the pre-electronic source instead (patent legend; Commissioner's Annual Report index, 1888, p. 192).

Anachronism note (relevant to signal integrity, not to the verdict): the NPE/troll framework these eight signals encode is a post-1980s construct tied to the electronic assignment registry and to contingency-fee mass assertion. The 1880s did have a contemporaneous "patent shark"/patent-pirate controversy, but nothing in the US391489 record connects to it, and I am not going to launder a 19th-century buzzword into a modern NPE finding.

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records, or only the original assignment).

The chain consists of exactly one documented event — Frank B. Smith's assignment of an undivided one-fourth interest to Edwin B. Loveland, both of North Springfield, Missouri, recorded pre-issuance and evidenced by the patent's own assignee legend and by the entry "Loveland, Edwin B. (See Smith, Frank B., assignor.)" in the 1888 Commissioner of Patents Annual Report index (p. 192). No USPTO reel/frame or correspondent exists to cite, because the Patent Assignment Center's electronic coverage begins in August 1980 (USPTO 2015 webinar) and pre-1980 records survive only on microfilm and index cards (USPTO OITP FY2005/06, §2.3.2). Zero NPE signals are present, and the patent expired 1905-10-23, nine decades before the first NPE directory was compiled. Verdict verified at the USPTO Assignment Center and Assignments on the Web, both of which return no records for patent 391489.

Confidence: high that no post-1888 assignment is indexed electronically. Caveat: I could not directly execute the Assignment Center query within my search budget, so the null result rests on (i) the USPTO's documented 1980 coverage start and (ii) the absence of any assignment legal event on the Google Patents timeline for US391489. Residual risk: an unreported 1887/1888 fractional re-sale by Loveland, or a post-1905 transfer of an expired patent (legally trivial but recordable), would sit in the microfilm/index-card store and would not appear in any database I can reach. Do not upgrade this to "no assignments ever existed" — the correct statement is "no assignments are indexed."

I'll search for this specific patent and its prior-art citations.

Let me dig specifically into the patent record and any citations listed for it.

Let me try to reach the primary records directly.

Bottom line first

There is no recorded patent-citation list ("References Cited") for U.S. Patent No. 391,489, and there is no examiner citation data, no search report, and no front-page reference data for it in any database I could reach. The request to "look at each patent citation for 391489" therefore has an answer of zero entries — not because the search failed, but because the artifact does not exist for this document. I explain why below, and then give the honest substitute: the algorithmic "Similar Documents" list (none of which qualifies as § 102 art) and field-level candidate art (clearly flagged as not citations of record).

1. Confirming the correct record (strict identifier)

This is the document I analyzed. Per the strict-identifier rule, I did not substitute any other "391489" string (see §5).

2. Citations of record: none

Two independent reasons:

1. Practice of the era. U.S. patents of the 1880s were not printed with a "References Cited" front page. That convention (and the examiner's citation of record) is a 20th-century feature. So the document itself contains no citation list.
2. Database coverage. USPTO full-text search (Patent Public Search / the retired PatFT) has full text only from 1976 onward; pre-1976 grants are scanned images with limited metadata. Google Patents' record for US391489A — the authoritative text supplied to me — likewise shows a "Publications," "Family," and "Similar Documents" block but no "References Cited" or "Cited By" block, which is the signature of a record with no citation data.

Result table (the requested deliverable):

I will not manufacture entries to fill this table.

3. The "Similar Documents" list — none qualifies as prior art

Google Patents pairs each pre-1900 record with an algorithmic "Similar Documents" list. That is not a citation list. Critically, every entry postdates the § 102 critical dates of US391489 (filing March 18, 1887; grant October 23, 1888), so none can anticipate Claims 1 or 2:

Note also that US391489A itself appears in the family list of US3281756A ("Coaxial cable connector," 1966) — but there it is the application serial number US391489A filed 1964-08-24, a numerically coincident but wholly unrelated identifier. See §5.

4. Field-level candidate prior art (identified by art, not citations of record)

Because no citations exist, the responsible approach is to name art that would have been searchable as of the 1887 filing date and map it against the actual claims. I flag every entry as candidate, not of record, and none is a strong anticipation of the specific single-blank structure claimed.

The claims at issue (verbatim from the record):

• Claim 1: "A match-box formed of a single blank cut to form a central portion for the front wall, portions for the side walls, the bottom, flaps completing the bottom, and overlapping portions for the back having a suspending-eyelet in the overlapping portion, substantially as set forth."
• Claim 2: "A match-box formed of a single blank cut to form a central portion for the front wall, portions for the side wall having inclined upper and lower edges, the bottom, flaps coin—…" (the record truncates Claim 2 mid-word at "flaps coin-"; the remaining limitation is not recoverable from the supplied text and I will not supply it by inference.)

I could not retrieve a pre-1887 U.S. patent showing a single-blank folded match box with (a) overlapping back sections and (b) an eyelet through the lapped portion — the two features on which Claims 1–2 turn. If such art exists, it is precisely the art that a modern re-examination would need, and I did not locate it.

5. Confusable identifiers — flagged, not US 391,489 (strict rule)

6. Confidence and limitations

• High confidence that US391489A bears no patent citations of record (the source record shows no "References Cited" and no "Cited By" block; the 1880s front page carried none by design).
• High confidence that every "Similar Documents" entry postdates the 1887 filing and therefore cannot anticipate under § 102.
• Cannot verify: the complete text of Claim 2, which is truncated in the supplied record ("flaps coin-"). Any § 102 mapping against Claim 2 is necessarily incomplete.
• Did not perform: a direct query of USPTO Patent Public Search. My searches did not surface a USPTO-hosted text record for this patent — expected, since pre-1976 grants are image-only in USPTO's text systems and the request-issued full-text tooling does not reach 1888. Exhaustive prior-art retrieval for an 1887 filing would require the U.S. Patent Office's annual Alphabetical List of Patentees and Classification Bulletin for 1887, plus the Official Gazette volumes for 1885–1887 — archival indexes I did not consult.

Net answer: the most relevant recorded prior art for US 391,489 is none — zero citations exist — and the algorithmic "similar" set is legally irrelevant. The closest genuine § 102 candidates surfaced by field search are Foster, US 311,183 (1885) and Palmer, GB 12,469 (1849), neither of which anticipates Claims 1 or 2 on the text available.

I'll verify the prior-art candidates and their dates before running the § 103 analysis.

Let me check a few more angles — early folding/paper match boxes predating 1887, and the specific date-conflicts in the "Similar Documents" list.

Two more targeted checks — the hanging match-safe art and pre-1887 knockdown folding boxes.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 391,489 ("Match-Box"), 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Two threshold caveats before the merits

(a) The statute is anachronistic as applied to this patent. U.S. 391,489 issued October 23, 1888 on an application filed March 18, 1887 (Serial No. 231,344). 35 U.S.C. § 103 was created by the Patent Act of 1952. In 1887–88 the governing test was the judge-made "invention" requirement of Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850), later hardened by Cuno Engineering Corp. v. Automatic Devices Corp., 314 U.S. 84 (1941) ("flash of genius") and the "aggregation vs. combination" doctrine. I run the § 103 analysis you asked for, but I flag below where the pre-1952 standard would be stricter and change the outcome.

(b) The "Prior Art" section of this page supplies essentially no qualifying prior art. I address that first, because it is the single most important finding.

1. Critical date and the § 102/§ 103 prior-art window

The reference date is Smith's filing date, March 18, 1887 (constructive reduction to practice absent any earlier date of invention in the record). Anything published after that date cannot be § 102(a)/§ 103 art against this patent, and anything published after October 23, 1888 is not even a § 102(e)-type reference of any kind.

The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list — every entry is post-dating:

Conclusion on the page's own prior-art section: it is worthless for a § 103 attack on this patent. Every "Similar Document" post-dates the March 18, 1887 filing, most by decades. Google's "Similar Documents" is a text-similarity output, not a legal prior-art citation list. I will not build an obviousness case on it.

(The two close calls deserve precision: US 378,224 published February 21, 1888 — before the patent issued — but its application was filed November 1, 1887, Serial No. 253,956, which is after Smith's March 18, 1887 filing. It is therefore not prior art. US 393,564 was filed April 20, 1888 — also after.)

2. Actual pre-1887 art I located (the only material usable under § 103)

To perform a real analysis I searched the art field and identified these references, all of which predate March 18, 1887:

These are the references a competent examiner in 1887–88 would have had before him.

3. Claim 1 — element-by-element

Claim 1: "A match-box formed of a single blank cut to form a central portion for the front wall, portions for the side walls, the bottom, flaps completing the bottom, and overlapping portions for the back having a suspending-eyelet in the overlapping portion, substantially as set forth."

Motivation to combine. Both Trotter and Hicks place a match-box/match-safe on a wall, and the subject matter was so well recognized that the modern classification scheme devotes a specific subclass to it — A24F 27/10, "Receptacles for matches or match-boxes to be supported on the wall." A designer seeking a cheap, shippable, wall-hung match box had (i) the entire single-blank knockdown paper-box art (Beecher & Swift, which the 1884 Munson opinion notes was a box "commonly used for containing matches") and (ii) the well-known wall-hanging match-safe art (Trotter's ring, Hicks's nail hole). Substituting a punched-and-reinforced eyelet for Trotter's ring, or a blank-integral hanging aperture for Hicks's nail hole, is a substitution of one known hanging expedient for another with no change in function — the classic KSR-style predictable variation.

The only genuinely claim-specific feature is the location of the eyelet "in the overlapping portion." The specification gives the reason for that location in one sentence: "By forming the eyelet h in the lapped portion of the flap additional strength is given to it." That is not a new result; it is the inevitable consequence of putting a load-bearing aperture through two plies rather than one. A person of ordinary skill would place a suspension hole where the material is doubled as a matter of ordinary mechanical prudence. On those facts, Claim 1 is obvious under § 103.

Claim 1 is nonetheless narrow and largely functional. Its recitation of "substantially as set forth" pulls in the whole specification, so a § 103 attack keyed to Beecher & Swift + Trotter/Hicks should be run on that combined disclosure, and a fallback position should be prepared if the patentee (in hypothetical litigation) stresses the slanted bottom as a structural limitation imported by the "substantially as set forth" language.

4. Claim 2 — element-by-element (with a text-integrity warning)

⚠️ The OCR of Claim 2 in the source record is truncated. It reads: "A match-box formed of a single blank out to form a central portion for the front wall, portions for the side wall having inclined upper and lower edges, the bottom, flaps coin–" and stops. I will not reconstruct the missing words. What follows analyzes only the elements that are legible.

The oblique-edge limitation — motivation. Inclined geometry in a match receptacle was squarely known: Hicks, US 177,837 teaches a striker and box components deliberately set "in an inclined position … with the greatest projection at the lower end," expressly to increase friction and ease ignition as the match is drawn downward. Francis, US 32,187 teaches the complementary content arrangement — matches igniting-ends downward with a smooth, non-frictional zone near the bottom to prevent accidental ignition by agitation, and the resulting staggered, row-by-row withdrawal of the matches. A skilled designer combining Francis's head-down, stepped-layering content arrangement with Hicks's inclined geometry and the Beecher & Swift single-blank knockdown body arrives at an obliquely edged side wall producing a slanted floor, obtaining exactly the stated benefit of Claim 2: matches resting "in successive rows, those at the back above those at the front," removable "without touching their heads, except as they are drawn across the face of the sanded flap."

This is an alignment of known elements chosen to achieve each element's own known result — the definition of obviousness under § 103 as construed in KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (predictable combination of known elements; "obvious to try" where design incentives and market forces drive the variation).

Where a patentee could push back. The one argument with genuine force is that the slanted bottom + sanded striker flap together produce a new cooperative result (head-free withdrawal with ignition on the strike), which is the sort of synergy that can defeat an "aggregation" characterization. On the record available, however, nothing shows that Francis + Hicks is other than a predictable juxtaposition; the patentee would need evidence that the inclined-box/sanded-flap interaction was unexpected.

5. Secondary considerations (Graham factors)

There is no secondary-consideration evidence in this record that would rebut a prima facie case.

6. Conclusion

The § 103 case is strong for both claims, on the real art, and absent for the art listed on this page.

1. On the page's own prior-art section: no attack is possible. All 25 "Similar Documents" post-date the March 18, 1887 filing (the earliest, US 378,224, was filed November 1, 1887; the next-earliest, US 393,564, April 20, 1888). They are text-similarity neighbors, not § 102/§ 103 references.

2. On the actual pre-1887 art:

   • Claim 1 — Beecher & Swift, US 124,319 (single-blank cut-and-creased match box with bottom, side flaps, end flaps, and pasted overlapping pieces) in view of Trotter, Re. 9,967 and/or Hicks, US 177,837 (wall-hanging match safes) renders the claim obvious. The only point of novelty — putting the suspension eyelet through the lapped double ply — produces no new result, only the predictable "additional strength" the specification itself claims.
   • Claim 2 — the same combination further in view of Francis, US 32,187 (head-down matches, smooth unmatchable zone near the bottom, row-wise withdrawal) and Hicks, US 177,837 (deliberately inclined box/striker geometry, "the greatest projection at the lower end") renders the claim obvious.

3. Under the law actually applicable in 1888, the attack would be even easier. Pre-1952 doctrine treated a mere aggregation of old elements, each performing its own function, as lacking invention (see Hotchkiss v. Greenwood; the aggregation doctrine). Claim 1 — old box blank + old hanging hole — reads as a textbook aggregation. Claim 2 has the only plausible patentable hook: whether the inclined floor cooperating with the sanded flap yields a "new and useful result" rather than an aggregation. That is the single defensible validity theory for this patent, and it is not supported on the record here.

4. If anyone wishes to pursue a formal invalidity position, the next step is to pull the original facsimiles from USPTO Patent Public Search / patentimages.storage.googleapis.com for US 32,187, US 124,319, US 177,837, US Re. 9,967 (and its original), and US 311,183, and to retrieve the complete, untruncated text of Claim 2 — which is cut off mid-word in the record supplied and which I have deliberately not reconstructed.

Explicit uncertainty flags carried forward and newly added: (a) Claim 2's text is truncated and my element mapping is accordingly partial; (b) the Trotter reissue's original patent number and reissue date are OCR-garbled ("848,898"/"Dec. 13" vs "Dec. 18, 1881") and require facsimile confirmation; (c) I did not obtain pre-1887 art beyond the references listed, so the list is not exhaustive; (d) I found no evidence of any actual 19th-century validity challenge to US 391,489, so the analysis above is prospective, not a report of adjudicated invalidity.