Appeal No. 2000-0075
Application 08/969,941
indeterminate.
Turning to the examiner's rejections of the appealed
claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103, we emphasis again that the
claims on appeal contain language which renders the subject
matter thereof indefinite. Accordingly, we find that it is
not reasonably possible to apply the prior art relied upon by
the examiner to these claims in deciding the question of
obviousness under § 103 without resorting to considerable
speculation and conjecture as to the meaning of the questioned
limitation in the last clause of claims 1 and 54, particularly
since appellants’ specification provides no guidance as to
what the additional “means utilizing the force. . .” is
intended to be as far as urging a contact portion of “said
third means” into sealing engagement with the canister during
charging of the gas and closing of the gas filling opening.
This being the case, we are constrained to reverse the
examiner's rejections of the appealed claims in light of the
holding in In re Steele, 305 F.2d 859, 862, 134 USPQ 292, 295
(CCPA 1962). We hasten to add that this reversal of the
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