Appeal No. 2002-1443 Page 5
Application No. 09/251,833
would have found it obvious to modify the Adamson appliance by replacing the
disclosed heating element with a spaced non-contact infrared heating element in view
of the teachings of Person “to provide uniform heating across the lower platen without
having hot spots,” and providing the infrared heating element with the claimed
wavelength in view of Payne (Paper No. 14, pages 2 and 3). The appellant argues in
rebuttal that there is no suggestion or motivation in the applied references to modify
Adamson in the manner proposed by the examiner, and that even if such modifications
were made, the resulting appliance would not meet the claim requirement of a
“substantially uniformly heated” lower platen (Brief, pages 6 and 7).
Adamson discloses in Figure 5 a cooking appliance comprising a housing, a
lower platen mounted to the housing, and an upper platen mounted on a positioning
mechanism and movable between a cooking position and a non-cooking position with
respect to the lower platen. Adamson states that the lower platen “is heated by heaters
which may be of the electrical or gas type, if desired” (column 4, lines 3 and 4). The
heaters in the embodiment of Figure 5 are described as being cast aluminum heating
units (18a-18c) heated by electrical heating elements (19a-19c), with the heating
elements being shown as embedded in the heating units. The heating units in Figure 5
are “attached as by bolts to the underside of the lower cooking platen” (column 4, lines
6 and 7). As it turns out, no other embodiments are shown or described in the
reference.
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