The lone inventors and the empty chairs: the record at its true size

1838–2026 · WHAT THE PATENT FILES DO NOT HOLD FOR THIS CITY

The honest close: Every other entry in this section is a firm or a famous name, and the discipline of the leg requires a closing entry for the rest of the city's inventive population — printed at the size the record gives it. Mishawaka's documented lone inventors are, on the patent faces themselves, the partners the firms absorbed: George Philion, co-inventor of the split pulley, whose inventive life survives inside the Dodge patent and the 1880 incorporation and nowhere else in the record reached; Miles D. Williams, co-inventor of the wagon jack, who survives nowhere else at all. Beyond them, the record reached for this section holds no Mishawaka Frank Worden — no lone patentee whose single patent built a hometown firm of his own name — and the searches that would have found one are the same patent indexes that produced every grant printed above. The negative results belong in the text. No letters patent in the name of a Ball Band officer was located beyond the boot patent of 1887; the rubber works' inventive output ran through two channels — its own men's patents, which the patent pass of this record prints name by name, and the parent company's laboratories, an hour's geography the Ball Band file prints plainly. No patent in the name of E. A. Saunders, the borrowed Goodyear superintendent who made the plant a rubber works, was located in the record reached. The 1889 manufacturers' roster the Businesses section carries — the felting, furniture, organ, and wagon shops — left no patent paper in the record reached, at the directory strength that file gives them. The sum of the section, stated plainly: Mishawaka's inventive record is a record of partnerships and plants — two-man patents, a founder's machine, a boot, a wheel — and of two native sons whose inventions belong, by the geography this section prints without flinching, to Tennessee and California. It is a thinner file than South Bend's, and it is the whole of what the patent record gives this city. Thin, here, is a finding, not an apology.

Sources:

1. The patent documents printed in this section — Nos. 208,940, 260,462, 367,333, 93,472, 2,077,637 and its family, 2,934,989, 2,830,484, and 3,447,413, via the Patent Office images and the official lists.
2. Negative searches, stated in the text: no further patent in the name of a Ball Band officer beyond No. 367,333, none in the name of E. A. Saunders, and none for the 1889 roster's shops, was located in the patent indexes searched for this section.
3. The Businesses and Ball Band sections of this history (banked) — Philion's place in the 1880 incorporation; Saunders's superintendency and course; the 1889 manufacturers' roster at directory size.