Appeal No. 2003-1178 Page 6
Application No. 09/218,990
We reach the same result, for the same reason, in the case of the rejection of
claims 21 and 22, for the addition of Schuerch fails to overcome the deficiency in
Bruyneel.
Remand To The Examiner
Among the references brought to the attention of the Patent and Trademark
Office by the appellants in one of their information disclosure submissions (Paper No.
6) is PCT publication WO 98/29327, published on July 9, 1998, a copy of which is
attached hereto. Figures 3-5 of this publication show tension members for providing
lifting force to a car of an elevator system, which comprise a plurality of discrete cords
arranged in side-by-side relationship and enveloped in a coating layer, with the aspect
ratio being greater than one. The publication states that steel hoisting ropes had been
used in the past, but that they presented problems and were replaced by ropes formed
of synthetic fibers (page 2). There follows an explanation of the shortcomings of the
synthetic ropes, which included the fact that they had a large bending radius and
therefore required sheaves of large diameter (page 3), but that the invention disclosed
in the publication eliminated these drawbacks by making the rope “very thin, which
means that it has a small bending diameter,” the “thin and flat hoisting rope allows the
use of a traction sleeve that is considerably smaller in diameter,” and the flat shape of
the rope “distributes the pressure imposed by the rope of the traction sheave” (page 4).
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