Appeal No. 2004-2173
Application No. 09/970353
examiner has not made out a prima facie case of obviousness.
More particularly, we fail to find any teaching or suggestion in
the applied patents which would have led one of ordinary skill in
the art to replace the clamps (11, 12) used in Bahder's splice
connector to form a seal between the insulating sleeve (10) and
insulation shields (8) and (9) of the cable segments therein,
with a weld. While it may be true that Crawley provides an
indication (column 17, lines 56+) that "adhesive, solder, a weld,
a clamp,. . . [or] a heat shrink sleeve" may be used to form an
attachment (239) between the container (238) and coatings (233,
234) of the fiber optic cable segments schematically shown in
Figure 23 of that patent, we see no basis except hindsight fueled
by speculation and conjecture for the examiner's conclusion that
it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at
the time of appellants' invention to use a weld in place of the
clamps (11, 12) in the particular splice coupling disclosed in
Bahder. Moreover, we find no reasonable basis to conclude that
the insulating sleeve (10) and insulation shields (8) and (9) of
the cable segments of Bahder are even capable of being welded
together to form a seal as needed in Bahder's splice coupling.
Nor do we find any basis for the examiner's assertion that
appellants' "thermal insulator" set forth in claims 1 and 6 on
66
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