Appeal No. 1997-1075
Application No. 08/335,084
OPINION
The examiner’s statement of the rejection begins with the assertion that the reference “suggests
all of the limitations of claim 1, except that Wataya prefers to determine only one pressure signal per
cylinder.” (Final Rejection, page 2.) The rejection continues, “However, it would have been obvious
to take all of the cylinders into account in calculating or updating the load, resulting in measuring ‘values’
at each cylinder’s ‘angle’.” (Id.) The statement regarding what “would have been obvious” is merely
an unsupported conclusion. Moreover, it is not seen how the limitations of Claim 1 may be met by
measuring “values” at each cylinder’s “angle.” The statement of rejection continues with another
unsupported conclusion: “Moreover, please note that it would have been obvious to compute a
pressure by integrating differential pressures.” (Id.)
Beyond these initial difficulties in the rejection, in view of the arguments advanced by the
examiner in the Final Rejection, Answer, and Supplemental Answer, the main thrust of the rejection
may be summed up in two observations by the examiner. “Wataya shows that it was known in the art
prior to the Applicant’s [sic] invention [to] apply well-known laws of gas physics to enable the
measurement of engine load via a measurement of pressure.” (Final Rejection, page 4.)
[T]he reference itself suggests using just the set of equations relied upon by the
Applicant [sic] to achieve the desired result, differing only from the Applicant [sic] in
the manner in which the necessary data are collected, which is a matter within the
purview of the routineer in the art. (Final Rejection, page 6.)
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