Inventors of Portage County: Close-to-home creations

Welcome to the third (and probably final) installment of Inventors of Portage County. Today we’ll focus on home conveniences, construction innovations and safety.

Outdoors:

Before the modern lawn mower was invented, people used scythes, sicles, sheep and scissors to keep their yards neat and trim. Basil Paul Strong of Atwater was having none of that. Born in 1901, he eventually became a draftsman for a furnace manufacturer. Strong worked for two decades as an automotive engineer, starting his own garage and making most of his own parts.

In 1949, Strong gained a patent for a three-horsepower grass cutting machine which weighed 140 pounds with the mower attached. Weight aside, local cemeteries signed on immediately. Strong died in 2001 and is buried in Atwater.

Focusing on farmers, Lucien B. Smith of Kent was awarded the first patent in the United States for barbed wire. His 1867 invention was the first wire technology capable of restraining cattle, and a vast improvement on Osage orange, a thorny bush that was time-consuming to transplant and grow. Osage orange farmers weren’t completely out of luck: they marketed the wood as fence posts for barbed wire.

Getting indoors:

Who doesn’t love a garage? Who doesn’t love an easily accessible garage even more? People everywhere have Richard D. Houk of Kent to thank for his invention: the Door and Control System. Houk filed his invention with the U.S. Patent Office in 1962, but didn’t actually gain the patent until Dec. 21, 1965.

We know it as the Genie Garage Door Opener. Houk may not have profited much from his innovation as the patent was assigned to the Consolidated Electronics Industries Corp. of Delaware.

Director of engineering at Morse Controls in 1974, Houk also built airplanes with four of his friends in his spare time. While working with Fred Gressard at Kent’s Fairway International Inc. in 1974, the pair also developed a product for manufacturing tires.

All the way indoors:

Until Harry Baxter of Garrettsville patented his invention, central heating existed, but there was no way to regulate heat from room to room.

Baxter’s 1950 invention, dubbed Control for Zone Heating Systems, used heating valves to reduce the amount of fuel needed to heat a building. Baxter’s invention reduced the number of motors used to drive the dampers and incorporated a valve and manifold device that would automatically actuate via independent thermostats.

The apparatus was compact and attached to water heating equipment. Suddenly, leaving a warm room did not mean walking into a cold one.

Born in 1895 in Brimfield, Max J. Kuss designed the very first room humidifier for a friend who was ill. That was in 1951, and the very next year, he developed a gadget for cooling and screening grain. Kuss, a farmer and machinist, worked for the McNeil Engineering Co. in Akron.

Cupolas are more than decorative features on roof peaks. Builders of yesteryear knew they also allowed for cross ventilation, letting hot air escape as cooler air entered from the doors and windows below. The problem was that roofs are pitched differently, so each cupola had to be custom built.

Enter Helger “Hal” L. Forsman of Kent. Born in 1916, he owned H&L Machinery of Kent and was a member of that city’s Masonic lodge. He gained a patent for an adjustable cupola in 1965. Mass production? Check.

Safety:

Portage County was home to two men who left the world a good deal safer than they found it.

Harry Clair Stockdale of Ravenna patented a fire hose nozzle in 1947. An improvement over previous attempts and inventions, it let firefighters control the form of the spray without removing their hands from the gun. It also, according to his 1940 patent application, had a valve trigger “to relieve the operator from pressure thereof while the valve is open,” yet allowed them, with the slightest pressure on the trigger, to release the valve from the locked position.

Suddenly, fires could be extinguished more quickly.

Stockdale seems to have specialized in droplets. He gained more than 20 patents while working for the Food Manufacturing Co. in Ravenna, including ones for a potato sprayer and an orchard sprayer. He is also credited with patents for “bagging rollable articles” such as potatoes (1936) and a cleaning device for strainers (1937).

Howard Hinsdale Clark of Kent was born in 1887 and worked as a brick mason for Wade Youngman contractors. His first patent for scaffolding for bricklayers, house painters and general building workers was awarded in December 1941. There was earlier scaffolding, but it was nailed and could come apart when loaded with weight. Clark’s more successful thought was to construct scaffolding that used a type of lap joint and bolts and screws.

Clark followed that invention with a safety scaffold pole in 1948. It held the cross poles for the scaffolds up and made them easier to adjust.

Thanks again to Barb Petroski, president of the Portage County chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, for providing this information, excepting the entry about Smith, which was provided by Kevin Gray, vice president and curator of the Portage County Historical Society.

If anyone knows of any other local inventors, please pass the information along and we just might publish your findings. The only rules are that the person must have some connection to Portage County, and that his or her name must appear on the patent.