Appeal No. 99-0214 Page 3
Application No. 08/372,126
the art. See, for example, In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425,
208 USPQ 871, 881 (CCPA 1981). In establishing a prima facie
case of obviousness, it is incumbent upon the examiner to
provide a reason why one of ordinary skill in the art would
have been led to modify a prior art reference or to combine
reference teachings to arrive at the claimed invention. See Ex
parte Clapp, 227 USPQ 972, 973 (Bd. Pat. App. & Int. 1985). To
this end, the requisite motivation must stem 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, 1052 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488
U.S. 825 (1988).
The appellant’s invention is directed to a seat for an
elastic sealing ring of the type used to seal around a rotating
shaft. The invention provides an annular groove into which a
portion of the elastic seal (a bead) is displaced when the seal
is pressed into position. From the description in the
specification, there appear to be five features of the
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