Appeal No. 2001-0308 Page 6
Application No. 09/188,701
We note, at the outset, that the examiner has erred in
according no patentable weight to the recitation of a “Robertson
driver” in the preamble of claims 1-9 (answer, page 5). As
pointed out in appellant’s specification (pages 2 and 5),
“Robertson” screws and drivers are terms of art in the hardware
field which refer to screws having square holes in the heads
thereof and drivers having square tips. While it is true that
the claims in a patent application are to be given their broadest
reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification
during prosecution of a patent application (see, for example,
In re Zletz, 893 F.2d 319, 321, 13 USPQ2d 1320, 1322 (Fed. Cir.
1989)), it is also well settled that terms in a claim should be
construed as those skilled in the art would construe them (see
Specialty Composites v. Cabot Corp., 845 F.2d 981, 986, 6 USPQ2d
1601, 1604 (Fed. Cir. 1988) and In re Johnson, 558 F.2d 1008,
1016, 194 USPQ 187, 194 (CCPA 1977). Consistent with its
understanding in the art, we construe the term “Robertson driver”
as used in the claims on appeal as requiring a square tip.
None of the three references, Foshee, Sloan and Frazier,
discloses a "Robertson driver," as required by claims 1-5. In
particular, the tip of the mandrel 24 of Frazier's tool is quite
clearly not square. As for the wire working tool of Foshee and
the screw driver of Sloan, there is no clear indication that the
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