Appeal No. 1997-0233 Page 12
Application No. 08/266,558
According to the examiner (answer, pp. 4-5) with respect
to claim 1 (the sole independent claim on appeal), it would
have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art to
(1) mount Eweryd's right-angle configuration of end and cross-
sealers in a vertical plane in view of the teaching of Edwin;
(2) substitute pressure sealing rollers for Eweryd's heat
sealing rollers;
(3) include a slot chute as the forms are transported in the
vertical direction in view of the teachings of Walter; and
(4) include any number of redundant sealing rollers in view of
the teachings of Kalisiak.
As set forth above, teachings of references can be
combined only if there is some suggestion or incentive to do
so. Here,
the prior art contains none. The disparate teachings of the
applied prior art and the manner in which they are proposed to
be combined indicate, in our view, that the examiner has
engaged in an impermissible hindsight reconstruction of the
appellants' invention using the claims as a template to
selectively piece together isolated disclosures in the prior
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