Appeal No. 96-0354 Page 6
Application No. 08/099,066
ordinary skill in the art that would have led that individual
to combine the relevant teachings of the references to arrive
at the claimed invention. See In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071,
1074, 5 USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988). Rejections based
on
§ 103 must rest on a factual basis with these facts being
interpreted without hindsight reconstruction of the invention
from the prior art. The examiner may not, because of doubt
that the invention is patentable, resort to speculation,
unfounded assumption or hindsight reconstruction to supply
deficiencies in the factual basis for the rejection. See In
re Warner, 379 F.2d 1011, 1017, 154 USPQ 173, 177 (CCPA 1967),
cert. denied, 389 U.S. 1057 (1968).
With this as background, we turn to the rejection of the
independent claims on appeal (i.e., claims 1 and 8).
The examiner determined (answer, p. 3) that
Peterson teaches a twin wire former wherein sharp edges
are defined by use of on [sic, one] wire having
impermeable bands 30. Peterson on col. 1 lines 13-25 and
col. 4 lines 10-15 teaches that separating the edges by a
thin jet of water is known, but that the band 30 is an
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