Appeal No. 96-0733
Application 08/173,805
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, 1439 (Fed. Cir.),
cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825 (1988).
Applying this to the situation at hand, it is our conclusion
that the teachings of the references fail to establish the
required prima facie case of obviousness, essentially for the
reasons expressed by the appellants on pages 5 through 7 of their
Brief. We focus upon the lack in the applied prior art of any
teaching of utilizing a sealing gel in both of the electrical
connectors, as well as the failure in the prior art cited to
recognize, explicitly or implicitly, the concept of maintaining
the gel in place "before, during, and after connection," which is
a requirement of both of the independent claims. It is our
further view that no suggestion can be gleaned from the
references which would have motivated one of ordinary skill in
the art to make either of the components of the Chan device of
elastomeric material, for no purpose would have been served by
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007