Appeal No. 98-0054
Application No. 08/438,888
The examiner’s § 103 rejections of the appealed
claims are untenable. It is well settled that there must
be some teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior
art that would have led one of ordinary skill in the art
to combine the relevant reference teachings in a manner
to arrive at the claimed invention. See Ashland Oil, Inc.
v. Delta Resins & Refractories, Inc., 776 F.2d 281, 297,
227 USPQ 657, 667 (Fed. Cir. 1985).
In the present case, Stumpf ‘984 discloses a unitary
mattress having a plurality of strings of pocketed coil
springs arranged to define a unitary mattress core. This
reference, however, lacks a teaching of providing the
coil springs in the same unitary core with different
compressive strengths.
The Forwood reference, on the other hand, does
recognize the desirability of providing coil springs in a
mattress assembly with different degrees of stiffness on
opposite sides of an imaginary line medially intersecting
the mattress assembly. In order to achieve this
objective, however, Forwood teaches the art to employ two
separate mattress cores, each having a different
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