South Bend Inventors and Inventions: The Patent Record

Inventors & Inventions · The Patent Record

South Bend's inventive record is unusually legible, because so much of it was written down in the one record that cannot be puffed: the letters patent themselves, with their numbers, their filing dates, and the residences of the men who signed them. This section works from that record. It holds the city's one indisputable giant of invention — James Oliver and the chilled plow, patented from this ground in 1857 — and the long second rank the patent files carry behind him: a clover huller that fought its way to the Supreme Court, a starter drive patented from Chicago by the man who later made this city his seat, a brake system whose heart was drawn by a South Bend engineer named Adiel Dodge, a lathe works whose famous gearbox turns out to be another man's patent under license, a fishing-tackle firm whose best-known lure was a Benton Harbor patent bought in, and a waterproof diaper cover invented in Connecticut by a woman who learned machinery in her father's South Bend lathe plant. Where the record gives a patent number, the number is printed. Where an innovation is documented but no patent for it was reached, the entry says so in plain words. Where a famous local claim fails — a patented freezing process for watches, an electric starter invented whole — the claim is printed with the record that corrects it.