Appeal No. 2005-2418
Application 09/932,639
we do not agree with appellant’s arguments at pages 7 through 9
of the Brief as to claim 25.
Even if we were to agree with appellant’s views that
the recitation at the end of claim 25 that the optical wavelength
bands are transmitted through a fiber optic line singly to mean
without the company of others or individually, we find our-
selves in agreement with the examiner’s observations at the top
of page 11 of the Answer that the optical switches 20 figures 2
and 4 of Endo may be manually operated one at a time or two at
a time or three at a time as illustrated among these figures.
The disclosure of Endo’s embodiments in figures 2 and 4 at
columns 3 through 5 of this patent indicates the individual
actuability of the manual switches 3 by the user and, contrary to
the arguments presented at page 8 of the Brief, does not require
the actuation of these switches simultaneously even though the
capability exists for this to happen. The “multiple control
modules” clause states that “one of multiple optical wavelength
bands transmitted through the fiber optic line”, yet this
language does not require that these multiple optical wavelength
bands be transmitted at the same time or individually. It is
thus seen from a study of the embodiments in figures 2 and 4 of
4
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