Appeal No. 1998-0484 Page 5
Application No. 08/675465
See In re Bell, 991 F.2d 781, 783, 26 USPQ2d 1529, 1531 (Fed. Cir. 1993). 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).
It is our opinion that the examiner has not met these burdens, and we therefore will
not sustain the rejection. Our rationale for arriving at this conclusion follows.
In column 1, Kirkman explains that in apparatus which produce multiple gobs of
glass, control of the flow of the center streams has presented a problem due to the fact that
they are hotter than the outer streams, as has maintaining uniformity of flow. The
improvements offered in the Kirkman invention to overcome these problems include
providing a relatively small circular inlet opening at the top of the spout bowl and an
elongated outlet opening at the bottom. As clearly is shown in Figures 1 and 6, the oblong
outlet opening does not fall “within” the periphery of the circular inlet opening, but extends
beyond, with portions of the interior walls diverging from inlet to outlet.
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