US RE10139

I'll run targeted searches before summarizing.

Two more checks on the original patent and any assignment/enforcement history.

One more attempt to pin the original patent number cited in the reissue.

US RE10,139 E — "Roller-Mill"

Bottom line up front: RE10139 is not a modern patent. Interpreted literally as printed, "RE10139" is Reissue Letters Patent No. 10,139, granted June 20, 1882 (US kind code "E" = reissue). It is a pre‑1952-era reissue of a grain roller-mill patent. There is no 2026 CAFC docket for RE10139 — the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit did not exist until 1982, and this reissue expired more than a century ago (reissue term then ran 17 years from grant → ~1899). My searches returned no live USPTO prosecution or 2026 judicial activity for this number, and I could not reach USPTO PatentCenter or a CAFC docket system directly from this environment; treat any "2026 docket" expectation as unsupported.

Bibliographic data (as printed in the reissue)

Uncertainty flags: the original patent number/date and the reissue filing date are both taken from an OCR-garbled "best available copy." The assignee field is genuinely absent from the document.

Abstract / stated objects

The reissue recites three objects:

1. Novel and efficient means for adjusting the outer crushing/grinding rolls toward or away from the inner rolls;
2. Doing so simultaneously with operating the hopper-gate mechanism (opening/closing the spouts and feed-channels that admit grain from the hopper to the feed-rollers);
3. Novel means for simultaneously stopping and starting the crushing/grinding operation of the rolls.

The specification describes: fast-speeded rolls d d and slow-speeded rolls d¹ d¹; inner rolls in rigid journal-bearings i i on frame D; outer rolls carried on oscillating/swinging arms F pivoted to the frame, with journal-bearings g g and housings on the arm tops; transverse shafts h (forked inner ends engaging segmental cam-slots i in links I); a through-shaft J keyed to crank k' and (via links I) to the transverse shafts h; crank L and link-rod L' connecting to a pivoted hand-lever K; pinions l and racks M/bars m carrying the hopper gates/slides m; and belt/pulley drive with tightener-pulleys P on adjustable forked levers Q (pivot bolts q, segmental gears r r, pulley shafts R, pinions S on a transversely journalled through-shaft driven by hand-wheel/lever T).

Notably, the specification expressly states that the differential-speed belting arrangement "is not herein claimed" and is shown only for clarity of the whole structure.

Independent claims — plain language

The reissue carries six claims, all written as independent combination claims (no claim-to-claim dependency language appears in the text; claims 5 and 6 also differ from claim 4 only in form, per Odell v. Stout).

Claim 1 — Hopper-gate mechanism alone. In a roller-mill, the combination of the hopper-gate mechanism on both sides of the machine with a through-shaft and lever mechanism connecting the parts to operate the gates simultaneously, plus a single hand-lever. Plainly: one lever shuts/opens both sides' feed gates at once. (Claim 1 and claim 2 were newly added in the reissue and do not appear in the original patent.)

Claim 2 — Roll-adjustment mechanism alone. In a roller-mill, the combination, with the adjustable rolls and journals, of transverse shafts h, a through-shaft J, link mechanism connecting those shafts, and a single hand-lever K connected to the through-shaft, for simultaneously adjusting both sets of rolls by a single lever movement. Plainly: one lever throws both pairs of rolls apart or back together in a double roller-mill. (Quoted verbatim in Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co.)

Claim 3 — Stop/start drive. In a roller-mill, the combination of two sets of crushing/grinding rolls, belt-and-pulley driving devices, the tightener-pulleys, adjustable frames therefor, and mechanism for simultaneously raising and lowering the frames and tightener-pulleys to stop and start the machine. Plainly: one hand-wheel swings both belt tighteners to start or kill the mill instantly.

Claim 4 — The combined roll + gate interlock. In a roller-mill, the combination, with the adjustable crushing-rolls and the gates/slides controlling grain flow from the hopper, of a single through-shaft J, a single hand-lever K, and mechanism connecting both the rolls and the gates to that shaft and lever, whereby a single lever movement simultaneously adjusts the rolls and the gates/slides. Plainly: this is the commercial heart of the patent — one pull of the lever both opens the roll gap and closes the feed, in a single motion.

Claim 5 — Specific linkage sub-combination. The slotted shaft J (slots i) combined with shafts h engaging those slots, the pivoted arms carrying the rolls, crank L on shaft J, link L', and swinging lever K. Plainly: a hardware-level recitation of the lever-to-slot linkage.

Claim 6 — Combined mechanism recitation. The combination, with swinging lever K and the outer-roll-adjusting mechanism, of crank k', links I, crank-rods k, shafts h, pinions l, the racks, and the gate/slide-carrying bars m — arranged so one lever movement both adjusts the rolls and raises/lowers the gates.

Enforcement / validity history (relevant, because it defines the claims' real scope)

• Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (C.C. 1884): Claim 1 held invalid (broadening reissue); complainant was required to file a statutory disclaimer of claim 1 (Rev. Stat. §§ 4917, 4922). Claims 2, 4, 5, and 6 were sustained and infringed; claims 5 and 6 were treated as substantially identical to claim 4. Mechwart (U.S. Pat. 250,000-series, issued Dec. 20, 1881), Poole 238,000, Poole & Miller 238,001, Gray 235,761, and Gray 238,677 were all rejected as anticipations of claim 2; Wegman was rejected as to claim 4. The court emphasized the coiled-spring yielding bearing as "one of the most valuable features."
• Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.N.D. Ill.): the court held claim 2 to lack invention, reasoning that shooting all bolts of a safe door with one lever anticipates whatever claim 2 contains.
• Consolidated Rolling-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 156 U.S. 261 (1895): RE10,139 was pleaded but the plaintiff sought a decree only on the Gray patents, so the Supreme Court expressly declined to address it ("the others will not be further noticed"). The 1895 decision therefore does not validate or invalidate RE10,139.

What I could not confirm

• No 2026 CAFC docket, no live USPTO prosecution history, and no current assignee. Searches surfaced only the 1882 reissue itself and 1883–1895 circuit/Supreme Court litigation. Any modern docket entry under "RE10139" would be inconsistent with the numeral's literal meaning (reissue numbers of ~46,000+ are current), so a 2026 hit should be treated as a different identifier or an error unless independently verified.
• The original patent number (the OCR gives "2?0,5?4, Dec. 6, 1881") and the assignment to Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. — both flagged above rather than guessed.

I'll search for litigation records involving US patent RE10139.

Let me dig deeper into the specific cases found and check litigation databases.

Let me pin down the remaining case citations.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US RE10,139: 0. Breakdown: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated at the PTAB, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials, 0 Final Written Decisions, 0 appeals. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block is empty (USPTO ODP returns no AIA trials), and independent searching found no PTAB, reexamination, or interference record for this number — only 1880s–1890s federal court cases.

The reason is definitional, not accidental: RE10,139 issued 1882-06-20 (reissue of original Letters Patent No. 250,954, granted 1881-12-13 to Udolpho H. Odell of Dayton, Ohio) and its term expired with the original — 1898-12-13 under the then-applicable 17-year term. The PTAB's IPR/PGR/CBM jurisdiction only came into being with the AIA provisions effective 2012-09-16. This patent was 130 years dead before the first petition could have been filed. Note that expiration is not a statutory bar to IPR (the Board does institute on expired patents for collateral purposes), so the absence of PTAB activity is explained by abandonment and disuse, not by any jurisdictional immunity.

Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB record to attack or rely on, and there is no live patent to defend against. If a demand letter cites "RE10139," the citation points to a patent that expired in 1898, whose claim 1 was judicially invalidated in 1884 and ordered disclaimed, and whose remaining claims were sustained on 1880s art under 1880s law. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to navigate because no IPR was ever instituted — but there is also no monetary exposure, because no infringing conduct can post-date the term.

Proceedings (PTAB): none

No entry exists under this heading. Do not let anyone populate it: I found no proceeding number, no petitioner, no FWD, and no CAFC appeal docket for RE10,139. Any IPR/PGR/CBM number attributed to this patent should be treated as fabricated until a PTAB E2E docket is produced (https://e2e.uspto.gov/; bulk data at https://developer.uspto.gov/api-catalog/ptab-api).

Cross-check against the previously generated sections

• The "PTAB proceedings on file" block states the ODP returns no AIA trial proceedings. My independent searches are consistent with that — no contradiction, but see the note below on the litigation section.
• The previously generated Litigation summary is truncated: it contains only process narration ("I'll search for litigation records… Let me pin down the remaining case citations.") and no case citations at all. Flagging that explicitly as an internal inconsistency/gap in the earlier output. The adjudications below are, as far as I can determine, the first concrete citations for this patent in this file, and they are 19th-century court decisions, not AIA trials.
• The fetched Google Patents text lists "Prior art date 1882-06-20," consistent with the reissue grant date; the specification's own OCR of the original patent number is garbled. The reliable corroboration for the original is the sibling patent US 260,226, which states that its rollers are "set in a machine constructed similar to the ones shown in Letters Patent No. 250,954, granted on December 13, 1881" (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/6f/bb/dc/1231fe4af85ded/[US260226](/patent/US260226).pdf), and Google Patents' own similar-documents list shows US250954A, "Roller-mill," 1881-12-13.

Closest available claim-level outcomes (pre-AIA, court — not PTAB)

Given that the requested PTAB entries do not exist, here is the equivalent adversary record, formatted the same way. These are U.S. Circuit Court equity suits, not AIA trials.

Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 / 22 F. 160 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1884) — Odell (later Consolidated Roller-Mill Co.) v. Stout et al.

• Type: Bill in equity for infringement of Reissued Letters Patent No. 10,139 (pre-AIA; not an AIA trial).
• Filed: 1883-06-06 (per the opinion's recital of the bill's filing date).
• Status: Decided for complainant in part — claim 1 held invalid; claims 2 and 4 sustained; defendants held infringers.
• Judge panel: Judge Sage, with Mr. Justice Matthews (riding circuit) concurring in the conclusion and reasoning.
• Grounds / art at issue: § 102-type want of novelty, plus reissue-validity attacks (no inadvertence, accident or mistake; enlargement of the original claims). Art set up: the Daverio (Simons) English patent, 1879-12-23 (U.S. 1880-12-14), and the Gray patents of 1880-12-21, against claim 1; Poole No. 238,000 (1881-02-22), Poole & Miller No. 238,001 (1881-02-22), Gray No. 235,761 (1880-12-21) and Gray No. 238,677 (1881-03-08) against claim 2; Meehwart No. 250,??? -series art (patented 1881-12-20, filed 1880-04-22) and the Wegman English patent (1879; U.S. application filed 1883-02-10) against claims 2 and 4.
• Disposition at claim level:
  • Claim 1 (hopper-gate mechanism alone) — INVALID for want of novelty. The court: "Our conclusion is that the first claim of the reissue is invalid for want of novelty." Because it was made in good faith, its invalidity did not vitiate the rest of the reissue.
  • Claim 2 (adjustable rolls + transverse shafts h + through-shaft J + link mechanism + single hand-lever K) — SUSTAINED. "It follows that the second claim of complainants' reissued patent is sustained."
  • Claim 3 — NOT ADDRESSED. The opinion states flatly: "Claim 3 is not involved."
  • Claim 4 (single through-shaft J + single hand-lever K adjusting both the rolls and the hopper gates/slides) — SUSTAINED, not anticipated by Wegman.
  • Claims 5 and 6 — not separately decided; the court found they "do not differ from the fourth, excepting in form of statement," and by stipulation of counsel only claim 4 was considered.
• Relief / procedural condition: Decree for injunction and account, but "the complainants must first file a disclaimer of the first claim of their reissued patent," and the decree was to be without costs (citing Rev. Stat. §§ 4917, 4922).
• Appeal: The reported decision is the circuit court's; Justice Matthews' concurrence is noted. I found no separate Federal Circuit-style appellate disposition (none existed in 1884; review would have been by the Supreme Court, and I found no such reported appeal).
• Defensive value then: claim 1 was already dead by 1884 and could not be asserted absent a filed disclaimer; claims 2/4 were real but narrow (tied to the "substantially as described" structure).

Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.N.D. Ill. 1890) (Blodgett, J.) — related roller-mill litigation naming RE10,139

• Type: Bill in equity (pre-AIA).
• Status: Bill dismissed for want of equity; rehearing overruled 1890-07-14.
• Judicial commentary on RE10,139 claim 2: In the reported opinion the court wrote that the Odell patent "shows only a device for separating the two sets of rolls of the double roller-mill by one movement," and that it could not "conceive that it required invention to connect the shaft … in a double mill," the ordinary safe-door bolt-shooting mechanism being enough to "fully anticipate whatever there is in the second claim of this Odell patent."
• Appeal: The successor case went up as The Roller Mill Patent, 156 U.S. 261 (1895) (argued 1894-11-12; decided 1895-02-04). Important limitation: the Supreme Court expressly did not adjudicate RE10,139 — "as plaintiff asked for a decree only upon the Gray patents, the others will not be further noticed." The Court held Gray No. 238,677 void for want of novelty and No. 222,895 not infringed.
• Caution (flagging uncertainty rather than fabricating): the retrieved text of 43 F. 527 contains the safe-door-bolt criticism of "the second claim of this Odell patent," but the opinion's framing (Gray-focused, "dismissed for want of equity") makes it unclear whether that criticism was a formal holding invalidating RE10,139 claim 2 or a judge's alternative reasoning about a patent not ultimately decreed upon. I will not characterize claim 2 as "adjudged invalid" on this record. Anyone relying on it should pull the full 43 F. 527 text: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0527.1.pdf

Pre-AIA Patent Office interference (analog, not PTAB) — Odell v. Livingston

• Type: Interference proceeding (pre-AIA Patent Office).
• Disposition: "An interference between Livingston, defendants' assignor, and Odell was decided in favor of Odell, March 31, 1883" (reported within 22 F. 160). Livingston's mill is shown in patent No. 284,135; the defendants ceased making that mill after 1883-03.
• Number: not stated in the sources I retrieved — I will not invent an interference number.
• Defensive value: confirms Odell priority for the single-lever simultaneous operation, which is why the 1884 claim-2 win was possible.

Strategic summary

Claims CANCELED vs. SUSTAINED vs. UNTESTED (no PTAB; using the 1884 court record as the proxy). Claim 1 — invalidated for want of novelty in Odell v. Stout and made subject to a mandatory disclaimer; it was never revived. Claim 2 — sustained in 1884; subjected to adverse but possibly non-holding commentary in the 1890 Illinois litigation. Claims 4, 5, 6 — sustained, with 5 and 6 treated as formal variants of 4. Claim 3 — never construed or adjudicated ("not involved"). The whole patent has been expired since 1898-12-13 (17 years from the 1881-12-13 original grant), so "surviving claims" has no live enforcement meaning.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel, because no IPR/PGR/CBM was ever instituted — the estoppel provision has never had an occasion to attach. There is likewise no inter partes reexamination estoppel. The only preclusion of record is the classic res judicata/issue-preclusion effect of the 1884 decree (claim 1 invalid, disclaimer ordered) as against Stout and his privies, and the 1890 dismissal as against Barnard & Leas and their privies — all parties long defunct. Practically, a modern defendant has every prior-art ground available, including all of the 1880s art already used in court (Daverio/Simons, Gray 235,761 and 238,677, Poole 238,000, Poole & Miller 238,001, Meehwart, Wegman, Lake/Nemelka) plus anything else of record, with no statutory estoppel constraint.

Pattern signals. The historical "petitioner" class was a set of competing mill manufacturers (Stout; Barnard & Leas), not a modern defensive aggregator — Unified Patents, RPX, and similar entities did not exist and have no footprint here. The patent owner (Odell, then assignee Consolidated Roller-Mill Co.) was the aggressor, filing equity bills in 1883 and through the 1890s and litigating hard, including a successful interference and a trip to the Supreme Court on companion patents. There is no serial-petitioner pattern and no PTAB appeal pattern, because there is no PTAB record.

Recommended next steps

1. Verify the number in hand before doing anything substantive. The canonical identifier is RE10,139 (reissue), dated 1882-06-20, corresponding to original No. 250,954 (1881-12-13). Modern reissue numbering runs in the RE40,000s–RE60,000s; a demand letter citing "RE10139" for a live patent is almost certainly a typo, a transposition, or a citation to a different instrument (e.g., a utility patent in the 10,139,xxx series). Ask the sender to identify the patent by grant date and title, and cross-check against Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[USRE10139](/patent/USRE10139)/en) and PTAB E2E (https://e2e.uspto.gov/).
2. If RE10,139 really is being asserted, the defense is dispositive on the face of the record:
   • Expiration: term ended 1898-12-13; no conduct within 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year recovery window can infringe.
   • Claim 1 is dead: invalid and required to be disclaimed by the 1884 decree (Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159; https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8162752](/patent/8162752)/odell-v-stout/). Any infringement theory built on claim 1 is frivolous.
   • Claims 2, 4–6 survive only as "substantially as described" combinations validated against 1880s art, and claim 2 drew express judicial criticism in 1890 (43 F. 527). Claim 3 was never construed.
   • Preserve Rule 11 / § 285 arguments if a demand or complaint is filed on an 1898-expired patent.
3. Do not represent to any tribunal that PTAB has ruled on this patent. It has not. No FWD exists to link; the only adjudicative documents to cite are 22 F. 159/160 (1884), 43 F. 527 (1890), and — for the companion Gray patents only — 156 U.S. 261 (1895) (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/156/261/).
4. If the goal is a defensive-publication or prior-art use (the only realistic modern relevance of a document like this), treat RE10,139 as 1882 prior art with a fully documented claim-level litigation history that is unusually favorable: one claim judicially invalidated, one judicially criticized, and the remainder narrowed to 19th-century structural language.

Explicit non-findings. I did not find, and will not assert: any AIA trial proceeding number; any PTAB institution or Final Written Decision; any CAFC docket; any patent-owner appeal of a PTAB decision; any settlement; or any interference number for Odell v. Livingston. If a proceeding is later surfaced in ODP or PTAB E2E, it should be treated as newly discovered rather than reconciled with the above.

I'll verify the ownership record for this patent before assembling the analysis.

The patent has a documented 19th-century litigation history. Let me trace the commercial entities and any recorded ownership transfers.

Ownership Reconstruction — US RE10139 (Roller-Mill, Udolpho H. Odell)

Inventors

Udolpho H. Odell — sole named inventor on both the original patent (No. 250,954, granted 1881-12-13) and the reissue RE10,139 (granted 1882-06-20).

Pattern note: There is no "inventor departure" signal to evaluate here, because Odell was never an employee-inventor of a corporate assignee. The relevant historical pattern is the inverse of the modern one: an independent inventor in a regional milling hub (Dayton, Ohio) who licensed his roll-control patents to a local machinery builder rather than assigning them at filing. A contemporaneous digest of Odell v. Stout identifies the complainants as Odell and the Stillwell & Bierce Manufacturing Company, his licensees (Scientific American, 1885-01-03, "Decisions Relating to Patents," https://www.scientificamerican.com — reproduced at http://www.albertostrumia.it/sites/default/files/SISRI/ScientificAmerican/journal/v52/n1/pdf/scientificamerican01031885-10.pdf). The OCR of that digest is degraded, so I flag the exact licence language (exclusive vs. non-exclusive, territory, term) as unverified.

Probable link worth recording: the two witnesses on the RE10,139 specification are Robert K. King and William B. Sullivan (patent text, signature block). An 1887 recorded trust deed in the Thomas collection is executed by "The Stilwell & Bierce Manufacturing Co. by Rct. [Robt.] King its Vice President & Treasurer" (https://dn760006.eu.archive.org/0/items/1763-thomas-vol-4/1763%20Thomas,%20Vol%201.pdf). If the witness "Ronert [Robert] K. King" of the reissue and the Stillwell & Bierce vice-president are the same man, the licensee's officer witnessed the reissue papers. This is an inference from two independently garbled OCR strings, not a documented fact.

Flagged contradiction with the previously generated section: the prior "Litigation summary" contains only process narration and no case list. That is inconsistent with the record, which is substantial (see below). Treat the prior litigation section as incomplete rather than as a null finding.

Original assignee

There is no original assignee. US RE10,139 issued to Udolpho H. Odell as an individual.

• The specification reads "Be it known that I, Udolpho H. Odell … have invented," with no assignment recital and no assignee field. Google Patents carries no assignee for this record (https://patents.google.com/patent/USRE10139/en).
• The reissue was granted only ~6 months after the original patent, at a time when Odell had no corporate employer of record.
• Commercial embodiment: the claimed machine (a four-roll double roller-mill with a single hand-lever through-shaft simultaneously (a) adjusting both sets of outer crushing rolls and (b) opening/closing the hopper gates) was built and sold. Odell was, by 1882, licensing to Stillwell & Bierce Manufacturing Co. of Dayton, Ohio — a Dayton machinery builder listed among that city's major incorporated manufacturers in Sharts' Biography of Dayton (1922) (https://ia601303.us.archive.org/25/items/ShartsBiographyOfDayton1922/Sharts-BiograhyOfDayton-1922.pdf). Stillwell & Bierce was an operating company; its 1891 Supreme Court appearance is a mill-construction contract dispute, not a patent assertion (Howard v. Stillwell & Bierce Mfg. Co., 139 U.S. 199 (1891), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USREPORTS-139/text/USREPORTS-139.txt).
• Current status: The patent is expired. Reissue terms ran with the unexpired portion of the original patent, i.e. to 1898-12-13. There is no current owner of RE10,139 as a property right. Stillwell & Bierce's corporate fate after the 1890s is not established in the sources I could reach — I will not guess between dissolution, acquisition, or continued operation.

Later asserting owner of record (documentary, not reel/frame): by 1890-02-10, the plaintiff asserting RE10,139 was the Consolidated Roller-Mill Company, which pleaded a portfolio of four roller-mill patents (Gray 222,895; Gray 238,677; Odell RE10,139; Birkholz 269,623) against Barnard & Leas Manufacturing Co., a Moline, Illinois mill-machinery builder (Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.N.D. Ill. 1890) — https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0527.1.pdf). That entity reached the Supreme Court as The Roller Mill Patent, 156 U.S. 261 (1895) (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/156/261/). I could not verify Consolidated Roller-Mill Company's state of incorporation or its corporate successor with confidence. Note a name discrepancy in the record: the C.C.N.D. Ill. opinion as republished identifies the patentee as "W. H. Odell," while the patent itself and the S.D. Ohio opinion say "U. H. Odell." Treat "W. H." as a typographical/OCR variance, not a second inventor.

Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for US RE10,139 in the USPTO Assignment Center. I could not directly query the live Assignment Center/Benefit system UI in this session, but no indexed assignment record for this patent number surfaced, and none would be expected: the searchable electronic assignment record set begins in the mid-1970s, roughly a century after this patent expired. Pre-1975 conveyances for a patent of this vintage live in the Patent Office's bound assignment books and microfilm, not in the online reel/frame database.

Per your instruction, the honest answer is: say so plainly. There is no reel/frame chain to reconstruct. Because the ownership story is nonetheless documented in contemporaneous court and technical-press records, I set it out below — explicitly labelled as non-reel/frame evidence. No reel/frame number is supplied for any entry, because none exists.

• 1881-12-13 (grant) — no reel/frame — patent grant, not an assignment

  • Conveyance: Original letters patent No. 250,954
  • Inventor/Grantee: Udolpho H. Odell, Dayton, Ohio
  • Assignee: none — unassigned individual grant
  • Correspondent: not stated on the face of the reissue; Odell's counsel of record on the contemporaneous sibling case US260,226 is Wood & Boyd (see US260,226 bibliography). Flag: this is the only candidate correspondent I can identify anywhere in this family, and it is drawn from a different patent in the same inventor's practice, not from a recording.
  • Context: initial grant to an individual inventor

• 1882-04-03 (approx., executed) — no reel/frame — prosecution paper, not an assignment

  • Conveyance: Application for reissue of No. 250,954
  • Applicant: Udolpho H. Odell
  • Assignee: none
  • Correspondent: unknown; witnesses of record are Robert K. King and William B. Sullivan
  • Context: not a transfer. The reissue was sought because Odell "when he first saw the original claims in the Patent-office Gazette … was dissatisfied with them, and took immediate steps to procure a reissue" (Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1884)). Caution: the filing date on the Google Patents OCR of the reissue is illegible ("Application for reissue filed April 3, 188?"), and the OCR of the case digest is also garbled on the delay ("four months"). The date is inferred from the 1881-12-13 grant and 1882-06-20 reissue — treat it as approximate.

• 1882-06-20 (grant) — no reel/frame — reissue grant

  • Conveyance: Reissue No. 10,139 granted to Udolpho H. Odell
  • Assignee: none — still unassigned
  • Context: same-inventor reissue; claims 1–6, of which claims 4–6 are substantially reproductions of the original claims and claims 1–2 are new matter introduced on reissue

• by 1883-06-06 (executed; no instrument date recovered) — no reel/frame — licence, not a recorded assignment

  • Conveyance: Licence (terms unknown; possibly exclusive)
  • Assignor: Udolpho H. Odell
  • Assignee/Licensee: Stillwell & Bierce Manufacturing Co., Dayton, Ohio
  • Correspondent: not applicable — licences were not recorded in the assignment books in this period
  • Context: transfer-to-manufacturer — the classic 19th-century independent-inventor operating licence. Evidence: the bill in Odell v. Stout was filed 1883-06-06 and the complainants are described as Odell and Stillwell & Bierce, his licensees (Scientific American, 1885-01-03). Flag: because this is a licence, it would not appear in an assignment chain even if the Assignment Center covered the era.

• by 1890-02-10 (executed; undated in available sources) — no reel/frame — conveyance inferred from litigation caption only

  • Conveyance: Unclear — assignment of the patent, or an exclusive licence sufficient to sue in equity in the patentee's name; the printed opinion does not distinguish
  • Assignor: Udolpho H. Odell (and/or his licensee)
  • Assignee: Consolidated Roller-Mill Company
  • Correspondent: not recovered; counsel of record on the C.C.N.D. Ill. case are George H. Lathrop for the appellant on appeal to the Supreme Court (156 U.S. 261) — that is litigation counsel, not a recording correspondent, and must not be conflated with one
  • Context: portfolio aggregation. Consolidated Roller-Mill Company assembled the Gray patents (222,895; 238,677), the Odell reissue, and Birkholz 269,623 and asserted them as a package. This is the closest thing in the record to a "patent aggregator" — but a 19th-century industrial one, not a modern NPE.

• 1895-02-04 — no reel/frame — judicial event, not a transfer

  • The Supreme Court affirmed dismissal as to the Gray patents; the Odell reissue was in the bill but expressly not pressed on appeal ("As plaintiff asked for a decree only upon the Gray patents, the others will not be further noticed," 156 U.S. 261, 262)

• 1898-12-13 — term expiry. RE10,139 and all rights in it terminated. Any downstream owner is moot.

If you want the pre-1975 paper trail confirmed, the only authoritative paths are a manual search of the Patent Office assignment books (Record Group 241 at the National Archives) or the assignment records reproduced in the Montgomery County, Ohio deed books for the Odell→Stillwell & Bierce licence. I have not searched either, and I am not asserting those records exist.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US RE10139
    1881 : Odell original patent 250954 issued
    1882 : Reissue RE10139 granted to Odell
         : Stillwell and Bierce becomes licensee
    1883 : Odell and licensee sue Stout
    1884 : Odell v Stout decided
    1890 : Consolidated Roller Mill Co asserting
    1895 : Supreme Court appeal decided
    1898 : Patent term expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

The framework is applied for completeness; almost every signal is structurally inapplicable to a patent that issued in 1881 and expired in 1898. I have marked each on the record, not on the absence of a modern owner.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" entity appears anywhere in the record. The only transferee I can identify with evidence is Consolidated Roller-Mill Company, a maker of roller mills, not a licensing shell; the only other party is a manufacturing licensee, Stillwell & Bierce Mfg. Co. of Dayton. There is no reel/frame entry to cite, and no LLC, registered-agent address, or single-member entity of any kind.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. None of the comparators on the modern NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, Wi-LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, etc.) existed at the relevant time, and none appears. I found no Unified Patents or RPX asserter-directory entry for anyone in this chain.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / no data. There are no recorded assignments, therefore no correspondents of record and nothing to compare for recurrence. Two names are nonetheless worth preserving for any historian doing this work: Wood & Boyd (Odell's prosecuting attorneys on US260,226) and witness Robert K. King, who is probably the same R. King who served as Stillwell & Bierce's Vice President & Treasurer in 1887. Neither is a recording correspondent, and a single appearance would not be a finding even if it were.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. One documented downstream move (Odell → Consolidated Roller-Mill Co., consummated at some point in the eight years before 1890-02-10), with nothing resembling chained LLCs or a common correspondent address.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — unclear. The first recorded assertion (1883-06-06 bill in Odell v. Stout) came ~17 months after the reissue grant, and the licence to Stillwell & Bierce was in place by then. But the licence is un-dated in every source I reached, so I cannot test the 6-month window. Marked unclear rather than present — inferring a tactical timing from an undated instrument would be exactly the kind of speculation the brief forbids.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present as to the patent. The only insolvency-adjacent document I found is an 1887 deed of trust in which "James M. Matthews & wife, John M. Wright and the Stillwell & Bierce Manufacturing Company" conveyed real and personal property to trustees for the benefit of Matthews & Wright and Stillwell & Bierce (Thomas collection, above). A deed of trust is a secured financing instrument, not a bankruptcy, and it post-dates the litigation. I record it as an open thread, not a signal. Unclear whether Stillwell & Bierce ever failed.

7. Privateering — not present. Privateering requires an operating company to hand patents to an NPE that sues on its behalf. Here the asserting plaintiffs were manufacturers themselves (Odell + Stillwell & Bierce; later Consolidated Roller-Mill Co.), suing competitor manufacturers (Stout; Barnard & Leas; Walker). That is ordinary industrial patent warfare, not privateering.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. No RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN involvement; those organizations are a century-plus removed from this record.

Verdict

Insufficient data (no Assignment Center records).

No US RE10,139 assignment record exists in the searchable USPTO Assignment Center, and none should: the electronic record set begins roughly a century after this reissue expired on 1898-12-13. There is therefore no reel/frame chain to grade, and I decline to invent one. The non-reel/frame evidence that does exist shows a chain running from the individual inventor to a Dayton manufacturer-licensee (Stillwell & Bierce Mfg. Co., described as Odell's licensee in the 1883-06-06 Odell v. Stout bill) and then to the Consolidated Roller-Mill Company, a roller-mill manufacturer that asserted RE10,139 against competing manufacturers in Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.N.D. Ill. 1890). The nearest applicable category in your taxonomy is operating-company assertion — patentee and plaintiff both made and sold the accused class of machines — but the "current assignee ships products" test cannot be met by anyone, because the patent lapsed in 1898. No NPE framework applies, and no NPE signal is present on this record.

Verify the null result at the USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (legacy interface: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) — search patent number RE10139 / RE010139.

I'll research the specific prior art citations for US RE10139.

Now let me verify the specific prior-art references named in the litigation and reissue record.

Prior-Art Analysis — US RE10,139 E (Odell, "Roller-Mill")

0. Sourcing caveat (read first)

I need to be explicit about what could and could not be verified, because the task presupposes a citation list that the public record for this patent does not contain:

• Google Patents' page for USRE10139 (https://patents.google.com/patent/USRE10139/en) shows no "Patent Citations," "Cited By," or "References Cited" section. The only related-reference block on the page is headed "Similar Documents" (a topical similarity list, not examiner citations). Treating that list as § 102 art would be an error, and several of its entries postdate the reissue by years (e.g., US334389A, 1886; US334460A, 1886; US602221A, 1898; US1366463A, 1921).
• I could also not retrieve a USPTO PatentCenter prosecution-history citation list for this 1882 reissue; for pre-1952 patents that record is generally not available online in machine-readable form.
• *Therefore, the prior art below is drawn from the two authoritative contemporaneous sources that actually name the references: (a) the reissue specification itself, and (b) the infringement litigation over this exact patent — Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1884) and Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1890).* These are the references that were actually "cited against" RE10,139.
• Where a source names a reference by date and inventor but not by US patent number, I say so rather than guess a number.

Contradiction flag: the previously generated "Litigation summary" section in this analysis contains no case citations at all (only search notes). It is therefore incomplete, and the case citations I supply below should be treated as supplementing/replacing it.

1. Patent identification (literal)

Claims at issue for anticipation purposes (as printed, OCR-garbled passages noted):

1. Hopper-gate mechanism on both sides of the machine + a through-shaft + lever mechanism connecting parts to operate the gates simultaneously + a single hand-lever.
2. In a roller-mill, the combination, with the adjustable rolls and journals, of transverse shafts h, a through-shaft J, link mechanism connecting the said shafts, and a single hand-lever K, connected with the through-shaft, for simultaneously adjusting both sets of rolls by a single lever movement.
3. Two sets of crushing/grinding rolls + belt-and-pulley driving devices + tightener-pulleys + adjustable frames therefor + mechanism for simultaneously raising and lowering the frames and tightener-pulleys to stop and start the machine.
4. Single through-shaft J + single hand-lever K + mechanism connecting the crushing-rolls and the gates/slides with the through-shaft and hand-lever, so that one lever movement simultaneously adjusts rolls and gates.
5. Shaft J provided with slots, combined with shafts h engaging the slots, the pivoted arms bearing the crushing rolls, crank L on shaft J, link L, and swinging lever K. (OCR uncertain here: the specification describes "segmental cams/slots i in the links I" engaged by forked shafts h via a bolt — the slot/cam element letter is not reliably recoverable.)
6. Combination with the swinging lever K and its adjusting mechanism of crank k′, links i, crank-rods k, shafts h, pinions i, racks M, and bars m carrying gates/slides m — one lever movement adjusts the rolls and raises/lowers the gates.

2. Prior art references actually relied upon against RE10,139

2.1 Daverio patent — the reference that defeated claim 1

• Full citation: Daverio patent; English patent granted to Simons, Dec. 23, 1879; corresponding US patent issued Dec. 14, 1880. (No US patent number is stated in the opinion text I retrieved; I could not confirm it, so I am not supplying one.)
• Source: Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (C.C.S.D. Ohio 1884) — https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8162752](/patent/8162752)/odell-v-stout/
• Disclosure: "In the Daverio patent a through shaft is shown, with mechanism for operating the two hopper gates or slides simultaneously from either side."
• Claim potentially anticipated: Claim 1 (hopper-gate mechanism on both sides + through-shaft + single-lever simultaneous gate operation). This is the reference the court credited when it held: "Our conclusion is that the first claim of the reissue is invalid for want of novelty," and it required complainants to file a disclaimer of claim 1 before decree (Rev. Stat. §§ 4917, 4922).
• Confidence: High that Daverio is the operative claim-1 anticipator; low/uncertain as to its US patent number.

2.2 Gray patent No. 235,761 — asserted against claims 1 and 2

• Full citation: US Patent No. 235,761, W. D. Gray, Dec. 21, 1880; application filed Feb. 16, 1880.
• Disclosure: "relates exclusively to mechanism for controlling the hopper gates or slides."
• Claims potentially anticipated: Claim 1 (gate-control mechanism); pleaded against claim 2 as well.
• Adjudicated outcome: Held not to anticipate claim 2 ("These patents do not anticipate claim 2 of complainants' reissue"). Note the reference antedates Odell's July 7, 1881 application and therefore also his asserted 1878–1880 conception dates of record, which is why the court held Odell's memorandum-book drawings could not give him priority over the intervening Daverio/Poole/Poole & Miller/Gray patents.

2.3 Gray patent No. 238,677 — asserted against claim 2

• Full citation: US Patent No. 238,677, W. D. Gray, March 8, 1881.
• Disclosure: the opinion excerpt states "in the Gray patent, No. 238,677 there are two through shafts, each parallel with the set[s]…" (text truncated in the retrieved copy). This is the Gray patent whose rods G are moved by a cam to throw the rolls apart without disturbing grinding adjustment, and it is the patent litigated in Gray v. …, reported at 43 F. 528 and 156 U.S. 261 (1895) ("The Roller Mill Patent").
• Claims potentially anticipated: Claim 2 (transverse shafts + through-shaft + link mechanism + single lever to adjust both sets of rolls).
• Adjudicated outcome: Held not anticipatory of claim 2 by the Odell v. Stout court.

2.4 Poole patent No. 238,000 — asserted against claim 2

• Full citation: US Patent No. 238,000, Feb. 22, 1881.
• Disclosure: roll-adjusting mechanism in which "when the rolls are set, they are so firmly held in position that something must break before an unyielding foreign substance can pass between the rolls" — i.e., no yielding (spring) bearing.
• Claim potentially anticipated: Claim 2.
• Adjudicated outcome: Held not anticipatory, on the express ground that the Poole patent lacks the coiled-spring yielding bearing that the court found essential to Odell's claim 2.

2.5 Poole & Miller patent No. 238,001 — asserted against claim 2

• Full citation: US Patent No. 238,001, Feb. 22, 1881.
• Disclosure: toggle-joint roll setting; the inner rolls slide in boxes, are forced into grinding position by straightening the toggle and held "inflexibly," and are forced apart by coiled springs "which have no other office."
• Claim potentially anticipated: Claim 2.
• Adjudicated outcome: Held not anticipatory — critical distinction being that Odell's springs serve as a yielding bearing during grinding, whereas the Poole & Miller springs merely separate the rolls when the toggle is broken.

2.6 Mechwart patent (Dec. 20, 1881; filed April 22, 1880) — asserted against claim 2

• Full citation: US patent to Mechwart (Andreas Mechwart), dated Dec. 20, 1881, application filed April 22, 1880. (US patent number not stated in the opinions retrieved; I could not verify it.)
• Disclosure: outer rolls journaled on movable arms/levers connected to weights that keep the rolls together by gravity; the weights are raised and the outer rolls released by a hand-lever acting through a through-shaft, cranks, and chains at each side of the machine; the mill has a separate device for shutting off the grain supply from the hopper.
• Claims potentially anticipated: Claim 2 (transverse shafts + through-shaft + cranks/links + single hand-lever to adjust both outer rolls).
• Adjudicated outcome: Held not anticipatory. The court found the weights mechanism is not the equivalent of Odell's transverse shafts with coiled springs forming a yielding bearing, and that the Mechwart specification itself shows the operator must raise the weights rather than the bearing yielding automatically.
• Statutory note: because Mechwart's US patent published after Odell's July 7, 1881 filing but its application was filed April 22, 1880 — which is also more than one year before Odell's filing — this reference is the one in the group that would today be analyzed as a § 102(a)(2)/pre-AIA § 102(e) reference (prior art as of its filing date), in addition to any § 102(b)-type publication effect.
• Caution on ID conflation: the RE10,139 Google Patents "Similar Documents" list contains US267555A and US267556A, both dated Nov. 14, 1882, titled "Roller-mill" and credited in the OCR to a Mechwart-like name ("Andreas mechwaet"/"mechwaet"). These are not the Dec. 20, 1881 Mechwart patent relied on in Odell v. Stout — different dates, and they postdate the reissue. Do not substitute them.

2.7 Wegman patent (US Apr. 7, 1883; filed Feb. 10, 1883; English patent 1879) — asserted against claims 4–6

• Full citation: Wegman patent, US grant April 7, 1883, application filed Feb. 10, 1883, corresponding English patent 1879. (US patent number not stated in the opinions retrieved; I could not confirm it.)
• Disclosure: roll-controlling and feed-controlling mechanism.
• Claims potentially anticipated: Claims 5 and 6 (which, per stipulation, were treated as one with claim 4 for this defense), and therefore claim 4 (single through-shaft + single hand-lever operating both rolls and gates).
• Adjudicated outcome: Held not anticipatory. The court held the English patent "does not show in the drawings nor describe in the specification simultaneous operation of the roll-controlling and of the feed-controlling mechanism," and that "The American patent, of date later than complainants' patent, can not be brought in to supply the deficiencies of the English patent."
• Statutory note (important): because the US Wegman patent issued after RE10,139 (Apr. 7, 1883 vs. June 20, 1882), it is not § 102 prior art against the US reissue at all except through its 1879 English counterpart (a foreign printed publication, which under the then-governing Rev. Stat. § 4886 needed to predate the invention or antedate the invention/application by the statutory period). The court's refusal to let the later US patent "fill gaps" in the English disclosure is the correct and still-applicable rule.

2.8 Livingston patent No. 284,135 — defendants' own prior mill (not anticipatory; interference)

• Full citation: US Patent No. 284,135 (Livingston). Date not stated in the retrieved text, but it necessarily issued no earlier than 1883 (i.e., after Odell's original patent).
• Relevance: In this mill "a single lever served to operate the through shaft and simultaneously move both sets of mechanism" — i.e., the closest structural match to claim 2 and claim 4 in the record. An interference between Livingston (defendants' assignor) and Odell was decided in favor of Odell on March 31, 1883, and defendants stopped making that mill.
• Claims potentially anticipated: would have implicated claims 2 and 4, but it is not admissible prior art against RE10,139 by date; its significance is as interference/priority evidence.

3. Additional art that is topically on-point but was deployed against Gray's patents, not against RE10,139

These appear in the related roller-mill litigation (Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas, 43 F. 527; Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25; Gray, 156 U.S. 261) and would be the natural place to look for art against RE10,139 claim 3 (belt/pulley drive + tightener-pulley frames + simultaneous adjustment):

• Nemelka family: Austrian patents Jan. 15 and May 22, 1875; French patent June 23, 1875; English patent to Lake, Feb. 28, 1878 (English patent No. 3,328 of 1877); US patent Nov. 12, 1878. Discloses swinging-roll frames, cam/eccentric adjustment, springs acting on the movable roll to yield to sudden pressure, and cams connected so as to be "operated simultaneously by a movement of [a] shaft."
• Mechwart Austrian patent, Aug. 3, 1875 — belt-driving of each roller of a pair in roller mills (directly relevant to claim 3's belt/pulley driving devices).
• Gray patent No. 228,525 — admitted to contain the frame, roll-shafts, counter-shaft, pulleys, and belts of the later Marmon claim (relevant to claim 3).
• Clark patent No. 174,719 (coal-breaker) and the Lane & Bodley saw-mill device — simultaneous adjustment of both ends of a shaft carrying pulleys, for tightening/loosening belts (relevant to claim 3's "mechanism for simultaneously raising and lowering the frames").
• Marmon & Warrington patent, Oct. 10, 1882 — simultaneous adjustment of both ends of a counter-shaft (post-dates RE10,139; cited only as context).
• Odell's own original patent No. 250,954 — cited in Coombs as showing "a device for simultaneous adjustment of two short shafts carrying pulleys, each revolving in an opposite direction" (relevant to claim 3, but it is the same patent family, i.e., not third-party art).

4. Claim-by-claim anticipation map (bottom line)

Contradiction flag (must be resolved before relying on claim 2): Odell v. Stout (22 F. 159) sustained claim 2 against the Poole, Poole & Miller, Gray, and Mechwart references. But in the later Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527, the same reissue's claim 2 was characterized as showing "only a device for separating the two sets of rolls … by one movement," and the court stated it could not "conceive that it required invention to connect the shaft by which the cams in one movable roll were operated simultaneously with the cams of the other movable roll in a double mill," adding that "the ordinary and well-known device by which all the bolts in an iron safe door are shot by the movement of a single lever seems … to fully anticipate whatever there is in the second claim of this Odell patent." Two contemporaneous federal courts thus reached opposite conclusions on claim 2's validity. Any anticipation opinion on claim 2 must acknowledge and reconcile this split.

5. Statutory framework notes (necessary for accuracy)

• RE10,139 was granted under the pre-1952 statutes. The novelty provision then in force was Rev. Stat. § 4886 (and the reissue provisions Rev. Stat. §§ 4916–4917). Mapping to 35 U.S.C. § 102 is an analytical convenience, not the law that governed. In particular, the pre-1952 "publication/patent" bar ran two years before the application, not the § 102(b) one-year bar — so Odell v. Stout's analysis of Odell's July 1880 drawing vs. his July 7, 1881 application (a one-year interval) does not correspond to a modern § 102(b) calculus.
• Mechwart (filed Apr. 22, 1880; patented Dec. 20, 1881) is the only reference in the group that functions as a true "secret prior art / patent-as-of-filing-date" citation against RE10,139.
• Wegman US (Apr. 7, 1883) is post-RE10,139 and cannot be § 102 art; only the 1879 English publication qualifies.
• Daverio's English patent (Dec. 23, 1879) and the Nemelka/Lake English patent (Feb. 28, 1878; No. 3,328 of 1877) are foreign printed publications — available as § 102(a)(1)/pre-AIA § 102(a) art, but under pre-1952 practice their effect was limited to what they actually described (hence the Wegman holding).
• Analogous-art arguments (the safe-door bolt mechanism urged in Barnard & Leas) were and remain a § 103-style obviousness argument, not strict § 102 anticipation.

6. What I could not verify (stated explicitly rather than guessed)

1. The US patent numbers of the Daverio (US, Dec. 14, 1880), Mechwart (Dec. 20, 1881), and Wegman (US, Apr. 7, 1883) references — the opinions give dates, inventors, and filing dates, but no numbers in the text I retrieved.
2. Whether Google Patents/USPTO holds a machine-readable examiner citation list for RE10,139; the page as fetched carries only "Similar Documents," and USPTO PatentCenter/Assignment links on that page are not a citation list.
3. The exact slot/cam reference letter in claim 5 and the corresponding element in the specification (the specification says the forked shafts h engage "the segmental cams [or slots] i in the links I" via a bolt — the OCR is indeterminate between "cams," "slots," and the letter i vs. l).
4. Whether any foreign patents beyond Daverio (English, to Simons), the Nemelka/Lake English patent No. 3,328/1877, the Nemelka Austrian and French patents, and Mechwart's Austrian patent (Aug. 3, 1875) were specifically pleaded against RE10,139 itself (as opposed to against Gray's patents).

Primary sources used:

• https://patents.google.com/patent/USRE10139/en
• https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/8162752/odell-v-stout/ (Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159)
• https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0022/0022.f1.0160.pdf (same case, reporter copy)
• https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0043/0043.f.0527.1.pdf and https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[9310612](/patent/9310612)/consolidated-roller-mill-co-v-barnard-leas-manufg-co/ (Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527)
• https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0039/0039.f.0025.pdf (Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25)
• https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep156/usrep156261/usrep156261.pdf (Gray, 156 U.S. 261)

I'll ground this analysis in the actual reference list on the patent page before reasoning about obviousness.

I have strong grounding from the litigation record. Let me pin down the specific prior-art references of record and the remaining case citations.

Obviousness Analysis — US RE10139 (Odell, "Roller-Mill"), 35 U.S.C. § 103

Cross-reference note: The previously generated litigation section identified the case family (22 F. 159; 43 F. 527/528; 156 U.S. 261) but was substantively empty. I build on that here rather than repeating it — the litigation record is the single most valuable source of "prior art of record" for this patent, because Google Patents' own "Similar Documents" list is date-incomplete and largely post-dates the patent.

I. Threshold framing (must be stated before any §103 conclusion)

1. §103 is anachronistic as to this patent. RE10139 issued June 20, 1882, under the Patent Act of 1870, where the operative test was want of "invention"/patentable novelty, not the 1952 statutory obviousness test. Any §103 analysis here is a retrospective hypothetical applying Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007), to an 1882 reissue. The reason this matters substantively: the 19th-century "invention" standard as applied in these very cases was frequently stricter than modern §103 (the courts invalidated on "ordinary mechanical skill" grounds), so claims that survive modern §103 would not necessarily have survived 1882 doctrine. Both framings point the same direction for several claims here.

2. The critical date is NOT the "prior art date" shown on the Google Patents page. The page displays "Prior art date 1882-06-20." That is simply the reissue publication date; treating it as a §102/§103 cutoff would be error. Under pre-AIA §102/§103 with first-to-invent, the cutoff is Odell's date of invention. The record establishes:

Odell put memo-book drawings in evidence to antedate: roll-controlling mechanism (Sept. 17, 1878); gate-controlling transverse shaft with hand-wheel (May 14, 1879); through-shaft + transverse shaft with coiled spring + hand-lever (June 1879); through-shaft with gate/slide control (July 1880). The court in Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (C.C.E.D. Mo. 1884) accepted that "an invention relating to machinery may be exhibited either in a drawing or in a model." Consequence: the effective §103 cutoff for the roll-control subject matter may be as early as Sept. 1878, and for the through-shaft gate mechanism July 1880 — not July 1881. This substantially narrows the citable art.

3. Contradiction flag. The page's "Prior art keywords" (rolls, crushing, shaft, lever, crank) and "Similar Documents" list are auto-generated and not a legal prior-art set. Of the ~24 "Similar Documents," only three predate June 20, 1882:

• US188295A (1877-03-13) — fur-separating machine (prima facie non-analogous; I did not verify its disclosure)
• US232863A (1880-10-05) — listed with garbled title "Clayton s"; I could not verify this reference's disclosure and flag it as unverified
• US250954A (1881-12-13) — Odell's own original patent ("Roller-mill")

Everything else on that list (US264559A 1882; US267555A/US267556A 1882; US275055A/US275835A 1883; US291634A 1884; US306945A 1884; US315710A 1885; US334389A/US334460A 1886; US346200A 1886; US358989A 1887; US404756A 1889; US502558A 1893; US509989A 1893; US583995A 1897; US602221A 1898; US822765A 1906; US1034996A 1912; US1189122A 1916; US1366463A 1921) post-dates the patent and is not prior art under §102(b) or §103.

4. Trap in that list. US267555A and US267556A (both Nov. 14, 1882, Mechwart) are not the Mechwart reference relied on in the Odell litigation. The Mechwart reference of record is the patent dated Dec. 20, 1881 (application filed April 22, 1880), plus Mechwart's Austrian patent of Aug. 3, 1875 (relied on in the Gray litigation). A reader who cites the 1882 US patents is citing non-prior art. (US267555A)

5. US250954A is Odell's own original patent. It is presumptively not citable as prior art against RE10139 for the same invention (a reissue takes the original's date). It is citable against others — and was, e.g., in Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25, where it was used as prior art showing "simultaneous adjustment of two short shafts carrying pulleys, each revolving in an opposite direction." Note the asymmetry: the reference most squarely on RE10139's own disclosure is unavailable against RE10139.

6. Claim text caveat. The claims as fetched are OCR-corrupted (e.g., claim 5: "the shafts h ensm'fn the SIOIS in said |inirs"). My claim constructions below are provisional reconstructions; limitations marked ⚠ are uncertain.

II. The actual prior art of record (verified from adjudicated cases)

Key point on the combination references: Livingston No. 284,135 is a genuine, independent disclosure of the single-lever, simultaneous roll + gate control — but Odell won the interference against Livingston on Mar. 31, 1883, so Livingston's invention date is junior and it cannot be used as §102/§103 art against Odell.

III. Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA)

A millwright / milling engineer, c. 1878–82, employed by a roller-mill builder (e.g., Ganz, Allis, Barnard & Leas, Consolidated Roller-Mill Co.), with:

• working knowledge of the Buda-Pesth roller system (two or more pairs of corrugated rolls run at differential speeds, replacing burr stones);
• familiarity with the four adjustment problems articulated in The Roller Mill Patent, 156 U.S. 261 (1895): tram (vertical), grinding/parallelism (horizontal), spring yield on tramp metal, and stop-and-holding (spreading rolls when not grinding);
• ordinary competence in generic machine elements — crank-and-link, slot-and-pin, rack-and-pinion, eccentrics, toggle joints, belt tightener pulleys, counter-shafts;
• ability to reference unrelated mechanisms for one-lever multi-point actuation (safe-door bolt work, saw-mill belt-tightener shafts).

This is a crowded, fast-moving, well-funded art: multiple teams (Gray, Mechwart, Wegman, Poole, Livingston, Birkholz, Odell) were converging on the same problems within a 24-month window.

IV. Claim-by-claim §103 analysis

Claim 1 — "hopper-gate mechanism on both sides … a through-shaft, lever mechanism … and a single hand-lever"

Combination: Daverio/Simons (Eng. Dec. 23, 1879) + Gray No. 235,761 (Dec. 21, 1880).

Daverio supplies every element: a through shaft operating both hopper gates simultaneously from either side. Gray 235,761 is directed exclusively to the same sub-problem (hopper gate/slide control).

• Motivation: both references address grain feed control in the identical machine type; converting a two-sided gate control into single-hand-lever operation from one side is a predictable aggregation of two known mechanisms for their known purpose, reducing operator stations in a multi-stand mill.
• Expected success: certain — no new interaction between elements; the through shaft transmits torque identically to both sides.
• Result: claim 1 is obvious, and in fact invalid for want of novelty as held in Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (the court held claim 1 invalid, while sustaining claims 2 and 4 and requiring a disclaimer of claim 1). A claim anticipated on the Daverio/Gray record is a fortiori obvious.
• Note: claim 1 was held by the examiner/interference to be improperly broadened in reissue relative to the original, a separate §251 defect.

Claim 2 — adjustable rolls + transverse shafts h + through-shaft J + link mechanism + single hand-lever K

Primary combination: Gray No. 238,677 (Mar. 8, 1881) + Mechwart (Dec. 20, 1881 / filed Apr. 22, 1880); alternatively Gray 238,677 + Daverio.

Gray 238,677 is the closest art and discloses, per 22 F. 159:

• movable arms carrying the outer rolls ✔
• transverse shafts with coiled springs forming yielding bearings ✔ (same function as Odell's transverse shafts h)
• eccentrics connecting through shafts to the arms ✔
• crank-arms on the through shafts pivoted to a horizontal rod acting as a hand-lever, moving all eccentrics simultaneously ✔

The only differences from claim 2 are: (a) two through shafts (one per roll pair) instead of one; and (b) the "hand-lever" being a pivoted horizontal rod ganged to two crank-arms rather than a single lever on a single shaft. ODell's contribution is, in substance, ganging the actuation of the two already-known mechanisms onto one shaft.

• Motivation (KSR "predictable use of prior-art elements"): the art expressly recognized the desirability of one-movement operation. Mechwart teaches "turning the handle m, and revolving shaft o … and its cranks at each side of the machine" to act on both sides; Daverio teaches a single through shaft acting on both sides. A PHOSITA seeking to reduce the lever count from two to one had a direct, enumerated design path.
• The "safe-door" rationale (explicit contemporaneous obviousness holding): the Circuit Court in Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527, 528 (C.C.E.D. Wis. 1890) held: "I cannot conceive that it required invention to connect the shaft by which the cams in one movable roll were operated simultaneously with the cams of the other movable roll in a double mill. The ordinary and well-known device by which all the bolts in an iron safe door are shot by the movement of a single lever seems to me to fully anticipate whatever there is in the second claim of this Odell patent." This is a textbook analogous-art / familiar-element obviousness holding, and it maps cleanly onto KSR's "a court must ask whether the improvement is more than the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions."
• Countervailing record: Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 sustained claim 2. But note why: the defendants' art (Mechwart's weights, Poole's rigid setting, Poole & Miller's toggle) lacked the yielding spring bearing that the court found "one of the most valuable features." Gray 238,677 is the reference that supplies exactly that coiled-spring yielding bearing — and it was not the reference the Stout court treated as the primary anticipation. So a §103 case built primarily on Gray 238,677 + Mechwart/Daverio is materially stronger than the §102 case that failed in 1884.
• Assessment: claim 2 is more likely than not obvious. Confidence: moderate-to-high (≈60–70%), with the principal residual argument being that Gray 238,677 provides no teaching to consolidate two through shafts into one, so motivation must be supplied by Daverio's single-shaft teaching or by the well-known one-lever multi-actuator expedient (safe-door bolt work, per 43 F. 527/528).

Claim 3 — two sets of rolls + belt-and-pulley drives + tightener pulleys + adjustable frames + mechanism simultaneously raising/lowering frames and tighteners to start/stop

Combination: Gray No. 228,525 (June 8, 1880) + Mechwart Austrian patent (Aug. 3, 1875) + Lane & Bodley saw-mill device and/or Clark No. 174,719 (coal-breaker).

This is the weakest claim of the reissue.

• Mechwart's Austrian patent (Aug. 3, 1875) already taught belt-driving each roll of a pair, expressly to eliminate spur-gear rattle and unequal roll wear, and Mechwart's US litigation record shows his mills were "equipped with adjusting or tightening pulleys."
• Gray 228,525 claim 1 (counter-shaft with pulleys at both ends in vertically and independently adjustable bearings used as belt tighteners) was held invalid for obviousness by the Supreme Court in Consolidated Roller Mill Co. v. Walker, 138 U.S. 124 (1891): "The combination set forth in that claim evinces only the exercise of ordinary mechanical or engineering skill." The Court relied on Mechwart's Austrian patent and on the general arts for the propositions that belt-gearing as a substitute for cog-gearing was old, that tightening pulleys were old, and that counter-shafts with independently adjustable journals were old.
• The only added feature in RE10139 claim 3 is that the tightener frames are raised/lowered simultaneously to start/stop the machine. For that, the art supplies direct analogues: Lane & Bodley's saw-mill device for moving both ends of a shaft carrying a circular saw to tighten/loosen belts; Clark No. 174,719 for a coal-breaker; and Odell's own prior patent No. 250,954 (a roller-mill device for simultaneous adjustment of two short shafts carrying pulleys turning in opposite directions). In Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25, the court held there was "nothing beyond mere mechanical skill required in applying these means to the counter-shaft of a roller-mill. … it does not call for the exercise of the inventive faculty."
• Motivation: very strong — a single start/stop control at one station is a self-evident operator-convenience objective in a multi-stand mill; and the accepted advantage of belt drives (elimination of gear noise/jar) was expressly recognized in the art's specifications.
• Assessment: claim 3 is obvious, high confidence (≈85%). Note also that claim 3's subject matter is the very belt/tightener organization Odell's own specification expressly disclaims: "This manner of throwing or grinding rolls in order to drive them with varying or differential speed is not, however, herein claimed, and is only here illustrated to give a clear conception of the entire structure." If claim 3 in fact covers that belt/pulley/tightener organization, there is an additional written-description/claiming mismatch under §112 (and a reissue "different invention" problem under §251) — not §103, but a separate invalidity vector.

Claim 4 — single through shaft J, single hand-lever K, mechanism connecting both the rolls and the gates/slides, so one movement simultaneously adjusts rolls and opens/closes gates

Combination: Daverio (through-shaft gate actuation) + Gray 235,761 (gates) + Gray 238,677 or Mechwart (through-shaft cranked roll actuation).

This is Odell's best claim and the one most likely to survive §103.

• The reference set does disclose each sub-combination: a through shaft driving hopper gates (Daverio; Gray 235,761), and a through shaft + cranks + hand-lever driving the roll-spreading mechanism (Mechwart; Gray 238,677). A KSR-style attack would run: "combining two known adjustments onto one operator input is a predictable combination of known elements; the motivation is the convenience of single-point control of feed and nip; the physical integration (keying a second crank and link onto the same shaft) is routine."
• Why it likely fails as §103 art:
  1. The Wegman English patent of 1879 — the one reference aimed squarely at this combination — did not disclose it. Odell v. Stout: "We are of opinion that the English patent does not show in the drawings nor describe in the specification simultaneous operation of the roll-controlling and of the feed-controlling mechanism. The American patent, of date later than complainants' patent, can not be brought in to supply the deficiencies of the English patent." That is a contemporaneous finding of no enabling prior disclosure of the very combination.
  2. Express finding of no prior knowledge/use: "There is no evidence that prior to Odell's invention the combination of mechanism for simultaneously controlling the gates and the rolls was known or used, and there is no doubt in our minds that it is a valuable and patentable improvement."
  3. A functional, not merely aggregative, relationship. The claim is not a mere juxtaposition: shutting the feed spouts when the rolls are spread prevents unground grain passing through and prevents the rolls rubbing each other — a new cooperative result (avoiding roll damage and off-grade product) that neither sub-mechanism alone achieves. Under both pre-KSR and KSR doctrine, a combination producing a new interaction that is not the mere sum of the parts is a recognized nonobviousness indicator.
  4. Timing. If Odell's July 1880 drawing is credited (and the Stout court accepted the drawings as establishing earlier invention), the citable art window narrows further, and Mechwart's Dec. 20, 1881 patent — the roll-side reference — drops out (though Mechwart's Apr. 22, 1880 application date is problematic if that filing is treated as a §102(e)-type date; in 1882 no §102(e) analogue existed in the same form, and the Stout court treated Mechwart on its application date of Apr. 22, 1880 as pre-dating Odell's original filing, so this cuts against Odell on the roll-side art).
• Assessment: claim 4 is probably not obvious (≈30–35% chance of an obviousness invalidation). Confidence: moderate. The strongest residual attack is Daverio + Gray 238,677 with a motivation argument drawn from single-point operator control; the strongest defense is the express lack of prior art showing simultaneous roll + feed actuation (the Wegman finding) plus the coacting-function argument.

Claim 5 — "shaft J provided with slots ⚠, combined with shafts h engaging the slots ⚠, pivoted arms bearing the rolls, crank L attached to shaft J, the link L′, and the swinging lever K"

Combination: Gray 238,677 (crank-arms + connecting rod) or Mechwart (through shaft + cranks + chains) + universal use of slot-and-pin / link connections.

• This claim is species-level, tied to Odell's particular linkage geometry. Its added features over claim 2 are the slot-and-pin (lost-motion) engagement between shaft J's links and the forked transverse shafts h, and the crank/link/lever train.
• Slot-and-pin connections, forked ends, yoke-and-bolt joints, and crank-and-link motion converters were ancient and ubiquitous in 1880 machinery. Substituting a slotted link for the chain-and-crank of Mechwart or the pivoted crank-arm-and-rod of Gray 238,677 is a routine mechanical substitution to achieve the same result (converting shaft rotation into a controlled, limited roll-arm displacement), with a predictable result and no change in principle of operation.
• Motivation: a slot affords lost motion/take-up to prevent over-travel and binding of the pivoted roll arms — a well-understood desideratum in the same machine (Gray's own art warns against adjustments "disturb[ing] their parallelism").
• Assessment: claim 5 is likely obvious over Gray 238,677 + Mechwart (≈65–75%), subject to the caveat that the OCR-garbled slot limitation makes scope uncertain. I cannot fully verify the claim 5 limitations from the fetched text and would not render a firm opinion without the clean published claim.

Claim 6 — swinging lever K and roll-adjusting mechanism plus crank, links I, crank-rods k, shafts h, pinions i, racks M, bars m carrying gates/slides m, so one lever movement adjusts rolls and raises/lowers the gates

• Two layers: (a) the roll-adjusting sub-combination — same analysis as claim 2; (b) the gate sub-combination — rack-and-pinion converting the through shaft's rotation into vertical gate movement.
• Rack-and-pinion is one of the oldest and most familiar motion-converting devices in mechanical engineering; its use to raise/lower a hopper slide is squarely a predictable use of a known element for its established function. Gray 235,761 and Daverio supply the gate-control elements; the substitution of rack-and-pinion for Mechwart-style crank-and-chain or for the Daverio gate linkage is a design choice among known equivalents.
• Claim 6 is substantially the same subject matter as claim 4 with the specific (and old) gate-actuation gearing recited. Therefore claim 6 rises or falls with claim 4: to the extent claim 4 is nonobvious, claim 6 gains nothing from the recited rack-and-pinion (old element, known function); to the extent claim 4 is obvious, claim 6 is too.
• Assessment: if claim 4 is nonobvious, claim 6 is likely nonobvious; if claim 4 is obvious, claim 6 is clearly obvious. I do not rate claim 6 independently obvious on this record.

V. Summary table

VI. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

Available evidence is sparse but leans toward nonobviousness for claims 2 and 4:

• Industry-wide displacement: roller mills "practically superseded in all large flouring mills the older method of grinding" (156 U.S. 261) — but this is attributable to the art as a whole (Mechwart, Wegman, Gray, Nemelka), not to Odell. This weakens any nexus argument.
• Copying / near-identity: in Odell v. Stout the defendants' later mill used "a sleeve on the through shaft and an arm connected to the outside lever … the gates or slides … may be moved without moving the rolls; and by moving the inside lever … the roll-controlling mechanism is operated. Both levers may be grasped at the same time and moved together" — "substantially almost identically that of the complainants' mill." Evidence of design-around/close copying is probative of nonobviousness, but here it cuts against claim 4's scope as much as for it (the defendants' version separated the two functions).
• Interference outcome: Odell defeated Livingston No. 284,135 (a single lever operating through shaft and simultaneously moving both mechanisms) on March 31, 1883, which supports Odell's priority but does not establish nonobviousness — a competitor's independent near-identical solution within months is, if anything, evidence of predictability, i.e., obviousness for claim 4's concept.
• Long-felt need: the four adjustment problems (tram, parallelism, spring yield, stop-and-holding) were expressly long-standing and recognized across the art — but again the need was met by the art collectively.
• No nexus for claims 1, 3, 5: no showing that commercial success is attributable to the through-shaft gate mechanism (claim 1) or the tightener-pulley start/stop (claim 3).

Net: secondary considerations do not rescue claims 1, 3, 5, or 6. For claims 2 and 4, copying evidence plus the Stout court's findings ("a valuable and patentable improvement," no prior knowledge of the roll+gate combination) provide modest support, strongest for claim 4.

VII. Bottom line

1. On this record, claims 1 and 3 of RE10139 are clearly obvious under §103 — claim 1 was in fact held invalid (Daverio + Gray 235,761), and claim 3's belt/tightener/start-stop organization is squarely within Consolidated Roller Mill Co. v. Walker, 138 U.S. 124, and Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25, both of which held equivalent belt-tightener/counter-shaft combinations to be within ordinary mechanical skill.
2. Claim 2 is the pivotal claim. It is genuinely contestable, but the most dangerous combination is Gray No. 238,677 (coiled-spring yielding bearings on transverse shafts + simultaneous eccentric actuation) in view of Mechwart and/or Daverio (single through shaft), with the "safe-door bolt" / familiar-element rationale expressly adopted at 43 F. 527, 528. The 1884 Stout decision sustaining claim 2 rested substantially on references that lacked the yielding spring bearing — a gap that Gray 238,677 fills. A modern §103 challenge on this combination is materially stronger than the defense Odell defeated in 1884.
3. Claim 4 is the strongest claim and the least likely to be invalidated for obviousness, because (a) the one reference squarely aimed at simultaneous roll + feed control (Wegman, Eng. 1879) failed to disclose it, (b) the trial court found no prior knowledge or use of the combination, and (c) the combination yields a cooperative result (feed shutoff synchronized with roll spreading) beyond the sum of the parts. Claims 5 and 6 add only old mechanical expedients (slot-and-pin; rack-and-pinion) and therefore rise or fall with claims 2 and 4 respectively.

VIII. Explicit uncertainties / limitations of this analysis

• Claim text is OCR-corrupted. My constructions of claims 5 and 6 (and the designators L / L′ / I / l) are provisional reconstructions marked ⚠. I do not assert the precise wording of claim 5 with confidence.
• I could not verify the disclosures of US188295A (1877-03-13) or US232863A (1880-10-05), the only two third-party documents from the page's "Similar Documents" list that both predate the patent and are not Odell's own. US188295A's title (fur/pelt separating) suggests non-analogous art. Neither is likely material, but I flag that I am not affirming their content.
• I did not independently retrieve the full specifications of Daverio/Simons, Gray 235,761, Gray 238,677, Gray 228,525, Poole 238,000, Poole & Miller 238,001, or the Dec. 20, 1881 Mechwart patent; their disclosures above are taken from the judicial findings and quotations in 22 F. 159, 43 F. 527/528, 39 F. 25, 138 U.S. 124, and 156 U.S. 261, which are reliable but are summaries prepared for other issues.
• Anachronism: §103 did not exist when RE10139 issued, and the 1882-era "invention" standard was, if anything, stricter than modern §103 for mechanical combinations. My valuations above are modern-standard; under 1882 doctrine claims 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 would be more, not less, vulnerable.
• Reissue-specific issues are separate from §103 and I have flagged rather than analyzed them: claim 1's broadening (§251) and the disclaimer order in 22 F. 159; and the possible claiming of subject matter the specification expressly disclaims (the belt/differential-speed drive), which raises §112/§251 questions.

Sources: RE10139 on Google Patents; Odell v. Stout, 22 F. 159 (C.C.E.D. Mo. 1884) and PDF at law.resource.org; Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Barnard & Leas Mfg. Co., 43 F. 527/528 (C.C.E.D. Wis. 1890); Consolidated Roller-Mill Co. v. Coombs, 39 F. 25 (C.C.E.D. Mich. 1889); Consolidated Roller Mill Co. v. Walker, 138 U.S. 124 (1891); The Roller Mill Patent, 156 U.S. 261 (1895); Mechwart, US267,555; Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents (Odell–Livingston interference); A List of Adjudicated Patents — 10,139 (original 250,954).