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1898–1919 · THE WOOLEN-NAME YEARS
The felt-boot paper the sweep opens with: The window opens on the felt trade the woolen company grew from. The 1898 patentee list carries Edward Roos assigning a "Wool boot" patent to the Beatty Felting Company of Mishawaka — the felt-boot house the banked Businesses record places in the city — and the 1902 list carries David A. Shaw, Edward Roos, and H. B. Pelton, all printed of Mishawaka, for "Forming bellows folds in felted boots or fabrics." Roos is a boundary case and is printed as one: the 1902 list prints him of Mishawaka, but the Canada Felting Company's records at Kitchener place "Edward Roos, South Bend, Indiana" in a patent-use agreement of 16 May 1903, and a Canadian patent for an improved shoe and boot heel followed in 1907; the two cities' claims on the felt-boot patentee stand side by side in this section, unresolved, because the records themselves print both. Henry B. Pelton stands in the 1900 list with a "Boot-tree" patent, printed of Mishawaka, at line size. The numbers of these earliest grants were not pinned in the records — the annual lists of those years print no numbers in the surviving text — and they are carried as the sweep's first named gap, with the settling source named in the closing entry.
The company's own name enters the lists: In 1907 the patentee list carries Frederick G. Eberhart, Jr., assigning a "Knit boot" patent to the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company. The name is the founding family's: Goodspeed's Memoirs place F. G. Eberhart, Jr. as the company's vice-president in the organization of 1886, brother of Adolphus Eberhart, the boot patent's co-inventor with Martin Beiger — so a generation after the 1887 patent that made the house, the company's own vice-president was still patenting knit-boot improvements into its own name. In 1911 and 1912 the lists carry August C. Timming — printed of South Bend — assigning two knitting-machine patents to the woolen company, Nos. 1,000,460 and 1,017,705: the machinery of the knit boot, patented by a South Bend machinist into the Mishawaka house, Class 1 with the residence printed as printed. The knitting line that begins here does not end here; it runs, as the later entries show, to a boot-from-knitted-tubular-stock patent of 1949.
Adna D. Warner: The first repeat patentee of the rubber side is Adna D. Warner of Mishawaka, and his paper runs ahead of the company's: three grants in 1910 with no assignee printed — No. 945,352, "Making rubber fabric"; No. 945,353, "Rubber tubing for tires, &c."; No. 953,077, "Rubber sole for boots and shoes" — then No. 989,089, "Rubber boot or shoe," in 1911, all carried at residence strength. By 1918 the same name assigns No. 1,276,293, "Last connection," to the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company itself: the resident rubber inventor of 1910 is the company's assignor of 1918, and the two records together draw the works' first inventive arc — a man patenting rubber manufacture from Mishawaka before the lists show the house taking rubber paper at all, then patenting into the house. A joint grant of December 1915, No. 1,163,050, "Vulcanizing rubber," names Warner with Raymond B. Price, and belongs to Price's arc below.
Raymond B. Price and the regenerating connection: The most prolific Mishawaka patentee of the war decade is a rubber chemist. Raymond B. Price's grants, as the annual lists print them, run: in 1915, No. 1,132,071, "Treatment of materials," no assignee printed; Nos. 1,152,834, 1,152,835, and 1,152,836, a same-day family on manufacturing and treating plastic materials and combined plastic-and-fabric articles; No. 1,162,396, "Antislipping and antiwearing material," assigned to the Rubber Regenerating Company; and, with Warner, No. 1,163,050 above, likewise to the Rubber Regenerating Company. In 1916, No. 1,184,015, "Treating rubber articles and product thereof," and No. 1,193,715, "Fabric for tires and the like," both to the Rubber Regenerating Company, with two further 1916 regenerating grants whose numbers the list's surviving text garbles, carried below as a named gap. In 1919 Price is back in the lists printed of Mishawaka: No. 1,295,594, "Vulcanizing rubber articles," and No. 1,295,595, "Apparatus for treating plastic articles," both of 25 February 1919, to the Rubber Regenerating Company; and No. 1,309,485, "Treating vulcanizable plastics," of 8 July 1919, assigned by mesne assignments to the Goodyear's Metallic Rubber Shoe Company of Naugatuck, Connecticut. The residences are printed exactly as the lists print them — Mishawaka in 1915, New York in two entries of late 1915 and 1916, Mishawaka again in 1919 — because the arc they draw is the finding: a rubber chemist working from Mishawaka for the reclaiming trade, drawn east to the industry's Naugatuck center, and patenting from Mishawaka again after the war. His paper is carried at Class 3, residence strength, in full: not one of his grants names the Mishawaka company as assignee, and this section does not pretend otherwise; what the record shows is that the chemistry the rubber age ran on was being written, in part, from this city.
The rest of the decade at line size: Johnathan R. Austin of Mishawaka, "Vulcanizing apparatus," 1906, residence strength, number unpinned. J. A. Wallace of Mishawaka, No. 878,581, "Lacing attachment for shoe-trees," 1908. James A. Mogle of Mishawaka, No. 1,134,889, "Shoemaker's jack," 1915. Demeter M. Severa of Mishawaka, No. 1,110,966, "Shoe-heel," 1914. Charles Futterknecht and J. A. Roth of Mishawaka, with A. T. Maenche of Waltham, Massachusetts, No. 995,245, "Sole-protector for boots and shoes," 1911. And in the design lists, Emmett A. Saunders of Mishawaka, Design No. 46,548, a "Boot," 1914 — the first appearance of a name the fastener campaign of 1929–1931 brings back, carried in that entry with the identification question stated in the open.
Sources:
- Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents, patentee lists for 1898, 1900, 1902, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1918, and 1919 — the grants as itemized in the entry, residences and assignees as printed there.
- Kitchener Public Library, Canada Felting Company fonds finding aid — the 16 May 1903 agreement with Edward Roos of South Bend, Indiana, and Roos's Canadian heel patent of 18 June 1907; the residence conflict is printed from the two records, not resolved between them.
- Goodspeed Brothers, Memoirs of St. Joseph County — F. G. Eberhart, Jr. as vice-president of the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company in the 1886 organization.