Appeal No. 1998-0294 Application No. 08/318,726 in 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 appellants’ invention relates to a humidifier and to a hollow yarn body. The objectives of the invention are to provide a humidifier that can quickly humidify a large volume of air, can be controlled with precision, is compact, and utilizes a hollow yarn body of high durability. In furtherance of these goals, the invention is manifested in 4Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007