US RE9199

I'll search for this specific patent number across the sources you mentioned.

Search results — important caveat first

I ran targeted queries for this number (including "RE9199" patent ejector Hugh Coll and CAFC docket 2026 "RE9199" appeal). All searches returned zero documents for RE9199. USPTO Patent Public Search indexes pre-1970 patents (1790–1969) by issue date, patent number, and classification only — not by full text — and no CAFC docket or litigation record surfaced. Per your instruction, I am not substituting results for similar numbers (e.g., RE9380, RE10169, RE8904, which appeared only as "similar documents" on the same page).

Therefore the summary below rests on the authoritative full text you supplied (Google Patents USRE9199E, fetched 2026-09-12), and I flag every point where I lack authoritative confirmation.

US RE9199 — summary

Abstract: The document contains no formal abstract. The closest thing is the opening statement of the specification:

"My present invention relates to certain improvements in the siphon-pump patented to me June 8, 1869; and it consists in modifications of form and construction, whereby such pump is adapted to new uses, or to accomplish old results in a better manner."

(Note: I do not have an authoritative number for the June 8, 1869 parent siphon-pump patent, and I will not guess at one.)

Subject matter: A steam-jet water ejector in which the inner head/shell of the prior double-head construction has its blunt base cut off at or near its broadest part, producing a shell d that is open at the base and has a bore diminishing toward its forward end d'. This head d is cast integrally with the outer head a by radial arms (any desired number). The large unobstructed rear opening is particularly intended for pumping bilge-water, water out of tan-vats, etc., where tan-bark carried with the water would otherwise clog narrow passages. Two interchangeable nozzle-pieces are disclosed: m (Fig. 1), whose rear end abuts the forward end of head d to form a smooth internal continuation, for raising water to a considerable height with comparatively little steam; and n (Fig. 2), with a reduced throat that does not abut head d but leaves an annular space, for raising a larger body of water to a lesser height. Nozzle n may sit loosely in the main discharge-pipe p.

Independent claim — plain language

There is exactly one claim (so the sole claim is the sole independent claim). The OCR text is interleaved with the witness block near the end of the printed column ("...as and for the purpose described" appears embedded in the signature lines). Reconstructed literally, the claim reads:

A water-ejector provided with an inner head or shell extending backward over the water-induction opening, and arranged with relation to the jet-pipe so as to protect the steam-jet from the direct impact of the inflowing current of water, the inner end of said head being provided with a large unobstructed opening, through which all the water passes to the discharge-outlet of the ejector, substantially as and for the purpose described.

Plain-language breakdown of the required elements:

1. A water-ejector (apparatus claim; not limited to a method).
2. An inner head or shell that extends backward over the water-induction opening — i.e., the inner member's rear end is positioned over/behind the outer housing's water inlet (b).
3. Positioned relative to the jet (steam-injection) pipe so as to shield the steam jet from the direct impact of incoming water — the shell acts as a "breakwater or dam," which the specification says prevents the jet from condensing too rapidly and thereby preserves its force.
4. The inner end of that head has a large unobstructed opening — the blunt base is cut away (no closed base, no small ports).
5. All of the water passes through that opening to the discharge outlet — the specification confirms "the forward end of the outer chamber is closed, and ... the entire discharge of the pump is through the inner head, d."
6. Closing phrase "substantially as and for the purpose described" — a typical 19th-century functional/boilerplate catch-all, which would be construed in light of the described structure and purpose.

Practical scope: one apparatus claim covering an ejector having a rearward-extending, base-open inner shell that shields the steam jet and forms the sole discharge path for the induced water. It is a structural/arrangement claim, not limited to the specific nozzle-pieces m or n discussed in the specification, and not limited to a particular steam pressure or water source.

CAFC 2026 docket — no record exists

I found no Federal Circuit docket, appeal, or litigation entry for RE9199, and I want to be explicit about why rather than leave it ambiguous:

• The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was established in 1982. This reissue issued in 1880 and, under the law then applicable, its term would have long since expired (well over a century before the CAFC existed). Any appeal concerning it would have gone to the courts of that era, not the CAFC.
• Accordingly, a "2026 CAFC docket" for this patent number is not something I can produce, and I will not fabricate one.
• I also found no USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier / Espacenet legal-status or assignment record retrievable for it; the document's own "Links" set points to those systems, but searches returned nothing specific to RE9199.

Identifiers to use if you need to verify independently: USRE9199E, RE9199, RE9,199, "Reissued Letters Patent No. 9,199," lineage US110205 → USRE8904 → USRE9199.

Uncertainty / data-quality flags

• No abstract exists in the original document; the "summary" above is my paraphrase of the specification's stated purpose.
• Assignee is genuinely unknown from the authoritative text — do not record one without checking assignment records.
• The OCR full text is corrupted in several places ("Thishead d," "efl'ected," "asshowu," "HUGE COLL" for HUGH COLL, "the tions under which the water is to be raised," and the claim-language/signature-column interleaving). I preserved the wording literally rather than correcting it.
• The reference letter for the radial arms is garbled (the OCR shows "a," which conflicts with the outer head a; the drawings presumably use a different letter). I did not auto-correct it.
• All live-search results for this number were empty; if you want full-text-level confirmation, a manual pull of the original 1880 printed specification or the OCR record in USPTO's USOCR database would be required.

I'll research litigation involving US patent RE9199.

Initial searches returned nothing. Let me broaden the search to litigation databases and specific sources.

Found a reported case. Let me get the full details (case name, parties, court, outcome).

Let me confirm the case caption, parties, and outcome.

I'll verify the PTAB record for this patent before writing anything.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file — the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM involving US RE9199, and independent web searches for the patent number in a PTAB context return nothing (no institution decisions, no FWDs, no PTAB E2E docket entries). There is no active/settled/invalidated breakdown to give, because there is no denominator: nothing has ever been filed at the PTAB against this patent, and the defensive posture this yields is not "hardened patent" or "claims canceled" — it is a threshold problem for whoever is asserting it, namely that the patent is a Civil War–era steam ejector that expired in the 1880s and cannot be infringed by anyone.

Two structural reasons, not just a search result:

1. Statutory unavailability. The PTAB and its AIA trial regimes were created by the Leahy–Smith America Invents Act and took effect 2012-09-16. Post-grant review under 35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329 is available only for patents issuing from applications filed on or after 2012-03-16; RE9199's reissue application was filed 1880-03-13, so a PGR is legally impossible. Covered business method review (AIA § 18) sunset on 2020-09-16 and in any event requires a claim to a financial-services data-processing method — an 1880 mechanical water pump does not qualify.
2. Term. Original patent No. 110,205 issued 1870-12-20; the reissue takes the unexpired remainder of that term, so RE9199's rights lapsed around 1887-12-20. Even an IPR (which is not facially barred by expiry) would be an academic exercise against a long-dead claim set.

Proceedings

None. I am not going to manufacture proceeding numbers, panels, or claim-level dispositions that do not exist. For the record, the sources I checked and what they returned:

If you want the negative confirmed at the primary source rather than through search, run the patent number through USPTO PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov) and the PTAB Decisions search (https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-web/#/search/decisions) — but I have no reason to expect anything but an empty set.

Correction flag on the "PTAB proceedings on file" block: that block was populated from the USPTO ODP API. For a patent that issued in 1880, an empty ODP result is not merely an API gap or an indexing lag — it reflects the correct legal state of the world. Do not treat this as "possibly under-indexed."

Strategic summary

Claim status: nothing CANCELED, nothing SUSTAINED, everything UNTESTED — and untestable. RE9199 carries a single claim (the reissue specification closes with one claim to a water-ejector having an inner head/shell extending backward over the water-induction opening, with a large unobstructed opening at its inner end, arranged relative to the jet-pipe to protect the steam-jet from the inflowing current). Its predecessor, original claim 1 of No. 110,205, was directed to the inner head d open at its rear end with radial arms a. There has never been a PTAB validity adjudication of either, and there never will be a PGR or CBM on these facts.

Estoppel landscape: empty. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is triggered only by a petitioner that received a final written decision in an IPR, PGR, or CBM. No FWD exists, so no party is estopped, no art is "burned," and there is no § 315(b) one-year bar clock running off any complaint service. Conversely, there is also no petitioner-side benefit: a defendant cannot ride co-pending or prior PTAB work, because there is none. If a demand letter on RE9199 crosses your desk, the correct response is not an IPR petition — it is a Rule 11 / § 285 letter pointing out that the asserted patent expired in the 1880s and that its reissue was held invalid for unreasonable delay (see the Litigation section above; the 1882 Circuit Court opinion at 12 F. 136 is at https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0012/0012.f.0136.html). I could not verify from available sources whether that invalidity holding was carried through on any appeal, so treat the affirmed/unreversed status as unconfirmed.

Pattern signals: none available. A single-proceeding patent this old cannot show a repeat-petitioner pattern, patent-owner appeal aggressiveness, or defensive-aggregator involvement (no Unified Patents / RPX-type filing). There is nothing to infer from silence here beyond the obvious: no one in the modern era has had a reason to file.

The one place this patent could plausibly matter today is as prior art, not as an assertion. A patent that issued 1880-05-18 and has been publicly available for well over a century is a § 102(a)(1) printed publication / § 102(a)(2)-analogue patent document for its disclosed subject matter (dual-head steam ejector with radial-arm-connected inner shell, breakwater geometry, interchangeable nozzle pieces). If you are defending a modern jet-pump or eductor claim, RE9199 and its family — RE8,904 (1879-09-23), No. 110,205 (1870-12-20), No. 90,930 (1869-06-08) — are worth a prior-art search, and they are free of any IPR estoppel complications because no IPR exists.

Recommended next steps

• No PTAB activity exists, and none is possible for PGR/CBM. State this plainly in any opinion letter; do not hedge with "no proceedings found to date," which implies they might yet appear.
• If you are a defendant facing an RE9199 assertion: do not budget for an IPR. Budget for a motion to dismiss or a sanctions letter. Ground it on (a) expiration of the original 1870 patent's 17-year term in 1887, and (b) the 1882 invalidity holding on reissue delay at 12 F. 136, subject to the confirmation caveat above. Note that Rule 11 and § 285 exposure attaches to the asserting party, not to you.
• If you are prosecuting a modern application in this space: pull the full family (No. 90,930; No. 110,205; RE8,904; RE9199 — all linked from the Google Patents family/similar-documents listing at the source URL) and cite them under § 102(a)(1) if the disclosure reads on your claims.
• If, contrary to everything above, you have actual knowledge of a newly-filed AIA proceeding touching this patent number — e.g., a petition citing RE9199 as prior art, which would be a proceeding against a different patent — send me the proceeding number and I will pull the institution decision and FWD from PTAB E2E. I will not speculate about one in advance.

Confidence statement: high confidence that no AIA trial proceeding has ever been instituted, filed, or decided on RE9199 itself. As always, an empty ODP record combined with zero corroborating web hits is strong negative evidence, not a mathematical proof — but for a patent that expired 139 years ago, the prior probability of an AIA filing is effectively nil.

I'll verify the assignment-record situation across the sources specified before writing anything.

Found a reported case involving this patent. Let me chase the ownership implication of the plaintiff's identity and check for any 19th-century assignment record.

Let me check for any additional suits and the ownership/plaintiff side of the 1882 case.

Assignment chain reconstruction — US RE9199 ("Ejector," Hugh Coll)

Scope note before the sections: The Assignment Center query target here is USRE9199E / RE9,199. Every retrieval avenue I ran (patent-number queries, assignor/assignee name queries for "Hugh Coll," and litigated-ownership cross-references) returned no recorded assignment for this patent — and, as explained in the timeline section, none can exist in the online system. I therefore complete all required sections but mark the analytical ones as no-record findings, because the Verdict section is required; the "stop after this section" rule and the mandated Verdict conflict, and I resolve it in favor of giving you the verdict with its evidentiary basis.

Also flagging one resolution of a prior open item: the earlier summary said the June 8, 1869 parent siphon-pump patent number was unknown. The court record supplies it: No. 90,930, dated June 8, 1869 (law.resource.org Federal Reporter v.12; CourtListener 12 F. 136). And the earlier flag about the radial-arm reference letter being garbled is resolved: the trial record confirms the inner head d is "connected to the outer head, a, by means of radial arms, a" — i.e., the double use of letter a is in the original document, not an OCR error.

Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: Not applicable in the modern sense — there is no corporate assignee-of-record at filing from which an inventor could "depart," and no 19th-century employment-assignment record exists to analyze. The relevant historical fact is the opposite of a fire-sale pattern: Coll personally prosecuted his own reissue (filed 1880-03-13), personally testified as a witness for the plaintiffs in the 1882 suit, and the court described "the patentee and his assignees" as jointly acquiescing in the original claim language for nine years — i.e., inventor and assignee remained aligned through litigation.

Original assignee

None named on the issued patent. Both the RE9199 specification and the accompanying claim/assignee block name only the inventor, Hugh Coll. The patent as issued was inventor-owned.

Two important qualifications:

1. A commercial assignee existed by 1882 but is not documented in any patent-office record I can retrieve. The infringement suit was captioned J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136 (U.S. Cir. Ct., W.D. Pa. 1882) — the plaintiffs are J. B. Sheriff & Son, and Judge Acheson's opinion repeatedly refers to "the patentee and his assignees." So J. B. Sheriff & Son was, on the face of the record, the asserting owner/co-owner of RE9199 by 1882. I found no reel/frame, execution date, or recording date for that transfer. Treat it as a documented-by-litigation, unrecorded (or unretrievable) transfer.
2. Product: The defendants in that suit were accused of making/selling a competing "siphon pump," and the opinion discusses "the siphon pump made or sold by the defendants" versus the plaintiffs' device — so at least one party in the chain was a manufacturer shipping an embodiment, not a bare licensor. Plaintiffs' counsel was the Pittsburgh firm Bakewell & Kerr; defense counsel M. D. Connelly. The patent's two witnesses are T. B. KERR and JAMES H. PORTE — the surname overlap with complainants' counsel (Bakewell & Kerr) strongly suggests T. B. Kerr attended both the reissue execution and the later litigation, but I flag that as inference, not a recorded correspondent field.

Term status: Under the law then applicable the reissue carried the unexpired term of original patent No. 110,205 (granted 1870-12-20), i.e., 17 years from 1870-12-20. The patent is long expired. Current status: expired; no Patent Center / Global Dossier legal-status record retrievable.

Assignment timeline

There are no recorded assignments for RE9199. Stating this plainly and with its structural reason:

• The USPTO Patent Assignment Search / Assignment Center database "contains all recorded Patent Assignment information back to August 1980" (USPTO Assignment Database webinar deck, https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Assignment%20Database%20Webinar_20150120.pdf). This patent issued 1880-05-18 and its term lapsed in the 1880s. No post-1980 recordation is even possible, so the database is categorically empty for RE9199 — this is not a retrieval failure on my part.
• Consequently there is no reel/frame, no conveyance code, no execution date, no correspondent of record, and no assignor/assignee pair to report. I will not manufacture any.
• The one ownership fact I can substantiate is non-recorded and comes from litigation, not from the Assignment Center: by 1882 the patent was being asserted in the W.D. Pa. by J. B. Sheriff & Son, described by the court as among "the patentee and his assignees." No execution date or consideration is recoverable from the reported opinion.

Verification entry points (both will show no records for this number): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — search RE9199 or 9199.

Timeline diagram

The block below contains no assignment events, because none exist. It records only dated, sourced milestones so the diagram is not misleading.

timeline
    title Ownership and validity milestones of US RE9199
    1869 : Coll siphon pump patent 90930 issued
    1870 : Original patent 110205 issued to Coll
    1879 : First reissue 8904 issued to Coll
    1880 : Second reissue 9199 filed March 13
         : Reissue 9199 issued May 18 to Coll
    1882 : Suit by JB Sheriff and Son against A Fultons Son
         : Reissue 9199 held invalid for delay
    1887 : Patent term lapses

(No assignment appears because none is recorded or recoverable. The 1882 plaintiff's identity is the only ownership evidence, and it is from a reporter volume, not a recordation.)

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Applying the eight signals to a patent whose entire assertable life predates the existence of every entity on the modern asserter lists:

Note on the actual 1882 disposition, since it bears on assertion posture: Judge Acheson held the reissue invalid — "The delay was altogether unreasonable, and the reissue, therefore, without authority of law" — reasoning that the reissue claim was "a great expansion of the original," that the original patent "did not cover and could not rightfully cover the inner head itself," and that nine years' acquiescence by "the patentee and his assignees" created an equitable estoppel. Source: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0012/0012.f.0136.html and https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8341150](/patent/8341150)/j-b-sheriff-son-v-a-fultons-son-co/. If anything, this is the inverse of a modern NPE playbook: a broadened reissue used offensively was struck down on delay/estoppel grounds.

Verdict

Insufficient data.

There is no recorded assignment for RE9199 and none can exist, because the USPTO Assignment Center only covers assignments recorded since August 1980 while this patent issued 1880-05-18 and lapsed in the 1880s — so no reel/frame, conveyance type, correspondent, or execution date is available to drive any signal. The sole ownership evidence is the caption of J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1882), which shows an assignee-manufacturer asserting pre-existing rights for about two years before the reissue was invalidated — an operating-company assertion posture in form, but resting on a 144-year-old reporter volume rather than any recordation. Verification: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search RE9199 — expect an empty result set).

Caveats I will not paper over: (a) I did not directly observe an empty Assignment Center result page; my conclusion rests on the database's documented August 1980 coverage start plus the patent's 1880s expiry, which makes a record impossible rather than merely unfound. (b) The names J. B. Sheriff & Son, Bakewell & Kerr, and T. B. Kerr come from the Federal Reporter text, and the Kerr/Correspondent overlap is my inference. (c) No SEC filing, PEDS/ODP record, RPX directory entry, or Unified Patents entry can exist for this patent; absence there is not evidence of anything.

I'll run targeted searches for this patent number and its citation trail.

Additional searches to pin down the citation record and the litigation outcome.

Prior-art analysis — US RE9199 (Hugh Coll, "Ejector")

Bottom line first

US RE9199 has no patent citation list — on its face or in any retrievable database record. This is not a search failure; it is a feature of the document. Three things must be stated plainly before any § 102 analysis:

1. US patents did not print cited references on their face until 1947. RE9199 issued May 18, 1880, so there is no "References Cited" block to look at. Any examiner citations would live only in the 1880 file wrapper (application papers), which is not retrievable through live search in my session.
2. The authoritative full text you supplied contains no citation section. Its visible metadata lists "Prior art keywords — water, head, ejector, opening, pipe" (machine-generated keyword tags, not citations) and a "Similar Documents" list (machine-generated similarity, not citations). My earlier searches for this number (USPTO patent RE9199 Hugh Coll ejector, "RE9199" patent prior art citations) returned zero results; three follow-up queries hit my tool-step limit.
3. What does function as prior art for RE9199 is the inventor's own earlier patent chain, which the specification itself expressly incorporates by reference — plus a self-admitted category of "old form of ejectors."

Contradiction flag (per your cross-reference rule): the earlier "Patent summary" section said "I do not have an authoritative number for the June 8, 1869 parent siphon-pump patent" and the earlier "CAFC 2026 docket" section said "no litigation … record." The litigation section then said a reported case was found. The case is now identified: J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1882) (Acheson, D.J.), and it supplies the 1869 patent number. Earlier statements are superseded to that extent.

Reference table (what actually functions as prior art)

§ 102 analysis, reference by reference

Against US 110,205 (Coll, Dec 20, 1870)

Map the sole RE9199 claim against the 110,205 claim as quoted by the 1882 court:

§ 102 conclusion: US 110,205 is a § 102(a)/(b)-type reference disclosing elements A, D, and part of B, but on the 1882 court's own findings it does not anticipate the reissue claim as a whole, because elements C and E were added as new matter. The correct doctrinal hook against RE9199 is not § 102 but the reissue statutes — R.S. § 4916 (new matter / enlargement of claim) and laches. That is exactly how the case was decided.

Against US 90,930 (Coll, June 8, 1869)

• Discloses (A) a water-elevating ejector; an inner head that surrounds the jet and is mounted on the injection pipe (partial B/C); connection of inner and outer heads.
• Does not disclose (D): the 1869 inner head is closed at its rear — screwed or cast onto the injection pipe — with only "inlets or openings … back of the discharging end of the steam-injection pipe." No "large unobstructed opening at the base."
• Does not disclose (E): 1869 discharges through and from either or both the heads.
• § 102: no anticipation — missing elements D and E. This is the natural primary § 103 (obviousness) reference in combination with 110,205. All three teachings are from the same inventor; under the law applicable in 1880 (and under pre-AIA § 102(a)/(e)), an inventor's own earlier patent is not "the invention of another," so 90,930 and RE 8,904 operate as statutory-bar/printed-publication art (§ 102(b) analogue, R.S. § 4886) rather than as § 102(a)/(e) art.

Against US RE 8,904 (Coll, Sept 23, 1879)

• § 102 status: cannot cleanly anticipate. It is a reissue of the same 110,205 disclosure by the same inventor, published Sept 23, 1879 — inside the two-year window before the March 13, 1880 reissue application, but by the same inventive entity. It has no independent anticipatory content beyond 110,205.
• Caveat: I retrieved only the date/title from the Google Patents 1879 sitemap; I did not verify its claim text. Do not rely on this row without a manual pull.

Against the admitted "old form of ejectors"

• § 102: unusable as-is. It is a specification admission of a genus with no identifying particulars, and therefore insufficient to anticipate a claim reciting a specific structural arrangement.

What is not prior art (explicit non-results)

The Google Patents "Similar Documents" list on the RE9199 page is not a citation list and must not be reported as one. Applying a literal date filter against RE9199's filing date (Mar 13, 1880), most of those documents postdate the application and therefore cannot be § 102 prior art at all: US RE9380 (Sept 21, 1880), US RE10169 (July 25, 1882), US 280733 (July 3, 1883), US 281415 (July 17, 1883), US 436932 (Sept 23, 1890), US 496977 (May 9, 1893), US 632572 (1899), US 697770 (1902), US 698511 (1902), US 755498 (1904), US 1131951 (1915), and the JPH/JPS references (1985–1997). The few that predate Mar 13, 1880 are titled in unrelated arts — US 126729 (1872, excavators), US 134900 (1873, steam-condensers), US 159187 (1875, car-ventilators), US 159872 (1875, parlor-fountains), US 176913 (1876, tuyeres), US 196384 (1877, hydrants), US 205584 (1878, hydraulic dredging). USTPO/Google: none is directed to a steam-jet water ejector, and none is cited against RE9199. US 228206 is dated June 1, 1880 — after the March 13, 1880 application — so it is out as well.

The decisive proceeding (§ 102-adjacent, but not § 102)

J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136, 1882 U.S. App. LEXIS 2488 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1882) (Acheson, D.J.; Bakewell & Kerr for complainants; M. D. Connelly for defendants).

• The court held the reissue claim enlarged beyond the original and supported by new matter — the "breakwater or dam" function for protecting the steam jet "neither mentioned nor hinted at" in US 110,205.
• Headnote 2: "A delay of nine years is unreasonable on an application for a reissue wherein the original claim is enlarged."
• Practical effect: RE9199 was held invalid as a reissue. § 102 anticipation was not the ground of decision.
• Sources: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8341150](/patent/8341150)/j-b-sheriff-son-v-a-fultons-son-co/ ; https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0012/0012.f.0136.html

Note the small historical detail: the patent's own witness was T. B. Kerr, and complainants' counsel was the firm Bakewell & Kerr — the same name. Noted, not asserted as a conflict.

Uncertainty and data-quality flags

• No on-face citations exist for RE9199 (pre-1947 practice). Treat any "citation list" you see produced for this number as reconstructed, not documentary. Confidence: high, but the 1947 cutoff is from general knowledge, not a source retrieved in this session.
• US 90,930's structure is known to me only through the 1882 opinion's paraphrase, not its own text. Its number and date are corroborated by that opinion; its claim scope is not independently verified.
• RE 8,904's text and claims are unverified — I have only the title/date from a sitemap.
• Google Patents lists "Prior art date 1880-03-13" (the reissue filing date) for RE9199. Legally, for subject matter common to the original, the effective date should trace to US 110,205 (Dec 20, 1870); the page's date field should not be read as the reissue's only legally relevant date.
• No assignee appears in the authoritative text; the 1882 suit shows the patent being enforced by J. B. Sheriff & Son (presumably as assignees/licensees), which is evidence of some transfer but not proof of recordation — do not record an assignee without the assignment record.
• I could not query USPTO Patent Public Search's pre-1970 index directly (it indexes by issue date, patent number, and classification only, not full text), and three follow-up queries were cut off by a tool-step limit. If you need file-wrapper-level citations, a manual pull of the 1880 application papers is required.

I'll first try to verify what these listed references actually disclose, since the "Similar Documents" list gives me only titles and dates.

Found the real 1882 case. Let me pull the full opinion and check the remaining listed references.

Obviousness of US RE9199 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Two threshold corrections before the analysis

A. § 103 did not exist when this patent issued. RE9199 issued May 18, 1880; 35 U.S.C. § 103 was enacted in 1952. In 1880 the governing statute was § 24 of the Act of July 8, 1870 (R.S. § 4886), which required only that the invention be "not known or used by others in this country" and "not patented or described in any printed publication … before his invention," plus a two-year bar for printed publications/public use. The obviousness-type inquiry was judge-made: Hotchkiss v. Greenwood, 52 U.S. (11 How.) 248 (1850) ("ordinary mechanic" standard). Below I apply the modern Graham/KSR framework, but flag that the historically apt framing is a "want of invention" defense. The two frameworks are cognate, so the analysis transfers — with the important caveat that § 103's "by another" and effective-filing-date mechanics must be applied here through reissue law (R.S. § 4916 / 35 U.S.C. § 251), not ordinary prosecution practice.

B. Two material facts I previously flagged as unknown are now resolved by the 1882 infringement opinion retrieved this session — J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1882) (Acheson, D.J.):

• The June 8, 1869 parent siphon-pump is patent No. 90,930 (previously recorded as "unknown — will not guess").
• Original No. 110,205 had more than one claim, and its first claim already read: "The inner head, d, open at its rear end so as to leave an unobstructed opening around the steam-injection pipe for the passage of such pieces of solid matter as may be brought up by the water, such inner head, d, being connected to the outer head, a, by means of radial arms, a, all arranged substantially as described." (quoted at https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F/0012/0012.f.0136.html and https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[8341150](/patent/8341150)/j-b-sheriff-son-v-a-fultons-son-co/).

That last point reframes the whole § 103 question, because every structural element of the RE9199 claim was already claimed in 1870. The Sheriff court also observed that the reissue specification "proceeds to set forth other advantages neither mentioned nor hinted at in the original specification (No. 110,205), viz.: that the jet of steam is protected and surrounded by the inner head, which acts as a breakwater or dam…". I could not retrieve the full text of the opinion or its disposition, so I do not state how the court ultimately ruled.

1. The claim, decomposed

Consequence: on the face of it, RE9199's sole claim is the 1870 claim plus a recitation of a function (jet shielding) that is an inherent consequence of the 1870 structure. That is the pressure point for § 103.

2. The prior-art universe listed on this page (Google Patents "Similar Documents")

The page's own prior-art keywords are water, head, ejector, opening, pipe. Its "prior art date 1880-03-13" is merely the reissue filing date, not a true prior-art date. Applying § 102 as of the two candidate critical dates:

Not listed, but established this session: US 90,930 (Coll, June 8, 1869) — prior art under either scenario, since it predates both.

3. Proposed § 103 combinations

Combination A — the strongest: US 90,930 + US 110,205 (both Coll)

• What each teaches: 90,930 teaches the inner/outer head pair, a steam jet discharging inside the inner head, water inlets opening behind the jet's discharge end (i.e., the jet is already shielded from the inflow), and the option of discharging all water through the inner pipe. 110,205 claim 1 teaches the open rear end, the unobstructed opening around the injection pipe for passing solids, and the radial arms.
• Motivation: the two references are the patentee's own successive patents on the same steam siphon pump, and 90,930 itself points to the two heads "so that a jet … shall elevate water and discharge it through and from either or both the heads." One of ordinary skill optimizing a siphon pump for solids-laden water has every reason to take the already-claimed open-head/radial-arm structure of 110,205 and recognize the shielding function that the surrounding shell has produced since 1869. Under KSR, a known technique (positioning the jet inside a surrounding shell) used to improve a similar device in the same way is obvious.
• Why this defeats the reissue claim specifically: the sole added limitation (E3) is not new structure — it is the inherent operation of structure Coll claimed eight years earlier, and § 103 does not require the function to be separately recognized in the art.

Combination B — 90,930 or 110,205 in view of the debris-handling art (US205584A; US126729A)

• Theory: even if one insists the open base itself is the point of novelty, US205584A ("hydraulic dredging apparatus," July 2, 1878) and US126729A ("excavators," 1872) are directed to jet-driven handling of solids-laden water — the very problem the reissue names ("tan-bark is necessarily carried up with the water … apt to become clogged unless ample room be left").
• Motivation: the inventor's own stated problem is a clogging problem; enlarging/removing a restriction to pass solids is the paradigm of a predictable mechanical change with no change in function, and "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill … would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious" (KSR, 550 U.S. 398, 417 (2007)).
• Confidence caveat: I have only titles, dates, and the page's own classification data for US205584A and US126729A. I could not verify their disclosures. A footnote in a later patent does confirm the existence of a same-era dredging patent (US204584A, "Improvement in dredging-machines," 1878-06-04 — see the US20110271561A1 citation list), so the title/date pairings on this page should be treated as unverified until the full texts are pulled.

Combination C — the "shield the surrounding jet" secondary art (US134900A steam-condensers; US176913A tuyeres; US159872A parlor-fountains)

• Theory: condensers and tuyeres are the classic arts for confining/surrounding a steam or blast jet against a surrounding water or air body; parlor-fountains and hydrants show concentric-shell jet arrangements.
• Motivation: the reissue's only asserted new advantage is reduced jet condensation. Art teaching enclosures/jackets about a steam jet addresses precisely that recognized problem (In re Oetiker / KSR "design incentive" reasoning).
• Caveats: these are non-analogous-field candidates at the margins, and I cannot confirm their disclosures from this page; a § 103 rejection resting only on them would be weak, and a non-analogous art objection could be raised.

4. The date problem — why this analysis has a built-in failure mode

The entire listed universe is useless against a claim entitled to December 20, 1870 (or Coll's 1869 invention), because every third-party item either issued after 1870 or is Coll's own work. That produces two mutually exclusive outcomes:

• Scenario 1 — claim gets the 1870 date. The claim is anticipated/obvious only over 90,930 + 110,205-for-its-own-disclosure, and since 110,205 is the reissued patent, the § 103 challenge on this record largely collapses. Validity would then turn on § 251 grounds (same invention; no new matter) rather than § 103.
• Scenario 2 — the E3 "breakwater" limitation is new matter (which is what the Sheriff court's observation suggests was litigated), moving the effective date to March 13, 1880. Now US110205 becomes a § 102(b) statutory bar in its own right, and the 1872–1878 references become available. This is where Combinations A–C become viable. Note that even in Scenario 2 the reissue's own added advantage would be self-defeating: a limitation whose only support is new matter cannot carry an earlier date, and once the date moves, the patentee's own 1870 patent supplies the entire structure.

5. Secondary considerations / counterarguments

• Asserted unexpected result: preserved jet force / reduced condensation. This is the patentee's only objective-indicia candidate — but (i) it was characterized by the 1882 court as "neither mentioned nor hinted at" in the original, i.e., unrecorded at the time of the invention, and (ii) it is an inherent property of a shell that had surrounded the jet since 1869. Inherency cuts against, not for, non-obviousness.
• No evidence of long-felt need, failure of others, or commercial success appears in the materials available to me.
• The unclaimed nozzle-pieces m and n (Fig. 1 abutting, Fig. 2 spaced with an annular gap) are not in the claim and cannot save it; they are relevant only as evidence of the ordinary skill level.
• Teaching away: a weak argument could be made from 90,930's alternative of discharging through both heads, but 90,930 expressly teaches closing the annular space to discharge entirely through the inner pipe — the opposite of a teaching away.
• Field-of-invention challenge: Combination C is vulnerable to a non-analogous-art attack; Combinations A and B are not.

6. Bottom line

1. On the face of the claim, RE9199 is a textbook § 103 case: its sole claim is Coll's own 1870 claim 1 plus a functional recitation whose structural basis existed in Coll's 1869 patent No. 90,930. Under KSR, that is obvious.
2. But the prior art listed on this page cannot legally support that rejection if the claim is entitled to the 1870 date — the list contains no admissible third-party § 103 art for that date, and the patent being reissued cannot be prior art against itself.
3. The viable rejection therefore depends on the effective-date question, which is a § 251/new-matter question the Sheriff litigation opened. I could not retrieve the disposition of J. B. Sheriff & Son v. A. Fulton's Son & Co., 12 F. 136 (C.C.W.D. Pa. 1882), and I will not represent what it held.
4. Flagged uncertainty: (a) the actual disclosures of the seven pre-1880 third-party references (I have titles and dates only — the OCR/listing on this page is not the full text); (b) the filing dates of US228206A and USRE9380E, which determine whether they could be prior art at all; (c) this page's misleading "prior art date 1880-03-13," which is just the reissue filing date.