Appeal No. 1998-1805
Application No. 08/596,734
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 appellants’ disclosure. See, for example,
Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley Corp., 837 F.2d 1044, 1051, 5
USPQ2d 1434, 1438 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825
(1988).
The appellants’ invention relates to a device for
impregnating a moving web with a medium under pressure in a
manner that is an improvement over the prior art devices. As
manifested in claim 1, the invention comprises a chamber
defined on the top by the surface of a roller rotatable about
a horizontal axis and at the bottom by a trough. The chamber
has an inlet and an outlet, each of which is equipped with
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