Appeal No. 96-0918
Application 08/059,017
could be modified as proposed by the examiner does not make
such modifications obvious unless the prior art suggests the
desirability of doing so. In re Gordon, 733 F.2d 900, 902,
221 USPQ 1125, 1127 (Fed. Cir. 1984). The brushes of Wechsler
and Larson would be viewed by one of ordinary skill in the art
as differing fundamentally in the way they clean. The
scraping action of Larson’s bristles is predicated on the
ability of the bristles to penetrate into and move along the
sides of the individual hair filaments such that the hair
filaments pass between adjacent bristles (page 1, left column,
lines 12-16; page 2, left column, lines 51-58). In contrast,
one of ordinary skill in the art would view the brush of
Wechsler as being designed to merely remove mud spatters from
the surface of clothing. The artisan would reasonably infer
as much from Wechsler’s disclosure because the brush thereof
is said to be for removing hardened or dried mud splashes
(page 1, lines 22-28) or light dust (page 3, lines 33-34) from
clothing, and because of the lack of any disclosure, teaching,
or suggestion in Wechsler that the bristles should penetrate
to any significant extent into the fibers of the clothing in
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