The seamless knitted boot: Beiger and Eberhart, and the patent of 26 July 1887

1886–1887 · THE BOOT THAT MADE BALL BAND

The patent: The woolen side of the city's record holds one great patent, and this one the popular telling has always shared. Letters Patent No. 367,333, "Seamless Knitted Boot or Shoe," was applied for on 26 February 1887 and granted on 26 July 1887 to Martin V. Beiger and Adolphus Eberhart, "of Mishawaka, in St. Joseph county in the State of Indiana." The specification opens on the point that made the product: "Our invention relates to that class of boots which are made from a seamless fabric." A knitted wool boot with no seam to chafe and no woven cloth to bag, knit to hold the shape of the leg and foot — the marker on the ground states the earned claim in the form this section adopts: the 1886 all-knit boot was "the first wool boot to hold its shape without shrinking or stretching." The dating needs one careful sentence. The invention is 1886 on every carrier — Goodspeed's Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of 1893 and Milton Bock's 1937 Tribune account alike — because 1886 is the year of the thing itself and of the reorganization it caused, when the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company was organized at $200,000 of capital, eight times the 1874 figure, with Beiger president and Eberhart superintendent; the letters patent that protected it issued the following summer, and the two dates are printed together rather than merged. The partners' own valuation of the paper survives in figures: Goodspeed records that Eberhart sold a half interest in the boot patent to the company for $100,000 — the single largest documented transaction of the company's woolen era, and the measure of what the partners believed the boot was worth. What the boot built — the red ball, the rubber turn of 1897–98, the forty-three acres and the nine thousand wartime workers — is the Ball Band file's whole story. What belongs here is the document at the root of it: a two-man Mishawaka patent for a seamless knitted boot, filed by the mill's president and its organizing superintendent, that carried a river mill-town's name onto the feet of the country.

Sources:

1. United States Patent Office, Letters Patent No. 367,333, "Seamless Knitted Boot or Shoe," application filed 26 February 1887, patented 26 July 1887 — the patent document itself, via the Patent Office images: Martin V. Beiger and Adolphus Eberhart of Mishawaka, Indiana; the specification's "that class of boots which are made from a seamless fabric."
2. Goodspeed Brothers, Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs (1893), biographies of Adolphus Eberhart and M. V. Beiger, as carried in the Ball Band file — the 1886 organization at $200,000 capital and its officer roster; Eberhart's sale of a half interest in the patent to the company for $100,000; Beiger credited with the boot's conception and Eberhart as co-inventor.
3. Ball-Band Factory historical marker (Historical Marker Database) — the 1886 all-knit boot as the first wool boot to hold its shape without shrinking or stretching, printed as the marker's claim.
4. Milton Bock, South Bend Tribune (1937), as carried in the Ball Band file — the invention of 1886.