Appeal No. 2006-1308
Application No. 10/269,974
While Lamb does discuss providing “a screen which may be located at any
desired position in a duct or in a wall opening” (p. 1, col. 1, ll. 47-49), it is clear
from the above that Lamb is concerned with preventing the spread of fire from one
part of a building structure to another. One skilled in the art would not have
inferred from Lamb any hint of a concern about stopping the spread of fire from
outside the building to inside the building or vice-versa and, thus, would not have
found suggestion to provide a fire screen of the type disclosed by Lamb in an
external wall of a building.
Relying on the disclosure of Lamb quoted above with regard to the use of a
fire screen in a fire wall to permit the ventilation of spaces or compartments such
as paint spray rooms, the examiner determines that “it is reasonable to interpret the
vented walls of the paint spray room disclosed by Lamb as ‘external walls of a
building’” since contaminated air from paint spray rooms is typically vented from
the internal space of the room through the walls of the room and to the open air
rather than into an adjacent room (answer, p. 6). The examiner’s determination is
not supported by Lamb. First, Lamb describes the wall in which the screen 24 is
mounted as a “fire wall 25.” A fire wall is typically understood to be “a fire proof
wall to prevent the spread of fire, as from one room or compartment to the next”
(Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition (Simon & Schuster,
Inc. 1984)). Consistent with the teachings of Lamb, one skilled in the art would
understand the “fire wall” referred to by Lamb to be a fire proof internal wall for
prevention of the spread of fire from one part of a building to another, as between a
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