Appeal No. 98-0516
Application No. 08/400,328
in the art. See In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425, 208 USPQ
871, 881 (CCPA 1981). In establishing a prima facie case of
obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103, it is incumbent upon the
examiner to provide a reason why one of ordinary skill in the
art would have been led to modify a prior art reference or to
combine reference teachings to arrive at the claimed
invention. See Ex parte Clapp, 227 USPQ 972, 973 (Bd. Pat.
App. & Int. 1985). To this end, the requisite motivation must
stem from some teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior
art as a whole or from the knowledge generally available to
one of ordinary skill in the art and not from the appellant's
disclosure. See, for example, Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley
Corp., 837 F.2d 1044, 1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1052 (Fed. Cir.),
cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825 (1988). We consider first the
rejection of independent claim 2 as being unpatentable over
the combined teachings of Edelhoff and Tonsor. One objective
of the appellants’ invention is to provide a residential front
loading refuse collection vehicle that includes a liftable
container in which the height to which the container is lifted
is minimized in order to allow the vehicle to be safely
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