Appeal No. 1999-0547 Page 5
Application No. 08/615,790
is, whether one of ordinary skill in the art would understand what is claimed when the claim
is read in the light of the specification. See Seattle Box Co. v. Industrial Crating &
Packing, Inc., 731 F.2d 818, 826, 221 USPQ 568, 573-74 (Fed. Cir. 1984). It is our view
that this requirement is met by the appellant’s specification. As stated in the paragraph
bridging pages 2 and 3,
[t]he [inventive] precision low-rate metering unit includes a vertical
elongate tubular hopper over the throat of a metering auger housing, with the
tubular hopper being substantially longer than a transverse dimension of the
throat. This tubular hopper discharges ingredients by gravity feed to the
metering auger. Because the tubular hopper does not have sloped walls, as
do existing circular, square or rectangular hoppers, very little of the weight of
the ingredient is supported by the hopper. Rather, nearly all of the weight of
the ingredient acts to force the ingredient downward, into the auger housing.
The tubular hopper thus acts to increase the quantity of material which is
reactive with (influenced by) the auger, thereby minimizing the effect of
upward perturbations caused by the auger’s rotation. This effectively
increases the weight of the column (head) of material positioned over the
auger and, as a result, upward forces on the column caused by the rotation
of the auger are thus rendered smaller in relation to the weight of the column.
By stabilizing the head pressure of material presented to the auger in this
manner, the accuracy of the auger’s metering is substantially improved.
In our opinion this explanation, as well as a consideration of the entirety of the specification
and drawings, makes it clear that the invention is grounded in the fact that the orientation of
the elongate tubular hoppers is such as to maximize the effect of the weight of the column
of ingredients held therein in motivating the material downward into the auger housing.
One of ordinary skill in the art thus would have understood that this is most effectively
accomplished by orienting the tubular hopper if not exactly vertically, “substantially”
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