Appeal No. 2005-0562
Application 09/824,276
Having reviewed and evaluated the applied Reynolds and Jones
patents, we find that we are in agreement with appellants’ that
the examiner’s position regarding the purported obviousness of
claims 11, 13 through 16 and 19 through 27 on appeal represents a
classic case of the examiner using impermissible hindsight
derived from appellants’ own disclosure in an attempt to
reconstruct appellants’ claimed subject matter from disparate
teachings and broad concepts purported to be present in the
applied prior art references. In our view, there is no
motivation or suggestion in the patents to Reynolds and Jones
which would have reasonably led one of ordinary skill in the art
to modify the manual transmission of Reynolds in the manner urged
by the examiner so as to result in appellants’ claimed subject
matter.
Like appellants (reply brief, page 2), we first note that
the plunger member (144) of Reynolds identified by the examiner
as being “a switch 144 to provide an indication to a splitter
mechanism of when said interlock is in a predetermined position”
(final rejection, page 3), is described in the Reynolds patent
(col. 7, lines 13-38) as being a spring biased plunger member
provided to give the operator of the transmission an indication
7
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