Appeal No. 1998-2590
Application No. 08/255,083
the cable act in a continuously changing direction . . . , ”
as required in appellant’s independent claim 1 on appeal and
the claims which depend therefrom.
Like appellant, we observe that none of the three
references applied by the examiner teaches or suggests a
specifically shaped insulation for a conductor as in
appellant’s application which provides an outer periphery of
the cable that acts in the manner required in the claims on
appeal to reduce the tendency of the cable to undergo aeolian
and galloping vibrations. Indeed, a review of the applied
references reveals that none of these patents even teaches or
suggests an insulation layer forming the outer periphery of an
overhead electrical cable. In our view, the examiner has used
impermissible hindsight derived from appellant’s own teachings
in attempting to combine the circular electric power cable of
Yamamoto with the uninsulated conductors of Powers and Shealy
in an effort to arrive at appellant’s claimed vibration
resistant electrical cable. In this regard, we note that, as
our court of review indicated in In re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260,
1266 n.15, 23 USPQ2d 1780, 1783-84 n.15 (Fed. Cir. 1992), it
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