The cushion line: Marion M. Cunningham and the seating program, 1937–1949

1937–1949 · CLASS 1 · A SOUTH BEND RESIDENCE, PRINTED AS PRINTED

The man: The works' second great product line after footwear — rubber seating — has one presiding patentee, and he is not a Mishawaka resident in any record the search read. Marion Morgan Cunningham is printed of South Bend on every grant he made to the Mishawaka company, and this section prints the residence as printed and counts the paper at Class 1, on the assignee line, which is where its Mishawaka claim lives. The identification is stated once and plainly: the cushion program was designed by a South Bend man and manufactured across the line in Mishawaka, and the record is richer for saying so than for blurring it.

The grants: The line opens in the brake trade: with Charles E. Bradley, No. 2,081,578, "Brake material and process connected therewith," of 25 May 1937, assigned jointly to the Bendix Aviation Corporation of South Bend and the Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company — asbestos-free friction material being rubber-compound work, and the two cities' great houses sharing one grant; a second Cunningham patent of the same season went to Bendix alone, its number carried as a named gap. Then the seating paper proper, all to the Mishawaka company: with Ernest Theodore Wise of Plymouth, Michigan, No. 2,314,608, "Cushion structure," filed 14 November 1940 and granted 23 March 1943; No. 2,314,318, "Stretching machine," of 16 March 1943 — the machinery that stretched cushion stock; No. 2,326,441, "Mattress covering," of 10 August 1943, to which the assignee later filed a disclaimer, noticed in the 1944 Index; No. 2,370,014, "Seat for farm implements and the like," of 20 February 1945 — the tractor-seat trade, the cushion line's farm market; No. 2,371,954, "Seat base or the like and making same," of 20 March 1945; No. 2,372,561, "Braced bed bottom or the like," of 27 March 1945; No. 2,406,589, "Molding apparatus," of 27 August 1946; and No. 2,454,912, "Springy adjustable seating structure," filed 30 October 1944 and granted 30 November 1948, a continuation-in-part that gathers the 1940 applications into the line's mature statement. Around him, the cushion bench at line size: Fred A. Sawyer of South Bend, No. 2,359,003, "Spring insert cushion," of September 1944, to the Mishawaka company; Perley C. Forbes of Mishawaka, in the parent channel, No. 2,540,779, "Resilient spring wire support," of 6 February 1951; and Jacob Goldstein of Mishawaka, No. 2,548,968, "Spring construction," of 17 April 1951, and No. 2,579,818, "Spring assembly," of 25 December 1951, both at residence strength — the seating idea, like the fastener before it, loose in the twin cities as well as on the works' paper.

Sources:

1. Index of Patents Issued, 1937, 1943–1946, 1948, and 1951 — the Cunningham and cushion-bench grants as itemized, residences as printed.
2. Google Patents records for U.S. 2,314,608, 2,371,954, and 2,454,912 — filing dates, the continuation-in-part chain, and Cunningham's full name, Marion Morgan Cunningham.