Appeal No. 2004-0893
Application No. 09/124,310 Page 13
§ 103(a) Rejection of claims 1-28
In the final rejection presented by the examiner, the
examiner relies on the combined teachings of La Salmonie, Itoh
and DeVolpi in asserting the obviousness of the claimed device.
Like appellants, La Salmonie is directed to a control unit for
use in controlling an industrial truck and for mounting in the
towbar head thereof. La Salmonie discloses the use of a
plurality of control elements (see, e.g., push button (7, fig. 2)
and butterflies (4) and (5) of drawing figure 1 of La Salmonie).
La Salmonie further discloses the use of a plurality of signal
generators (microswitches 14-19, fig. 5) located on a circuit
board (11, fig. 5). However, as the examiner recognizes, La
Salmonie does not disclose the use of a membrane constructed as
claimed by appellants. Relying on the teachings of Itoh in
combination with La Salmonie, the examiner asserts that “[i]t
would have been obvious to modify La Salmonie, by replacing the
micro switches with membrane switches as taught by Itoh, to
provide a switch which minimizes the space required to arrange a
plurality of switches and to provide switches having a small
thickness (Itoh col. 1, lines 53-60).”
A significant difficulty we have with the examiner’s
proposed modification of La Salmonie is that the examiner has not
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