Appeal No. 1999-0930
Application 08/410,931
liquid product in the hollow portion (column 4, lines 35
through 39) and the liquid product “passes axially along the
outer surface of the tuft” (column 8, lines 3 through 8).
Like the examiner, we certainly appreciate the relevance
of the Gueret and Buehrer teachings, in particular, to the
claimed invention. Nevertheless, this panel of the board
concludes that, absent hindsight, the entirety of the evidence
of obviousness relied upon, by itself, simply would not have
been suggestive of altering the applicator device of Gueret to
yield the subject matter of independent claims 1, 17, and 12.
Each of these specified claims requires an applicator having a
reservoir “spaced from” a distal end of a stem, with a passage
in the stem communicating between the reservoir and the distal
end, and with the passage defining a path for flow between the
distal end and the reservoir externally of the body portion of
a tip inserted in the passage. The overall applicator of
Gueret is not configured with a reservoir spaced from the
distal end of stem 9. Instead, as can readily be discerned
from a review of Fig. 1 of Gueret, the hollow portion of the
9
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