Appeal No. 95-4369
Application 08/117,242
The test for obviousness is not whether the features of a
secondary reference may be bodily incorporated into the structure
of the primary reference, nor is it that the claimed invention
must be expressly suggested in any one or all of the references.
Keller, 642 F.2d at 425, 208 USPQ at 881. As already discussed,
the test is what the combined teachings of the references would
have suggested to those of ordinary skill in the art. Here, the
collective teachings of Jowitt, Bowen, and Griffin would have
made up for the deficiencies of only Jowitt and Bowen insofar as
remotely locating the plasma source from the detector is
concerned. One with ordinary skill in the art would have known
that another way to operate Jowitt’s inductively coupled plasma
source and spectrometer is to have them connected through a fiber
optic cable. The reasons for doing so need not be breath-taking
or lead to an impressive or fantastic result. The mere knowledge
that an alternative exists is a sufficient lead to obviousness.
For the foregoing reasons, we sustain the rejection of
claims 46, 48, 54, 56, 65, 71-72 and 81 as being unpatentable
over Jowitt, Bowen and Griffin.
Claim 52 further recites a "seal means attached to the
housing [in the sampling probe] proximate to said opening for
engagement with the surface of the material to be sampled for
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