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Inventor of the Kunkle lock-up pop safety valve; manufacturer
On the record
Erastus Boise Kunkle learned the machinist's trade in Pennsylvania, worked at Alliance, Ohio, from 1862, and came to Fort Wayne in 1864, spending eleven years in the locomotive department of the Pennsylvania Railroad shops. Experimenting in his spare time, he invented and patented the Kunkle lock-up pop safety valve and began manufacturing it in January 1876, adding further patented devices; with his brother-in-law W. D. Bostick he built the firm into one of the substantial industrial enterprises of Fort Wayne, and it continued under Bostick and Kunkle's widow after his death. He served on the city's board of waterworks commissioners and as a deacon and trustee of the English Lutheran church. He married Louisa E. Bostick on 22 October 1868.
Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History, Vol. II (1917), biographical sketch and portrait, read first-hand. No second source reached for this profile.