Appeal No. 2001-0193 Page 4
Application No. 09/182,138
(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, 1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1439 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825
(1988).
Ahlgren moves the rotating sign members by means of an electric motor
driving a gear, which can be of various designs, for example, intermittent or slow motion
(column 2, line 27 et seq.).
Pessina is concerned with a drive mechanism for operating a rotating drum of an
automatic sheet feeder in such a fashion that grippers mounted on the drum can effectively
grasp a single sheet. Pessina accomplishes this by providing a drive mechanism that
causes the drum to rotate at a minimum speed during the sheet-gripping phase and then
accelerate to the maximum speed until the machine again reaches the next sheet-gripping
phase, “without any abrupt accelerations or decelerations” (column 2, lines 47 and 48).
The drive means can be in the form of a cam and follower drive system, as shown in the
drawings, or “[t]he same effect could be also obtained by means of elliptic gears” (column
2, lines 23-30). The cam and follower system appears to operate in the same manner as
that which is recited in the appellants’ claim 1.
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