Appeal No. 1998-3060 Page 7
Application No. 08/703,932
In this case, the evidence only establishes that it would
have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a
person having ordinary skill in the art to have modified the
glass bending systems of Nitschke '141, Frank and Nitschke
'437 by providing their respective vacuum system with a vacuum
reservoir as suggested by Kulig in order to provide a level of
vacuum up to about 10 inches water column (0.0242 atmospheres
of vacuum).
All the claims under appeal require that the recited
apparatus includes a vacuum system that provides a vacuum
impulse of at least 0.1 atmospheres of vacuum. In our view 2
from the evidence before us in this appeal, this limitation
would not have been obvious at the time the invention was made
to a person having ordinary skill in the art for the following
reasons. First, the evidence before us establishes that the
level of vacuum known in this art was up to about 0.0242
2A patent applicant is free to recite features of an
apparatus either structurally or functionally. See In re
Swinehart, 439 F.2d 210, 212, 169 USPQ 226, 228 (CCPA 1971)
([T]here is nothing intrinsically wrong with [defining
something by what it does rather than what it is] in drafting
patent claims).
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