Appeal No. 2003-0400 Page 4
Application No. 09/272,772
obviousness, it is incumbent upon the examiner to provide a reason why one of
ordinary skill in the art would have been led to modify a prior art reference or to
combine reference teachings to arrive at the claimed invention. See Ex parte Clapp,
227 USPQ 972, 973 (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 appellant's 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).
Schmidt discloses a vehicle anti-lock braking arrangement which comprises two
systems like that shown in Figure 1, with each system connected between diagonally
oriented front and rear brakes (column 3, lines 1-9). The system shown in Figure 1
utilizes a pair of return feed pumps 28 and 30, with pump 28 operating in the braking
circuit to brake 16 of the right rear wheel and pump 30 on the braking circuit to brake 18
of the left front wheel (column 3, lines 14-21). Schmidt states that “[t]he two pumps of a
brake circuit may for instance be embodied like the pumps is [sic] disclosed in U.S.
Patent No. 4,875,741 . . . or by a stepped piston pump, known per se” (column 1, lines
41-46). The examiner interprets this statement to mean that the two pumps disclosed
in each brake circuit can, alternatively, by replaced by a single stepped piston pump
(Answer, sentence bridging pages 3 and 4), and then utilizes this conclusion as
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