US 500960

I'll run searches against the specified sources before summarizing.

US 500,960 — Bibliographic Record

I searched for the literal string "500960" against USPTO/Google Patents, general web, and for a CAFC 2026 docket. Findings below; where I could not obtain an authoritative record, I say so.

Two identifier/record caveats (do not auto-correct)

1. The title field on the Google Patents page renders as "Thomas k." — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US500960](/patent/US500960)/en. This is an indexing artifact; the OCR'd specification and the PDF both read "FINISHING-TOOL FOR GLASS BOTTLES." Similarly, "US500960D" is a duplicate-record index artifact, not a US design patent.
2. The "assigned to FLEET CAPITAL CORPORATION / IGEN, INC, 2000-01-19" reassignment entry is almost certainly a mis-mapped record, not a real assignment of this patent. A patent that expired in 1910 cannot be collateral for a 1999 loan. The IGEN, Inc./Fleet Capital security-interest filings I located (Patent Security Agreements dated Oct. 29, 1999; trademark agreement recorded at the PTO January 19, 2000) line up with the spurious date on this record — see IGI Inc. Form 10-K exhibits. Treat any 20th/21st-century assignee data on this patent number as unreliable.

Abstract

There is no abstract. US abstracts were not required for patents of this era, and the Google Patents abstract field is empty. The de facto abstract is the opening paragraph of the specification:

"Our invention relates to a new and useful improvement in tools for finishing glass bottles, and it consists mainly in the construction of tools for finishing the ends of the bottles in such a manner as to provide an extension on the mouth of the same, and at the same time to form the glass of the extension at the point of connection with the bottle of less thickness than the rest, so that the extension may be readily broken off, but it can also be used to form the neck and mouth of any bottle, where it is desired to make the inside of the neck corrugated, or concave, or of any other irregular form."

CAFC 2026 docket search — negative result

I found no CAFC docket, ITC action, or district court litigation involving US 500,960. This is expected: the patent expired in 1910. Apparent "500960-2026" hits are unrelated other-jurisdiction matters sharing the digits — e.g., EU TED procurement notice 500960-2026 (Madrid health-service cleaning contract), An Bord Pleanála planning case PL06S.500960 (signed 10/06/2026), and Brazilian court case numbers (500960-68.2017.4.03.0000, 500960-44.2019.4.03.0000). None involve the US patent. I could not independently open a USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment record for this document in these searches; for a patent this old only a scanned PDF and minimal bibliographic data typically exist, so I cannot claim to have verified USPTO's current record beyond the Google Patents/USPTO-sourced PDF.

Plain-Language Overview of the Claims

All six claims are independent. None depends from or incorporates another by reference; each ends with the formula "substantially as shown and described," which ties claim scope to the illustrated embodiment and its equivalents.

Claim 1 — The core sub-combination (interior former).
A bottle-finishing tool having a spindle (tapering plug 7) mounted on a central arm (8), plus interior dies (bulbous heads 10) mounted on spring arms (9) and located immediately above the spindle. Plainly: the inside-of-the-neck forming element, with the expandable interior heads sitting right on top of the plug.

Claim 2 — Claim 1 plus backing support.
Same elements, but the interior dies are specified to have their backs bearing against the central arm. This adds rigidity/resistance so the expanding heads push outward against the glass instead of collapsing inward.

Claim 3 — Claim 2 plus collars.
Adds collars (the enlargements 11) immediately above and integral with the interior dies. These collars define the end of the bottle extension and act as stops.

Claim 4 — The expansion mechanism.
A pair of spring jaws carrying exterior finishing dies (15) at their lower ends; a central arm carrying a spindle; interior dies on spring arms seated in recesses above the spindle, arranged so that closing the spring jaws springs the interior heads outward beyond the face of the spindle proper. Plainly: closing the outside dies simultaneously drives the inside former outward — a single closing motion forms both faces of the glass.

Claim 5 — Adjustment and return.
Spring jaws with exterior finishing dies; a central adjustable arm with the spindle between and in line with the dies; spring arms carrying interior dies with a collar above; interior dies that sit against the central arm above the spindle; and screw pins with nuts running through the spring arms and working loosely through openings in the spring jaws. Function: tightening forces the heads outward; releasing draws them back in (so the tool can be withdrawn).

Claim 6 — The full combination (narrowest, most detailed).
The complete assembly: jaws joined at top by a spring; exterior finishing dies at their lower ends; an adjustable threaded rod working loosely through the spring and held by nuts; a spindle/plug on the lower end of a flat extension of that rod, in line with and between the finishing dies; interior dies on spring arms secured to the central rod and fitting into the recess above the spindle; screw pins with nuts each working loosely through a spring jaw, the central arm, and one of the spring arms, and secured to the opposite spring arm; the tapering spindle heads forced outward beyond the spindle line as the jaws close; and collars above the interior dies acting as stops to limit jaw travel.

Note on ambiguity in claim 6's original text: the printed claim attributes the outward forcing to "the heads of the tapering spindle." Read against the specification (which states the divided head 10 is "gradually spread as the spring jaws are closed"), this is a drafting/typographic confusion — the interior dies are what get forced outward. I flag it rather than silently correcting it, since it is a genuine claim-language defect in the source document.

How the device works (from the specification)

Bottles are reheated until the necks are soft and plastic. The spindle 7 is inserted into the mouth; the spring jaws 1 are closed so the exterior dies 15 bear on the outside of the neck while the interior head 10 spreads inside. Where the glass is worked between the external dies and the head — at the rib 3 — the wall is formed thinnest, creating a deliberately weakened line at which the extension snaps off. When the external dies contact the enlargements/collars 11, forming is complete; releasing the jaws lets the divided head collapse, and since it is smaller than the spindle, the tool withdraws from the bottle. The nut-and-pin arrangement (12) adjusts how far the heads expand, letting one tool accommodate differently sized bottles. The patent expressly disclaims any limitation to a bulbous interior die shape — corrugated, "spin die-shaped," or other forms are contemplated.

Related prior art cited on the record

US 233,672 (1880, tool for making glass pitchers); US 130,207 (1872, tools for forming bottle mouths); US 382,929 (1888, tool for grooving bottle mouths); US 491,069 (1893, tool for finishing necks and mouths of bottles); and later, US 680,306 (1901), US 692,957 (1902), US 818,691 (1906) — indicating a crowded late-19th-century art of bottle-neck finishing tools.

Confidence and uncertainty

• High confidence on title, inventors, filing/issue dates, serial number, claim structure, and the substance of all six claims — these come from the full OCR'd specification and the patent PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US500960.pdf.
• Low confidence / flagged: the 2000 Fleet Capital/IGEN reassignment entry (treated as a mapping error), and OCR corruptions in the scanned text such as "SHE-LEON" for Sheldon, "MIRABEAUV" for Mirabeau, and "GLSS"/"GLJOR"/"PINISHING" for the title words. These are scan artifacts, not alternate identifiers.
• I did not locate an independent USPTO PatentCenter or Assignment-database record, nor any CAFC 2026 docket entry; my searches returned no such hits, which for a patent with a 1910 expiration is the expected outcome rather than evidence of absence of any filing.

I'll search multiple sources for litigation involving US patent 500960.

Let me check litigation-specific databases directly.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 500,960

Prepared: April 26, 2026
Subject patent (as identified literally): US 500,960 — "Finishing-Tool for Glass Bottles"; inventors Thomas K. Sheldon (Marion, Grant County, IN) and Mirabeau N. Lynn (Indianapolis, Marion County, IN); Application filed June 13, 1892, Serial No. 436,505; granted July 4, 1893.

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Bottom line

No litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 500,960. I found no district court case, no Federal Circuit appeal, no ITC Section 337 investigation, no PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM), and no state or foreign court action in which US 500,960 is a patent-in-suit, an asserted reference patent, or an invalidity reference in a pleading.

This is not a gap in the record — it is the expected result. The patent issued July 4, 1893, and under the law then in force (17 years from grant, R.S. § 4884), it expired July 4, 1910. Google Patents' own legal-status field records exactly this: "1910-07-04 Anticipated expiration." A patent that lapsed in 1910 cannot be the basis of an infringement action in any modern forum, and its pre-1910 assertion record, if any, would not be captured in the online litigation databases that are searchable today.

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What I searched and what came back

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False positives I ruled out (do not confuse these with US 500,960)

Your instruction was to search only for 500960 and not to return similar numbers. I am flagging these strictly so they are excluded, not reported as hits:

• Case No. 500960 — San Diego Superior Court, Davis Concrete Inc. v. Jackie Fine Arts Inc. (filed 3/23/1983, fraud). A case index number, not a patent.
• Index No. 500960/2018 — N.Y. Sup. Ct., Kings County, Livingston v. Long Island University (pay-discrimination class action). A docket number, not a patent.
• Brazilian/other foreign docket numbers containing "500960" (e.g., TRF-3 Agravo de Instrumento nº 500960-68.2017.4.03.0000). Docket numbers, not patents.
• JP 2005-500960, JP 2006-500960, JP 2017-500960 — Japanese national-phase publications of PCT applications. Different jurisdictions, different subject matter, different numbers.
• Modern U.S. patents referred to as "the '960 patent" (e.g., U.S. 5,690,960, 7,372,960, 8,566,960, 9,869,960, 9,874,960). These are shorthand references to six- and seven-digit patents. They are not US 500,960 and share no relationship to it.

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One record on the patent's page that is not litigation — but is worth noting

The Google Patents record for US500960A carries a reassignment entry:

2000-01-19 — Assigned to FLEET CAPITAL CORPORATION; SECURITY INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS); Assignors: IGEN, INC.

Two things follow from reading this literally, as instructed:

1. It is an assignment/security-interest record, not a lawsuit. It tells us nothing about litigation involving US 500,960.
2. The record is almost certainly a database cross-link artifact: IGEN, Inc. was the assignee of electrochemiluminescence/bioassay patents in the ORIGEN technology family, and Fleet Capital held a security interest in IGEN's portfolio. There is no plausible connection between an IGEN security interest and a hand tool for finishing bottle mouths patented in 1893 by two Indiana inventors. I am flagging this rather than "correcting" it, per your standing instruction, but you should not treat it as evidence of any activity concerning US 500,960.

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Legal-status summary for the file

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Caveats and limits of this search

• Coverage limits. Public litigation databases (Unified Patents Portal, Docket Alarm, RECAP/CourtListener, Justia) have essentially no useful coverage of 19th-century federal court dockets. If US 500,960 was ever asserted between 1893 and 1910, that action would exist only in paper records at the National Archives or in contemporary reporter volumes (Foster's Federal Practice Digest, Off. Gaz. litigation notes, regional reporters). I did not locate any such historical record, and I cannot rule out its existence with high confidence.
• Unified Patents' portal is not a complete litigation database. It is oriented to NPE/PTAB campaigns. Its silence is consistent with, but not independent proof of, the absence of litigation.
• Nothing in the file suggests any pending or threatened dispute. The patent has been in the public domain for over 115 years and is cited today (if at all) only as prior art against later glass-forming and chuck/jaw tooling — notably the closely-related contemporaneous references on the Google Patents "Similar Documents" list, such as US 491,069 ("Tool for finishing the necks and mouths of bottles," 1893), US 130,207 (1872), US 382,929 (1888), and US 680,306 (1901).

Conclusion: No known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 500,960. I say this affirmatively rather than as a placeholder — but the affirmative confidence rests on the patent's 1910 expiration, not on the exhaustiveness of the modern databases, which do not reach pre-1910 federal practice.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings on file" result against public sources before writing the analysis.

PTAB / AIA Trial Report — U.S. Patent No. 500,960

Prepared: 2026-09-27
Subject: US 500,960 — "Finishing-Tool for Glass Bottles" (Sheldon & Lynn), filed 1892-06-13, granted 1893-07-04, expired 1910-07-04.
Canonical source (USPTO ODP block supplied in this prompt): "The USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest."

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 with institution denied.

The bottom-line defensive posture for a defendant is neither "the patent survived IPRs and is hardened" nor "claims 1-5 were canceled, so the demand letter is baseless." It is a third thing the PTAB framework doesn't have a shelf for: the patent expired on 1910-07-04, no AIA trial was ever filed or could meaningfully be filed, and the entire modern PTAB analysis is inapplicable. There are no Final Written Decisions to read, no claim-level dispositions to rely on, and no estoppel attaching to anyone. If you have received an assertion letter citing "US 500,960," the vulnerability is not in the IPR record — it is that the instrument is a 133-year-old public-domain document whose statutory term ran out during the Taft administration.

I verified this against public sources rather than relying on the ODP block alone. Searches on the patent number in combination with IPR/PTAB terminology, on the inventor names (Sheldon, Lynn) plus "finishing tool / glass bottle," and on PTAB/E2E document repositories returned no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, no Notice of Termination, and no CAFC appeal. The only high-hit-count "500960" documents on the open web are unrelated: Japanese national-phase publications JP 2005-500960, JP 2006-500960 and JP 2017-500960 (biotech / medical-device coatings), a Spanish BORME registry entry number, and case/docket index numbers that are not patents. These are excluded, not reported as hits.

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Per-proceeding detail

There are no proceedings to detail. The template fields (judge panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal) have no values because no paper exists to populate them. I am not filling them with inferences.

What I can supply is the availability matrix that explains why the count is zero and what remains theoretically open:

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Strategic summary

Claim status: every claim is UNTESTED — and every claim is expired. The specification carries six claims (1–6), all drafted in the pre-1910 omnibus form ("substantially as shown and described"). None has ever been adjudicated by the PTAB, by the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, or — on the record developed in the prior litigation section of this file — by any court. There is no claim to call "CANCELED" and none to call "SUSTAINED." Practically all six lapsed together on the same date: 1910-07-04, 17 years from grant under R.S. § 4884, as Google Patents records ("Anticipated expiration," legal status "Expired – Lifetime"). A claim that has been in the public domain since 1910 is not a "surviving claim" in the IPR sense at all; it is a historical artifact that anyone may practice.

Estoppel landscape: there is none, and there never can be. IPR estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) attaches only to a petitioner (and its real parties in interest and privies) that obtained a Final Written Decision. No FWD has ever issued here, so no party is estopped from anything. The corollary is worth stating precisely, because it flips the usual defensive advice: there is no prior-art ground "foreclosed," and there is no PTAB win to inherit. A defendant cannot borrow a cancelled claim or an estoppel finding from an IPR that does not exist. Conversely, a defendant has lost nothing — every § 102/§ 103 theory that any prior-art searcher could assemble (including the close contemporaneous art on the Google Patents "Similar Documents" list: US 491,069 (1893), US 130,207 (1872), US 382,929 (1888), US 233,672 (1880), US 680,306 (1901)) remains unadjudicated and unburdened.

Why nobody has filed, and why an IPR would be a dead end even though it is legally possible. Three converging reasons, none of which is "the patent is strong":

1. No live controversy to resolve. Patent damages are backstopped by the 6-year limitations period of 35 U.S.C. § 286. A limitations window opened in 2020 cannot reach infringing conduct from before 1911. Gesture justified expired-patent IPR jurisdiction by pointing to remaining "right to bring an action for past damages" — a rationale that has nothing to grip here, where no past-damages claim can exist.
2. The Board would almost certainly discretionarily deny institution. Current Director practice bifurcates institution into discretionary and merits phases, with "[s]ettled expectations of the parties, such as the length of time the claims have been in force" as an enumerated discretionary factor (Director's memorandum, 2025-03-26), applied in decisions such as Dabico Airport Solutions Inc. v. AXA Power ApS (2025-06-18). A patent out of force for 116 years, with no commercialization and no assertion, is the paradigm of a petition that "does not provide any persuasive reasoning why an inter partes review is an appropriate use of Office resources."
3. No petitioner has any incentive. There is no NPE, no demand letter, and no defensive aggregator in the chain. (Unified Patents and similar entities index modern campaigns; none touches this number.)

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones are present. No repeat petitioner, because there is no petitioner. No PTAB-to-Federal Circuit appeal practice by a patent owner, because there is no patent owner of record with any interest. No aggregator, no joinder, no General Plastic follow-on petitions, no Fintiv parallel-litigation skirmishing. The single modern-looking data point on the Google Patents record — the 2000-01-19 assignment of a security interest to FLEET CAPITAL CORPORATION, assignor IGEN, INC. — is not PTAB activity and, as flagged in the litigation section of this file, is an unrelated portfolio cross-link artifact (IGEN's electrochemiluminescence security interest has no conceivable nexus to an 1893 Indiana glass-finishing tool). I am not treating it as signalling anything about this patent.

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Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and hold a demand letter citing US 500,960: there is no FWD to link and none to quote, because none exists. Your response is not an IPR-based argument but a term-expiration argument: the patent expired 1910-07-04, and no damages period reachable under 35 U.S.C. § 286 can overlap its term. There is likewise no claim to invalidate — nothing to petition against. Ask the asserting party to identify the legal theory and the claimed damages period; there is none available.
• Do not file an IPR "for completeness." It is legally permissible under § 311 in the abstract (and expiration is not jurisdictional, per Gesture), but it would be a near-certain discretionary denial, would waste fees measured in the tens of thousands, and would create no estoppel benefit for anyone. Similarly, an ex parte reexam request under § 302 is technically permitted at any time but pointless: 37 C.F.R. § 1.530 forecloses amendment of an expired patent, and the Office's reexam of a 1910-lapsed claim produces no operative commercial effect.
• If, contrary to everything above, you believe there is a proceeding I did not find: the correct primary sources to check are the PTAB's document system (PTAB E2E / PTACTS, https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) by patent number, and the Federal Circuit's docket via CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%22500960%22). I ran equivalent searches and found nothing. I say "no PTAB activity exists" plainly and affirmatively, with the caveat that my confidence rests on the structural facts (no AIA trials existed before 2012-09-16; the patent lapsed in 1910; PGR and CBM are categorically unavailable) rather than on the exhaustiveness of any single database.

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Verification log and limitations

• Search queries run (2026-09-27): "500960" IPR PTAB inter partes review Sheldon Lynn bottle finishing tool; "US 500,960" patent PTAB AIA trial proceeding; USPTO PTAB IPR petition expired patent 1893 "500,960"; patent 500960 ex parte reexamination history. No hit identified US 500,960 as a patent-in-suit or as the subject of any AIA trial.
• Sources supporting the legal framework above: Apple Inc. v. Gesture Tech. Partners, LLC, 127 F.4th 364 (Fed. Cir. 2025) (PTAB has jurisdiction over expired patents; expired patents retain past-damages rights); Oil States Energy Servs., LLC v. Greene's Energy Grp., LLC, 584 U.S. 325 (2018); Wasica Fin. GmbH v. Cont'l Auto. Sys., Inc., 853 F.3d 1272, 1279 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (Phillips construction for expired claims, citing 37 C.F.R. § 42.100(b)); Board decisions applying expired-patent jurisdiction in IPR2021-00922 and IPR2021-00921, and in the IPR2023-00081 / IPR2023-00590 family (Patent 7,155,451) discussing 35 U.S.C. §§ 311(b), 311(c), 315; 37 C.F.R. § 1.530(d) and MPEP §§ 2249–2250 (4th ed. 1981) (no amendment of expired patents in reexam).
• Explicit non-findings: I did not locate an IPR, PGR, CBM, derivation, inter partes reexamination, ex parte reexamination, or PTAB appeal touching US 500,960. I am not asserting that no pre-1910 Circuit Court validity suit was ever filed in paper form — the litigation section of this file addresses that gap — but such a suit would not be PTAB activity in any event.
• Data-integrity flag (carried forward, not corrected): the Google Patents reassignment entry dated 2000-01-19 involving FLEET CAPITAL CORPORATION and IGEN, INC. appears on the US500960A record and is inconsistent with the patent's subject matter and expiration history. It is treated here, as in the litigation section, as a database artifact.

I'll research the assignment record and ownership context for US 500,960.

Assignment / Ownership Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 500,960

Subject: US 500,960 — "Finishing-Tool for Glass Bottles" (Sheldon & Lynn). Filed June 13, 1892 (Ser. No. 436,505); granted July 4, 1893; term expired July 4, 1910.

Search note before anything else: I could not retrieve a verified reel/frame record for this patent from USPTO Patent Assignment Search (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). That interface is a scripted application and my queries returned no indexed record for US 500,960. The only assignment-like data I could surface is the single legal-event entry on Google Patents' legal-events tab (which carries no reel/frame), plus the underlying SEC-recorded loan documents that appear to explain that entry. I say this plainly rather than presenting a fabricated Reel NNNNNN/NNNN. All confidence statements below are calibrated to that limit.

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Inventors

Notes on Sheldon's trajectory (context, not a signal):

• He is separately identified in glass-mark literature as a plant manager associated with Chicago Glass Mfg. Co. ("it matches with Thomas K. Sheldon, the plant manager at that time" — SHA bottle-research paper, https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/ChicagoGlassMfg.pdf). The dating of that association is not established in what I could retrieve, so I do not treat it as his 1892 employer.
• By 1895 he was a named partner with A. M. Foster in the Sheldon-Foster Glass Co. (1895–1913), and the "SHELDON"-embossed prescription-ware style was named for him (https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/Sheldon-FosterGlass.pdf).

Unusual-pattern check:

• Departure within 12 months of filing → not present. Sheldon's move from Marion Flint Glass to co-founding Sheldon-Foster Glass Co. occurs roughly three years after the filing date, well outside the 12-month window the rubric asks about. There is no evidence of a simultaneous inventor exodus.
• No employer assignment taken. This is the more interesting finding: although Sheldon was a superintendent of a glassworks — i.e., squarely inside the industry that would practice the claimed bottle-neck finishing tool — the patent bears no assignee on its face and no assignment to Marion Flint Glass Co. appears anywhere in the record. That is a notable departure from the modern norm and is consistent with the pre-1900 practice in which employee inventions were frequently retained personally by the inventor absent an express agreement.
• Lynn: a genealogy record for a "Mirabeau Norman Lynn" (b. ca. 1834, d. 1893, resident of Indiana) exists (Ancestry: https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/elmore-t-lynn-24-cc0sfm), and a separate WikiTree profile for a different, younger "Mirabeau Norman Lynn (1873)" also exists (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lynn-4593). I cannot confirm that either is the inventor, and the two profiles conflict with each other in birth year. Low confidence; no personnel inference should be drawn from this.

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Original assignee

None. No assignee is named on the issued patent.

• The printed front page and specification name only "THOMAS K. SHELDON, OF MARION, AND MIRABEAU N. LYNN, OF INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA" — there is no "assignor to" recital, no corporate assignee block, and no assignment notice in the grant.
• Consequence under the law in force: absent a recorded assignment, title remained personally with Sheldon and Lynn as tenants in common.
• Primary line of business of the inventors' employer: glass container manufacturing (Marion Flint Glass Co. made "prescription vials, flasks, brandies, pickle-ware, &c., specialty high grade lettered ware" per the 1892 letterhead — a direct match for a bottle-neck finishing tool).
• Was the invention commercialized by an assignee? There is no corporate owner, therefore no product line traceable to an assignee. Marion Flint Glass Co. plausibly practiced the general art (it made bottles and vials), but no evidence ties a shipped product to this claim set by a title-holder, because no title-holder entity exists.
• Current status of the patent: expired July 4, 1910; public domain for over 115 years. Google Patents legal status: "Expired – Lifetime," anticipated expiration 1910-07-04.

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Assignment timeline

Preamble — what the record actually shows. There is no verifiable USPTO assignment (reel/frame) on this patent. The only post-issuance legal event in the accessible record is the Google Patents reassignment entry quoted in the earlier sections, reproduced here exactly as recorded:

2000-01-19 — Assigned to FLEET CAPITAL CORPORATION; SECURITY INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: IGEN, INC.

Recorded below as the single candidate entry, with every field I could and could not verify.

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• 2000-01-19 (recording date as displayed; execution date not shown) / recorded 2000-01-19 — Reel/Frame NOT DISCLOSED on the Google Patents legal-events entry; no reel or frame could be retrieved from USPTO Patent Assignment Search
  • Conveyance: Security Interest (security agreement / collateral assignment)
  • Assignor (as displayed): IGEN, INC.
  • Assignee (as displayed): FLEET CAPITAL CORPORATION
  • Correspondent: Not recorded / not available. No attorney or filing firm of record is exposed because no reel/frame record could be opened. I therefore cannot run the repeat-correspondent test on this chain.
  • Context: Database cross-link artifact — not a transfer of this patent. The 2000-01-19 date matches, to the day, the USPTO recording date of the trademark security agreement in the same financing: the "Trademark Security Agreement dated as of October 29, 1999, between the Company and the Lender and recorded with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on January 19, 2000 at (Trademark Reel 002019 and Frame 0001)" — recital in Termination and Release of Trademark Security Agreement, IGI, Inc. Form 10-K Exhibit 10.90, https://capedge.com/filing/s3-content/0000910647-03-000079/24. The companion Patent Security Agreement issued by IGEN, Inc. in favor of Fleet Capital is a listed exhibit (IGI, Inc. Form 10-K, Ex. 10.22 / 10.39, https://getfilings.com/o0000910647-03-000079.html), and it was terminated and released on May 31, 2002 (Exhibit 10.92, https://business.starkvilledailynews.com/... getedgarpdf). The secured loan was a Loan and Security Agreement dated October 29, 1999 among IGI, Inc., IGEN, Inc., ImmunoGenetics, Inc. and Blood Cells, Inc. as borrowers and Fleet Capital as lender.

Why this entry cannot be an assignment of US 500,960:

1. Physical impossibility of the security interest attaching. US 500,960 expired July 4, 1910, 89 years before the October 29, 1999 loan. There was no patent right left to pledge.
2. Date coincidence with a real PTO recording. The real recording on 2000-01-19 was the IGI/IGEN trademark security agreement at Trademark Reel 002019/Frame 0001. An automated legal-events ingest that captured the "recorded 2000-01-19 / Fleet Capital / assignor IGEN" event and mis-keyed it to a patent number is the most economical explanation.
3. Same-family patents exist. IGEN, Inc.'s actual pledged portfolio was the electrochemiluminescence/ORIGEN bioassay family. A transposed or truncated 6-digit mapping from a 1990s-era patent number in the 5,009,60x–5,009,96x range (e.g., a US 5,009,xxx series patent) into the 6-digit 500960 string is a very plausible keying failure.

This corroborates — rather than contradicts — the earlier sections' treatment of the Fleet Capital/IGEN entry as "almost certainly a mis-mapped record." No contradiction is present.

Other than this single mis-mapped event, I found no recorded assignment of any kind — no assignment, merger, change of name, license, or release — naming US 500,960 as the transferred property.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 500960
    1892 : Executed by Sheldon and Lynn
         : Filed June 13 by inventors
    1893 : Patent issued July 4
         : No assignee named on the face
    1910 : Patent term expired July 4
         : Public domain thereafter
    2000 : Mis-mapped Fleet Capital entry
         : Not a transfer of this patent

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data — as that term is defined in the rubric ("no records, or only the original assignment").

Justification. The entire ownership record consists of a single machine-ingested legal event, dated 2000-01-19, naming Fleet Capital Corporation as assignee and IGEN, Inc. as assignor on a security interest — an entry that is chronologically impossible for a patent that expired July 4, 1910 and that lines up to the day with the independent USPTO recording of the IGI/IGEN trademark security agreement at Trademark Reel 002019/Frame 0001. No reel or frame exists for US 500,960 in any record I could reach, no correspondent of record is exposed, and no transfer of any conveyance type appears. With all eight NPE signals either not present or not determinable, there is no evidentiary basis for an NPE finding in either direction — the patent was issued to two Indiana inventors, no assignee was named on its face, and it entered the public domain in 1910. Note the affirmative corollary: because no assignment was recorded and no assignee was named at grant, title is presumed to have remained with Sheldon and Lynn personally; the absence of an assignment is the finding, not a hole in the search.

Verification links:

• USPTO Patent Assignment Search (query by patent number 500960): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — I could not retrieve a record; verify manually.
• Google Patents legal events (source of the single mis-mapped entry): https://patents.google.com/patent/[US500960A](/patent/US500960A)/en#legal-events
• Google Patents home record for the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US500960](/patent/US500960)/en

Limits of this search, stated affirmatively: (i) I did not obtain any USPTO reel/frame data for this patent and therefore cannot state what the Assignment Center holds or does not hold for pre-1980s recordings; (ii) the 2000-01-19 entry is reported here exactly as indexed, and my "mis-map" conclusion is an inference from the date coincidence with IGI/IGEN's trademark recording, not from a verified USPTO record keyed to a different patent number; (iii) if an assignment of US 500,960 was executed and recorded between 1893 and 1910, it would exist only on microfilm/reel in the old assignment books and would not be expected to surface in any modern full-text search — I did not locate such a record, but I cannot rule it out with high confidence.

I'll run targeted searches against the USPTO-sourced record and each candidate reference before analyzing.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 500,960

"Finishing-Tool for Glass Bottles" — Thomas K. Sheldon (Marion, Grant Co., IN) & Mirabeau N. Lynn (Indianapolis, Marion Co., IN). Application filed June 13, 1892, Ser. No. 436,505; executed May 7, 1892; granted July 4, 1893. Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US500960](/patent/US500960)/en and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/2a/49/1e65fad61bc5e3/US500960.pdf

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1. Threshold finding: US 500,960 has no "References Cited" of record

This is not a search failure — it is a property of the document. I re-pulled the USPTO-sourced record and it contains:

• "Publications (1)" — the patent itself only.
• "Patent Citations" — absent. The 1893 record has no examiner-citation field, because the U.S. Patent Office did not print references cited on the face of patents of that era, and Google's structured "Patent Citations" field is empty for this document.
• "Cited By" — empty. No patent in the modern database cites US 500,960 (the classification cross-reference at trade.patenthub.cn lists only the two self-records US500960D / US500960A).

What the record does supply is a 24-item "Similar Documents" list. These are algorithmic subject-matter neighbors, not citations made by an examiner or by the applicants. I treat them as the de facto citation set (they are the only patent-level references associated with the record), and I analyze each one below — while flagging explicitly that they carry no legal weight as "references cited" against this patent.

I therefore split the analysis into:

• Tier 1 — the of-record "Similar Documents" set (§3).
• Tier 2 — prior art I independently located during the USPTO/Google search, not of record (§4). Two of these are materially stronger than anything in Tier 1.

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2. Critical-date framework (this governs every § 102 call below)

The statute in force was R.S. § 4886, not the modern § 102. Its substance maps as follows for analytical purposes:

Consequence: any reference dated after June 13, 1892 cannot anticipate US 500,960 under § 102(a) or (b), no matter how similar. This eliminates a large fraction of the "Similar Documents" list as § 102 art. I say so per-reference rather than lumping them.

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3. Tier 1 — The of-record "Similar Documents" set

3.1 Pre-critical-date references (potentially § 102(a)/(b) art)

3.2 References post-dating the June 13, 1892 filing — not § 102 art

I list these because they appear in the record's "Similar Documents," but each is legally incapable of anticipation:

3.3 ⚠️ Correction to the previously generated section

The earlier "Plain-Language Overview" grouped US 491,069 (1893) with "Related prior art cited on the record" alongside genuine pre-1892 art. Read literally against the dates, US 491,069 published February 7, 1893 — eight months after the US 500,960 application was filed and nine months after its execution date. It therefore cannot be § 102(a) or § 102(b) prior art to US 500,960, whatever its substantive closeness. Its only theoretical route to qualifying is if its underlying U.S. application was filed before May 7, 1892 (an earlier-filed, later-issued reference). I do not have its filing date from the retrieved sources, so I mark that unverified rather than assume either way. The substantive point stands: it is a contemporaneous sibling, not a citation.

3.4 The two post-dating references whose full text I did retrieve

US 680,306 — Allen Ferguson Wilson, Clayton, N.J., "Tool for Finishing Necks of Bottles, &c." (assignor of one-half to David Wilson Moore, Jr.)

• https://patents.google.com/patent/[US680306A](/patent/US680306A)/en · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8f/34/26/337a6b49106670/[US680306](/patent/US680306).pdf
• ⚠️ The scanned front matter of this patent is internally inconsistent on dates: the face reads "Patented Aug. 13, 1901" and "Application filed March 23, 1901. Serial No. 62,863," while the drawing sheet header reads "(Application filed Nov. 28, 1901.)" and the specification body gives "dated August 18, 1901." I flag this rather than pick one.
• Substance: molding-jaws on shanks united at the opposite ends by a bowed spring c; a die g with a stem h sliding in an aperture in the spring; a collar/shoulder m on the stem; a tapering plug l on a stem k extending from the die; a cross-bar p; and a spring r urging the die assembly toward the jaw ends. Functionally: closing the jaws on a rotating heated neck while the plug expands the glass and the collar upsets it.
• Claim mapping: architecturally the closest analogue in the whole record to US 500,960's claim 6 combination (spring-united jaws + central sliding stem + tapering plug + collar + cross-bar). Because it post-dates the filing, it is not § 102 art — but it is the strongest evidence of how narrow the 1892 contribution was, and would be a prime § 103-type reference against a later patent, not against this one.

US 744,681 — Carl A. Ergo, Terre Haute, Ind., "Tool"

• https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/80/74/77/610525c13621b3/[US744681](/patent/US744681).pdf · filed May 26, 1903, Ser. No. 158,858; patented Nov. 17, 1903.
• Substance: central screw-threaded rod 1; core/point 3 with shoulders 4/5 resting in recess 6 of plate 7; spring jaws or arms 13 and 14; jaw 13 carrying a rotatable threading spool/die 17; jaw 14 carrying a non-rotatable finishing die 25; set-screws 20/27 abutting flat surfaces 9 to limit inward jaw travel.
• Claim mapping: the "limits the inward movement of the jaw by abutment against a flat surface" feature is a close functional cousin of US 500,960's claim 6 "collars… adapted to stop the movement of such jaws." Not § 102 art (post-dates).

3.5 One additional of-record-adjacent item I retrieved

US RE13,339 — William S. Dorman (reissue) — https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/bd/f6/38/aee826c8617a42/[USRE13339](/patent/USRE13339).pdf. Mandrel thrust into the re-heated neck; a hood shapes the external/internal mouth; forming jaws with stop faces 31 engage the flat faces of the hood to limit inward jaw movement; jaw concavities 30 work surplus glass. This is the same inventive family as US 500,960's collar-as-stop concept, but it is circa 1910 and post-dates US 500,960 — it may be a "cited-by"/descendant-style record, not prior art. Not § 102 art.

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4. Tier 2 — Stronger prior art located independently (not on the US 500,960 record)

These did not appear in the Google "Similar Documents" list, but my searches surfaced them, and two are materially better § 102 candidates than anything in Tier 1.

4.1 ⭐ US 443,728 — William Painter, "Tool for Forming the Necks of Bottles"

Assignor to The Bottle Seal Company, Baltimore. Filed May 21, 1888, Ser. No. 274,620; patented December 30, 1890. https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/Paintertool1890.pdf

Disclosure (verbatim from the specification):

• Jaws A pivoted together, "yieldingly held apart by means of a spring B" seated in recesses a³;
• the shank C' of the "core C" passes through the spring and rests in a bearing carried by the jaws; core portion C² "is adapted to enter the mouth of the bottle and act as a former for its inner side" — i.e., a spindle on a central arm;
• boss C³ formed on/cast with the core, hollowed at its underside c, "provided at its outer edge with a downwardly extending lip c', so as to co-operate with the forming-surfaces of the jaws to properly round and smooth the lip of the bottle";
• points d² on the lever arms D' which form the interior groove in the bottle mouth: "When the jaws are open, the points d² are concealed within the slots c² in the core, and when the jaws are closed or brought toward the core the said points are projected outward, as shown in Fig. 2"; and
• "stops which limit the closing movement of the jaws are represented by a³."

Claim mapping — this is the key reference:

Bottom line: Painter US 443,728 is the single most dangerous § 102 reference I located for claims 1 and 4 (and arguably 2), and it was not even on the record as a "similar document."

4.2 US 27,333 — MacLardy (1860) — see §3.1 item 1. Already in Tier 1 by coincidence, but I retrieved its full text. It is the earliest clean disclosure of "a spindle carried on a central arm" for a bottle-neck tool (claim 1's first element) and of the exterior jaw/plug architecture of claims 4 and 6. It does not anticipate any claim in full.

4.3 British printed publication — Patents for Inventions (Abridgments of Specifications relating to Glass)

https://books.google.com/books/download/Patents_for_Inventions.pdf?id=8dBOAAAAYAAJ&output=pdf (Bottle necks, making; p. ~126)

This is a pre-1892 printed publication and therefore § 102(b)-analogue art. Two passages are directly on point:

1. "The core or plug of the tongs is in two or more parts, which are made to slide or move outwards to their full extent before the outer dies close upon the metal. These parts are connected to slides A, which move in dovetail grooves across the face of the swiller B and carry pins C. The pins pass through radial slots in the swiller and through others in the plate D, which can rotate about the screw pin E which carries the swiller. This plate D is connected by a link to one arm of the tongs, the closing of which gives it the required rotation."
   → A multi-part interior die forced outward by a pin-and-plate linkage actuated by closing the tongs. This is materially the same functional architecture as claims 1, 4 and 5 (minus the specific nut adjustment).
2. "On inserting the tool in the bottle neck, and grasping it, the jaws A, A are brought together, and the spring D, D forces out the bits C, C so that on turning the tool they form a groove in the neck. Stops are placed on the inside of the plate E to limit the motion."
   → Interior forming bits projected outward by closing spring jaws, with stops limiting travel — the operative core of claims 4, 5 and 6.
3. Also in the same abridgment, an entry referencing Specification No. 2401, A.D. 1885: cylindrical one-piece die forming the bottle head, arms pressed together, die rotating freely about the central plug/core, metal pressed outward by spring dugs forced out from the plug by a wedge; notches A on the die exterior and teeth B engage to lock against rotation.
   → Another interior-expansion-on-jaw-closing disclosure, dated 1885.

Claim mapping: § 102(b)-analogue candidate against claims 1, 3, 4, 5 in substance. Caveat: I retrieved this only as a Google Books text snippet. The abridgment's exact volume, its publication year, and the specific British specification numbers/dates for the first two passages are not legible in the snippet (only "Specification No. 2401, A.D. 1885" and attributions to "Codd, H." and "Lake, W. R." are visible). I flag this as a high-value lead requiring verification in the original Abridgments volumes, not as an established reference.

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5. Anticipation summary by claim

Net assessment: the two independent claims of the patent that survive a § 102 challenge most comfortably are claims 5 and 6 — the screw-pin/nut adjustment that makes one tool serve "many different sized bottles," and the full combination. Claims 1, 2 and 4 are exposed to US 443,728 (Painter) and to the British abridgment art, and claim 3 depends on references I could not retrieve in full.

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6. False positives explicitly excluded (per the "do not return similar numbers" instruction)

I flag these only so they are excluded, not reported as hits:

• ⚠️ US 3,414,708 (Maier, "Forced Convection Oven," Dec. 3, 1968) shares the digits "500,960" only as its application serial number ("Filed Oct. 22, 1965, Ser. No. 500,960"). A search for "500960" returns this patent's citation tables (9 citations, 17 cited-by) rather than US 500,960's. These are not US 500,960's citations. This is the single most likely source of a false prior-art report on this number.
• US 500960D — duplicate-record index artifact on the Google Patents page, not a design patent (consistent with the earlier section's finding).
• JP 2005-500960 / JP 2006-500960 / JP 2017-500960 — Japanese national-phase publications; different jurisdictions and subject matter.
• EU TED notice 500960-2026; An Bord Pleanála PL06S.500960; Brazilian dockets 500960-68.2017.4.03.0000 and 500960-44.2019.4.03.0000 — procurement/planning/court docket numbers (consistent with the earlier section).
• US 5,690,960 / 7,372,960 / 8,566,960 / 9,869,960 / 9,874,960 — shorthand references to six- and seven-digit patents; unrelated to US 500,960.

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7. Confidence and limits

High confidence:

• US 500,960 has no examiner "References Cited" of record; the 24-item "Similar Documents" list is algorithmic similarity, not citation.
• Dates and identity of US 27,333 (MacLardy, Feb. 28, 1860), US 443,728 (Painter, filed May 21, 1888; patented Dec. 30, 1890), US 680,306 (Wilson, Aug. 13, 1901), US 744,681 (Ergo, Nov. 17, 1903) and US RE13,339 (Dorman) — all retrieved as full text or scanned PDFs.
• The critical-date conclusion that US 491,069 (Feb. 7, 1893) and every 1892-after / 1893-and-later reference cannot be § 102(a)/(b) art to US 500,960.

Flagged / low confidence:

• US 443,728 (Painter) is not on the US 500,960 record. I identified it independently. It is the strongest § 102 candidate I found, and the "spring arms" versus "positively-pivoted guiding-levers" question is a real limitation dispute, not a settled anticipation.
• The British Patents for Inventions abridgment passages are the most substantively on-point art I located for claims 4–5, but I have them only from a Google Books snippet with unverified specification numbers and publication year. Treat as a lead, not a finding.
• Descriptions marked "title only" (US 130,207; US 183,267; US 233,672; US 382,929; US 456,854; US 480,774; and the post-dating items other than 680,306 and 744,681) are inferred from the record's title field, which Google truncates to inventor-name fragments in several cases ("Charles leng," "Albert s," "William j"). I did not verify their claim content and do not assert anticipation for them.
• US 680,306's filing date is internally inconsistent in the scan (March 23, 1901 vs. Nov. 28, 1901) — flagged, not resolved.
• In no case did I find a reference that anticipates claim 5 or claim 6 in full. My confidence that the nut-and-pin adjustment sub-combination is novel over the art I located is moderate, resting on the completeness of my searches rather than on exhaustive review of 19th-century British and French abridgments, which I could only sample.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis in the actual content of the listed prior-art references before combining them.

Now let me pin down the remaining listed references and their critical dates.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 500,960 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Prepared: April 26, 2026
Subject: US 500,960 (Sheldon & Lynn), "Finishing-Tool for Glass Bottles," filed June 13, 1892 (Serial No. 436,505), executed May 7, 1892, issued July 4, 1893.

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0. Threshold caveats before the analysis

0.1 § 103 is anachronistic to this document. Section 103 was enacted by the Patent Act of 1952. In 1893 the governing test was the judge-made "invention" requirement — Thompson v. Boisselier, 114 U.S. 1, 11 (1885) ("the exercise of the inventive faculty … something more than the mere exercise of the skill of the calling"). I apply § 103 as instructed, because the substantive inquiry (differences over the art, level of skill, motivation to combine, objective indicia) maps closely onto the 19th-century inquiry. But a real validity challenge to this patent would have been pleaded under R.S. §§ 4886/4920, and the 1952 Act's codified "obviousness" and § 112(b) indefiniteness provisions would not have applied.

0.2 An important record artifact — the page's "prior art date." The Google Patents record states "Prior art date 1893-07-04." That is the issue date of US 500,960, not a prior-art date; it is an indexing artifact of the same kind as the "Thomas k" title field and the "US500960D" duplicate-record stub flagged in the earlier bibliographic section of this file. Likewise, the "Prior art keywords" field ("dies, spindle, spring, bottle, finishing") is a term-frequency extraction from the patent's own text. Neither field represents a legal prior-art determination, and I do not rely on either.

0.3 The "Similar Documents" list is a text-similarity list, not a legal prior-art list. Consistent with the standing instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct, I treat every listed document as a candidate reference at its literal number and date. But the list mixes genuine pre-1892 art with references that issued up to 24 years after US 500,960. Each is classified below.

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1. The candidate references and their critical dates

The controlling date is the June 13, 1892 filing date (no earlier invention date is evidenced other than the May 7, 1892 execution). Under pre-AIA § 102(a), a reference must pre-date the invention; under § 102(e), a U.S. patent is available as of its filing date if that antedates the applicant's invention.

Only the pre-June-1892 group can be combined. I flag explicitly that the post-1893 references — including US 680,306 (A. F. Wilson, 1901), whose structure (spring jaws, expanding oval/tapering plug, sliding die with a cross-bar and spring, collar/shoulder on the stem limiting jaw travel) is uncannily close to claims 4–6 — cannot be used as § 103 prior art. They are usable only as evidence of the level of ordinary skill and of the trajectory of the art. Any examiner's rejection built on US 680,306 would be improper.

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2. Graham factor 1 — scope and content of the prior art

Three pre-1892 references, which I verified in full text during this session, do most of the work.

(a) US 382,929 — William H. Wilson, "Tool for Grooving the Mouths of Bottles," May 15, 1888 (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/79/88/b4/5e668358581c13/[US382929](/patent/US382929).pdf)

"A represents spring-jaws, to the crown or jointed portion B of which is adjustably secured a stem, C, the latter having at the end opposite to said crown the prong or head D, which conforms to the shape of the inside of the mouth of the bottle… To the ends of the jaws … are secured the blocks or molds E, the faces of which conform to the shape of the outside of the mouth… The head is slotted near its inner end in the direction of its length to receive the grooving-bits F, which are secured to or formed with levers G, the latter being fitted partly within the stem C and pivoted thereto, the ends of the portions of the levers outside of the stem opposite to the bits freely entering eyes H on the inner sides of the jaws A. … [T]he levers G caus[e] said bits to enter the head D when the jaws are opened … and to emerge therefrom when the jaws are closed. … The extent of entrance of the head into the mouth [is] limited by shoulders D' at the base of said head. … When the work is accomplished, the jaws are permitted to expand or open, whereby the levers carried by said jaws withdraw the bits from the groove that they have formed and return them into the head, whereby the tool may be disconnected from the mouth of the bottle."

(b) US 443,728 — William Painter, "Tool for Forming the Necks of Bottles," Dec. 30, 1890 (https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/Paintertool1890.pdf)

"A represents the jaws of the tool, which … are two in number. … The said jaws are yieldingly held apart by means of a spring B… The portion C² of the core is adapted to enter the mouth of the bottle and act as a former for its inner side. C³ is a boss formed upon or cast with the core and hollowed or coved out at its under side at c, and provided at its outer edge with a downwardly extending lip c', so as to co-operate with the forming-surfaces of the jaws to properly round and smooth the lip of the bottle. … In order that the mouth of the bottle may be provided with an interior groove, the arms D' of the levers D are furnished with points d² … When the jaws are open, the points d² are concealed within the slots c² in the core, and when the jaws are closed or brought toward the core the said points are projected outward, as shown in Fig. 2. The stops which limit the closing movement of the jaws are represented by a³."

(c) US 295,848 — Joseph B. Wilson, "Tool for Forming Bottle Lips and Necks," Mar. 25, 1884 (http://www.sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/lippingtoolpatent.pdf)

"D is the plug, being of a conical form at D', and having shoulders D², adapted to rest on the end of a bottle-neck, curved guides D³ and D⁴, projecting laterally and passing so as to slide freely through slots B² and B³ in the shanks B and B′, and a stem, D⁵, terminating in a screw, D⁶, passing through a hole, C¹, in the center of the spring C, where it is secured by nuts D⁷ and D⁸, by which the plug D may be adjusted in the direction of its length in relation to the jaws…"

Its stated objects are directly on point: "facility of adjustment to compensate for wear, and to adapt the instrument to different dimensions of mouths required in glassware," and it expressly criticizes "tools having an expansible plug composed of several parts" as liable to "lose their adjustment."

(d) US 27,333 — Robert MacLardy, Feb. 28, 1860 (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/2c/15/3e/7772da88b28c3d/US27333.pdf)

"[T]he spring or bow is made of steel bent over so as to form two legs a… b are the lugs by which the outside shape of the mouth of the glass bottle is determined. … From the center of the curve of the spring-bow a rod of iron c hangs down between the legs. This rod is kept in place by a cross-piece or guide d, the end points of which pass through holes in the legs of the spring-bow… a short distance above the lugs … This arrangement allows the free play of the legs of the spring to and from the rod while it keeps the rod in place. At the extremity of the rod c is the plug e, which is pointed at the end, but enlarges toward the base… the diameter of the plug at its base and for a short distance toward its point being equal to the required inside diameter of the neck of the bottle."

(e) US 15,788 — Amasa Stone, Sept. 23, 1856 (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/3c/35/3c/0585c47daa7087/US15788.pdf) — a spring A with "a pair of steel jaws B B," "a spindle E with one end fastened in the bow of the spring A … and passing through the plate C, flanged disk F, and plug G, and … provided with a screw-nut beyond the plug." Critically for the break-off feature: "the flange on the disk F forms a groove or score in the end around the orifice of the bottle."

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3. Graham factor 2 — level of ordinary skill

The artisan is a glasshouse toolmaker/mechanic of the 1880s–1890s, working in a mature and crowded art. The record itself proves the crowding: at least eleven U.S. patents on hand tools for forming, finishing, lipping, grooving, and scoring bottle necks and mouths issued between 1856 and 1892 (the list above), plus contemporaneous British practice. These tools were all used identically — the bottle neck is reheated to plasticity, the tool's plug is inserted in the mouth, the spring jaws are squeezed while the bottle is rotated, and the tool is released and withdrawn, with a stop limiting jaw travel. That common mode of use is confirmed by the archaeological literature returned in search (e.g., "Once reheating or refiring the end of the neck was accomplished, a lipping tool was inserted into the neck of the bottle and rotated while squeezing the jaws to form the finish desired" — https://transportation.ky.gov/Archaeology/Reports/Phase%20I%20Archaeological%20Survey%20along%20KY%[203376](/patent/203376)%20in%20Madison%20County%2C%20Kentucky.pdf). The artisan's toolkit — spring steel bows, pivoted levers, screw-and-nut adjusters, cast forming dies, and positive stops — is the entire vocabulary of US 500,960's independent claims.

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4. Graham factor 3 — claim-by-claim differences and combining rationales

Claim 1 — spindle on a central arm + interior dies on spring arms immediately above the spindle

What is missing from any single reference: no verified pre-1892 reference shows a spindle on a central arm together with separately-resilient interior dies riding immediately above that spindle. MacLardy (27,333) and Stone (15,788) supply the spindle-on-central-arm, but their only interior-forming element is the fixed plug; their spring-borne members (lugs b / jaws B B) are exterior dies. Wilson (382,929) and Painter (443,728) supply interior forming points located on arms carried by the central member directly above the mouth-entering portion of the head/core — but those arms are pivoted levers, not spring arms.

Combination: MacLardy 27,333 (or Stone 15,788) + Wilson 382,929 (or Painter 443,728).

Motivation. All of the references are in the same field (hand tools for shaping reheated bottle necks) and address the same problem — forming the inner and outer surfaces of the mouth in one pass while leaving the tool removable. Wilson's and Painter's stated purposes are expressly the interior shaping that claim 1 is directed to: Wilson forms "a groove on the inside of the mouth of the bottle"; Painter provides "that the mouth of the bottle may be provided with an interior groove." Sheldon and Lynn themselves state the same purpose in the specification — the tool "can also be used to form the neck and mouth of any bottle, where it is desired to make the inside of the neck corrugated, or concave, or of any other irregular form." A designer starting from MacLardy's plug-and-lugs tool who needed interior features had Wilson's and Painter's interior-projection mechanisms sitting in the same art, achieving the same result by the same physics (jaw closure drives an interior member radially outward). Combining them is the textbook case of KSR rationales (A) and (C): known elements arranged according to known methods, and a known technique applied to a known device ready for improvement.

Substitution point on "spring arms." Wilson's and Painter's arms are pivoted; US 500,960's arms 9 are "riveted or welded to the central rod 5" and are resilient. The substitution of a resilient cantilever for a pivoted lever to obtain the same biased-outward/retract-on-release motion is (i) a predictable mechanical substitution, (ii) expressly taught as desirable by J. B. Wilson (295,848), who criticizes multi-part expansible plugs and pivoted guide arrangements for "losing adjustment" and requiring "watchfulness on the part of the workmen which interferes with rapid working," and (iii) literally reflected in Painter, where the tool's own spring is used to return the interior points — i.e., the art already treated the jaw spring and the interior-point mechanism as a single spring-driven system.

Claim 2 — same, plus interior dies "with their backs against such central arm"

Difference from claim 1: a support/abutment limitation. This is squarely met by both Wilson and Painter.

• Wilson 382,929: the grooving-bits F sit inside a slot formed lengthwise in the head D, which is on the stem C. The slot walls are the backing surface. Without the backing, lateral reaction force from the hot glass would simply tilt the bits.
• Painter 443,728: "the points d² … are concealed within the slots c² in the core" — again, recessed into and backed by the central member.

Motivation: the reaction force of pressing a forming element outward into glass must be borne by something. Providing an abutment surface behind an outward-pressing tool element is not an inventive act; it is the reason the slot exists in both references. Claim 2 is obvious over either reference alone in view of the claim 1 combination — and, on the verified text, is close to anticipated by Wilson 382,929 taken alone if the head/slot structure is read as the "central arm."

Claim 3 — plus collars immediately above and integral with the interior dies

Where taught:

• J. B. Wilson 295,848 teaches the shoulder itself: the plug D has "shoulders D², adapted to rest on the end of a bottle-neck." That is precisely the locating/stop function Sheldon and Lynn assign to enlargement 11. Wilson further teaches integrality: "guides forming an integral piece with the said shouldered cone … and in a screw-shaft formed also as an integral piece with the said shouldered cone."
• Painter 443,728 teaches a boss "formed upon or cast with the core" having a lip c' that "co-operate[s] with the forming-surfaces of the jaws to properly round and smooth the lip of the bottle" — i.e., a collar above and integral with the interior former that defines the end of the bottle's finish.
• Wilson 382,929 teaches the stop function ("shoulders D' at the base of said head" limiting entry).
• US 500,960 assigns the collar two jobs: forming the end of the extension, and "serv[ing] as stops to the exterior finishing dies when they are closed." Painter separately teaches the stop: "The stops which limit the closing movement of the jaws are represented by a³."

Motivation: combining a bottle-mouth finishing collar (Wilson 295,848; Painter) with an interior die that must not over-expand (Wilson 382,929) yields only predictable results — the collar caps the extension and caps the die's travel. Making it integral is a manufacturing choice the art had already made and described as advantageous.

Claim 4 — spring jaws + exterior dies + central arm with spindle + interior dies on spring arms in recesses above the spindle, sprung outward beyond the spindle face as the jaws close

This is the mechanical heart of the patent, and Wilson 382,929 describes the identical structure-and-function relationship:

The only structural delta is lever-versus-spring-arm, discussed above, plus the location "above" versus "at the inner end." Painter 443,728 supplies the second, independent teaching of the same camming principle with the points d² concealed in the core and projected outward on jaw closure.

Motivation: both references exist to solve the identical problem that claim 4 addresses — how to press a forming element radially outward into the inside of a plastic bottle mouth, hold it out while the bottle is rotated, and then retract it so the tool can be withdrawn from an undercut. Where a reference already discloses a mechanism producing the claimed motion and result, substituting a resilient arm for a pivoted one is a predictable variation requiring no inventive faculty. Under § 103, claim 4 is obvious over Wilson 382,929 in view of MacLardy 27,333 and/or J. B. Wilson 295,848.

Claim 5 — plus a central adjustable arm, screw pins with nuts working through the spring arms and loosely through openings in the spring jaws, so closing forces the heads out and releasing draws them in

Every element is separately pre-figured:

• Adjustable central arm: J. B. Wilson 295,848 — screw D⁶ through the spring, secured "by nuts D⁷ and D⁸, by which the plug D may be adjusted in the direction of its length in relation to the jaws"; Stone 15,788 — spindle "provided with a screw-nut"; Wilson 382,929 — "a stem, C … adjustably secured" to the crown, "The ends of the levers G freely moving in the eyes H during the adjusting motions of the stem."
• Pins working loosely through the spring jaws: MacLardy 27,333 — the guide cross-piece d whose "end points … pass through holes in the legs of the spring-bow," which "allows the free play of the legs of the spring to and from the rod while it keeps the rod in place." That is functionally claim 5's screw pin 12 passing loosely through the jaw 1.
• Nuts for adjusting the outward throw: J. B. Wilson 295,848's nut pair; and, in US 500,960's own words, "by screwing the nuts outward when the spring jaws are closed … the heads or dies will be forced farther out, thus making the extension and the end of the bottle slightly larger, thereby enabling many different sized bottles to be finished with one tool."
• Out on closing / in on releasing: Wilson 382,929 and Painter 443,728, both quoted above.

Motivation — and this one is unusually strong because the references state it as their own object. J. B. Wilson's stated purpose is "facility of adjustment to compensate for wear, and to adapt the instrument to different dimensions of mouths required in glassware." US 500,960's asserted advantage is the same: one tool fits many sizes. That makes the combination not merely suggested but the express goal of the prior art, and it defeats any argument that the adjustable pin-and-nut arrangement produces an unexpected result.

Claim 6 — the full combination

Claim 6 aggregates: spring-joined jaws; exterior finishing dies; an adjustable threaded rod through the spring held by nuts; a spindle on a flat extension of the rod, in line with and between the dies; interior dies on spring arms secured to the central rod, in the recess above the spindle; screw pins with nuts through a spring jaw, the central arm, and one spring arm; heads forced outward on jaw closure; and collars as stops.

Element-by-element:

Motivation. Claim 6 is a hand-tool combination in which each element performs exactly the function it performed in the reference from which it is drawn, with no change in the general operation of any element. That is the classic unpatentable aggregation: Lincoln Engineering Co. v. Stewart-Warner Corp., 303 U.S. 545, 549 (1938) ("the mere aggregation of a number of old parts or elements which, in the aggregation, perform or produce no new or different function or operation than that theretofore performed or produced by them, is not patentable invention"); Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336, 344–45 (1961) (combination of old elements must produce a new and useful result; sub-combinations must independently satisfy that requirement).

And the one arguably new result — the deliberately thinned break-off extension — is also old. US 500,960's central stated object is "to form the glass of the extension at the point of connection with the bottle of less thickness than the rest, so that the extension may be readily broken off." Stone 15,788 (1856) already discloses exactly this: "the flange on the disk F forms a groove or score in the end around the orifice of the bottle." A score/weak-line formed by a tool element at a defined plane of the finish is therefore not novel in concept. (I note, with a date caveat, that the search results also surfaced U.S. Patent No. 424,524 — Samuel Washington — describing a mold collar with "an annular upward and inward projecting knife-edge … upon which the glass is severed." I could not independently verify 424,524's issue date in this session; the document's internal reference to a prior application filed April 8, 1889 indicates issuance around 1890, which would make it prior art, but I flag this as unverified and do not rest the analysis on it.)

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5. Consolidated motivation-to-combine (the KSR rationales)

1. Same field, same problem, same mode of use. Every reference is a hand tool applied to a reheated, rotating bottle neck to shape the mouth; each plug is inserted in the mouth and the jaws squeezed and released. This is not analogous-art reasoning at its outer edge; it is a single, narrow art.
2. The prior art states the very objectives US 500,960 asserts. Interior grooving (Wilson 382,929; Painter 443,728); size adjustability and wear compensation with the result that one tool serves different mouths (J. B. Wilson 295,848); a shoulder that caps the neck end and limits jaw travel (J. B. Wilson; Painter; Wilson 382,929); a score line permitting severance (Stone 15,788). Where the references predict the asserted advantages, there is no unexpected result to weigh.
3. Predictable mechanical substitutions. Pivoted lever arm → resilient spring arm; fixed plug → expanding die; separate stop → integral collar. Each is a substitution of one known mechanical expedient for another to obtain the same motion and function.
4. Design pressure in the field. The contemporaneous literature returned in search documents the industry-wide push toward standardized, uniform bottle finishes on a high-volume basis (the "Improved Tooled Finish" of the mid-1890s, semi-automatic and then Owens machine production). Under KSR, "design incentives and other market forces can prompt variations of [a known work], either in the same field or a different one." The drive to make bore/finish dimensions uniform across bottles is precisely what the adjustable expanding interior die of US 500,960 serves.
5. No teaching away. I found no reference that criticizes or discourages the combination. The strongest candidate for a "teaching away" — J. B. Wilson's criticism of "expansible plug[s] composed of several parts" — discourages multi-part expanding plugs; it does not discourage the two-arm expanding head of US 500,960, and Wilson's own alternative (a slotted, wedge-expanded conical plug) is a worse fit for the claimed structure, not a better one.
6. Crowded art. Eleven-plus patents in this narrow field between 1856 and 1892 signal an art where incremental variation was routine and within the skill of the calling.

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6. Graham factor 4 — objective indicia (secondary considerations)

On this record there is no evidence of any objective indicium supporting nonobviousness:

• No nexus evidence for commercial success. The earlier sections of this file located only antiquarian glass-industry history (including a Sheldon-Foster Glass Co. corporate history) and confirmed no known litigation involving US 500,960. Commercial practice by a patentee's affiliated company would not establish nexus absent evidence that the success derived from the claimed combination rather than from prior-art elements or market factors.
• No long-felt-but-unmet need. Interior grooving and size adjustability were both solved in the art by 1884–1890.
• No copying, licensing, industry praise, or unexpected results appear in the record.
• No failure of others. US 500,960 was, on these facts, one of many contemporaneous design-around points in a crowded field.

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7. Where the obviousness case is weakest — candid counterpoints

1. "Spring arms" as a literal matter. Wilson's and Painter's arms are pivoted levers, not resilient cantilever arms. A patentee defending these claims would argue that the claim language ("spring arms") excludes those teachings and that the substitution is not shown to have been made. The response is that J. B. Wilson's criticism of multi-part and slotted-guide constructions supplies the reason to simplify to a resilient arm, and that the substitution is mechanical and predictable — but this is an argument, not a clean single-reference hit.
2. Claim 6's drafting defect. As flagged in the earlier claim section of this file, the printed claim attributes outward forcing to "the heads of the tapering spindle," while the specification attributes it to the divided head 10 spread by jaw closure. Under a modern § 112(b) analysis that ambiguity could render claim 6 indefinite, which cuts both ways: it would not save the claim from § 103, but it complicates any precise element mapping. I do not silently correct the text.
3. "Substantially as shown and described" in every claim. Each of the six claims closes with this formula. Under modern doctrine this ties the claims to the illustrated embodiment and its equivalents, narrowing them. That cuts against the breadth of my mapping and would require the combination to be measured against the specific illustrated geometry. It does not, however, add patentable weight, because the illustrated geometry is itself the aggregation of old elements described above.
4. Unverified references. US 130,207, US 233,672, US 456,854, and US 180,774/486,182/491,069 contents and, where relevant, filing dates were not verified in this session. In particular, US 491,069 ("Tool for finishing the necks and mouths of bottles," issued Feb. 7, 1893) is textually the closest document on the page to US 500,960 and could be the single strongest reference if its application was filed before the relevant invention date (pre-AIA § 102(e)) — but its filing date is unknown to me. Its issue date alone is eight months after the Sheldon/Lynn filing, so it is not § 102(a)/(b) art. I cannot resolve this without an independent filing-date check.
5. Post-dating references cannot be used. US 680,306 (A. F. Wilson, 1901) is structurally the closest overall document to claims 4–6 (spring jaws, expanding tapered/oval plug, sliding die with spring and cross-bar, collar/shoulder limiting jaw travel), and US 692,957, US 818,691, US 744,681, and US 634,276 fill in peripheral features. None is available as § 103 prior art against this patent. Any analysis that leans on them would be legally erroneous; I use them only to show that the same design solutions recurred repeatedly in the decades after 1893, which bears on the level of ordinary skill in 1892 and on the absence of unexpected results.

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8. Bottom line

Every one of the six claims would have been prima facie obvious under § 103 as of June 13, 1892, on the following combinations:

The single most damaging reference is US 382,929 (W. H. Wilson, 1888). It discloses the decisive functional relationship of claims 4–6 — an interior forming element held in a recess in the head and forced outward beyond the head when the jaws close and withdrawn when they open — with exterior spring jaws and exterior forming blocks, stop shoulders, and a longitudinally adjustable stem. The remaining elements (spring arms for the interior dies; a screw-and-nut adjuster through the spring; a collar integral with the head) come from J. B. Wilson 295,848 and MacLardy 27,333, both long pre-dating the filing date, and both directed to the same problem and mode of use.

Verification status: the full texts of US 382,929, US 443,728, US 295,848, US 27,333, US 15,788, and US 680,306 were examined in this session. US 130,207, US 233,672, US 456,854, US 480,774, US 486,182, and US 491,069 were treated on the basis of their recorded titles and dates only; their contents, and the filing dates of the three 1892–1893 documents, remain unverified.