9 Incredible Inventors You'll Want to Meet

patent for a toy truck design. And the thing is, he was just six years old when he got this, and he built this toy truck using shoe boxes and bottle caps and some nails. But here's the clever thing about it. Actually he could transform it from a flatbed truck to a dump truck just by moving some of the axles. And so his dad, who happened to be a patent attorney, sees this and he realizes this is patentable. So of course Robert was actually so young that he

couldn't even write his name at the time. So if you look back at the patent application, he just signed it with an X. That's pretty cute that, like, he can invent a truck but he can't sign his name. But did he ever make money off it? No, he didn't, and you know, they just looked at it is something that was more fun and fun to get the patent. But actually he did get some publicity out of it. And then you know, Marketers realized that the shoebox he'd used had been built using a CAD shoebox and so

we got a free pair of kids from it. So I'm not a bad prize for this. But anyway, that's just the first of nine stories of inventions that we've got for you today. So let's dig in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Man Guesh Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof booth surrounded by I'd say it's at least what do you think somewhere around there? It's hard to say, but it's a lot

of bags of shelled peanuts. I mean, this guy, I haven't seen him this inspired by something he's been reading in a long time, but he's been reading George Washington Carver's biography. I think it's actually his second go of the biography. It's been fun to watch him just so inspired. Well, anyway, that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Now me go, I know one of your goals as a kid was to be an inventor as well, Is that right? Yeah? I mean I had I think four goals as a kid,

and this was when I was super young. But I wanted to be an inventor, a composer, a cartoonist, and a writer. And obviously, you know, a lot of those things didn't pan out. But I used to watch doctor pretty good at most of those things. I used to watch Dr Fat on TV, who like had invented that wacky wall walker, and he'd celebrate kid inventors every week. And in first grade I came up with this idea for like a glow in the dark patch that you could attach to the zipper of a ten, so like

you could find it easily at night. And I actually think that idea came out of necessity when I was camping and had to use the bathroom badly. But I would just go around inventing cute things like that all the time. I mean, that's a great idea, And the thing is, honestly, I don't think we've ever owned a tent that had a glow in the dark zipper on it. So that's there's still room for this. And you know what, it's also weird. I haven't thought about those wall walkers

until you just said that. Those things were so much fun.

We played with those all the time, all right. Well, one of the reasons we wanted to do an episode on Amateur Inventors was because inventions it kind of feel like one of those truly American things, like, you know, everybody gets their fifteen seconds of fame, everybody's got a novel in them, and everybody probably has a brilliant idea for some invention, and whether or not they make money off these inventions, we thought it'd be fun to celebrate

some of that, roll up your sleeves and build something in genuity. So go I kicked this off with Robert W. Patch's toy truck. And you know I have to say the full name. I can't just say Robert or Patch. I say Robert W. Patches, Old Patch, Old Patchy. Well, anyway, where do you want to go from there? So I actually want to talk about a story I heard from our old pal Ethan treks and this is forever ago. But this is about Frank Dorset, who is the genius

behind Ego Frozen Waffles. And he started a food company from his parents basement, which I do want to point out is a good sign note to parents about why not to kick your adult kids out of your basement because it could pan out. But Ego actually started as a mayonnaise company, which is why it was called Ego.

You know, I never put that together. But the mayo spread was actually so popular that Dorset and his brothers ended up with this extra cash and they decided to use it to make a waffle batter that they could sell to like local chains. And when they realized the market was limited in the region, Dorst a breakd up this merry go round motor and he built this giant thirty foot whirling machine that you could pour batter into and it would prepare a foul in waffles for freezing

in an hour. I mean, it's remarkable. Yeah. And and so the frozen waffles were originally called Froffles. I love that name so much, A great name. I honestly hope there's a documentary about Frank because he sounds like such a wonderful man like according to his obituary, and I think I saw in the Seattle Times he had no hobbies. He just invented tons of things, like he made this some squeegee for cement, and this commercial potato peeler which you could use to make potato chips, but it basically

made it unnecessary to peel potatoes by hand anymore. And the rest of the time he just spent being a great husband and father. But apparently he did have this one white whale that he never conquered, like all his life. He tried to make a delicious frozen pancake, but it just never happened. Oh man, But that is a great story. A thousand waffles in an hour, just coming up with this motor idea that is really impressive. And I did

not know that about the mayonnaise company. All right, well, I'm gonna stick with that food theme and talk about the invention of one of the greatest snacks of all time. Ango. I'm talking about none other than the cheese puff. And I found this story from the Tedium newsletter. And you know, just like Alexander Fleming and penicillin, cheese puffs were really more of a discovery than an invention. So I love your idea of comparing cheese puffs and penicillan, like those

things have equal way in human history. But yeah, yeah, I mean, penicillin is more important than you realize. It's it's as important as the cheese puff, I think. But it happened that this little company in Beloit, Wisconsin, where they made animal feed, and so basically the company ran all their food through this industrial grinder to make the food softer for the cows so they could chew it more easily, and then they would be able to eke out every last bit of corn that they were using.

And what came out the other end were these thin little flakes. So the grinder worked pretty well, but there were some kinks and the machine would get stuck, and so they were looking for ways to make the process a little bit smoother. So what they did was, you know, sometimes the operators would moisten the corn before it went through, but as this one employee, Edward Wilson, noticed, when the moist corn hit the heat of the machine, it actually

puffed up on the other side without any of the kernels. Now, since this was going to animals, most people just went back to not moistening the corn and running it on through. But Wilson decided to try something out. He took some of the puff corn home, he seasoned it, and then he tried it out to see how it tasted. And then the process he created what he called corn curls. And these were the predecessor to so many things. We've got cheese wizz, cheese doodles, cheetos. I'm just getting so

hungry thinking about it. But for what it's worth, the company decided to change their name to the Adams Corporation, and they shifted to being a snack company, and they marketed their new cheese puff as quote the Aristocrat of Snacks, And I can't think of a more perfect slogan. It

is so so fancy anyway, So what do you have next, Mago. Well, one person I'm grateful for is Chester Greenwood, who, like me, didn't like cold weather because his ears used to get super cold, and he didn't love wearing hats because he was allergic to the wool. Unlike me, though, he loved ice skating, so he was looking for any way to stay out playing with his friends, and he enlisted his grandmother to make him some earmuffs he had are so some fur or flannel pads onto a wire that he

could slap onto his head. And while his friends initially mocked him for these ridiculous looking muffs, before long they were actually clamoring for them too. And over the years he made some improvements that eventually landed him a patent. But what's amazing is that this eventually became his family business, like within ten years, and this was in the eighteen eighties. He built a small factory of about a dozen workers and they turned out fifty earmuffs a year, and I

guess it put Farmington, Maine on the map. Is the earmuff capital of the world, the ear muff capital of the world. That is unbelievable. Though, fifty thousand a year at that time, I can't imagine being able to crank that out with what technology they would have had available to them. Where do you find the market? It's pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, I wanted to talk for a second

about Josephine Cochrane, who we've talked about before. She invented the dishwasher, and many people may have heard this story before that Cochrane was a socialite, who invented the appliance out of frustration. But actually it wasn't because she didn't like doing the dishes. I mean, the truth is she had never really been doing the dishes in the first place. She was actually so rich that she had the domestic

help to do the dishwashing for her. But where her frustration came in was that, you know, the people who were washing the dishes were often so rough with the plates and saucers that they'd often end up chipped. So what she did she went out back to the shed and this is all true, and she figured out this system for washing dishes. Now what's amazing is that she

came to inventing things naturally. Her dad was a civil engineer, her great granddad had all these inventions related to the steamboat, and so she came up with a dishwasher that you cranked by hand, but then you used hot water to clean all these plates carefully. So did this thing take off immediately? I mean not really in middle class households, because you needed hot water on hand, and these didn't

function with electricity just yet. But she debuted her dishwasher at the Chicago World's Fair, and so it was restaurants and these commercial establishments that actually went crazy for it first. And then she eventually grew this little company into a brand you probably have heard of, and it's called Kitchen Aid. That's funny. I didn't know that, so I think Josephine and Cochrane would have actually admired my next inventor on

the list, whose name is Francis Gabe. And according to her obituary in the New York Times, frances was sick of the fact that quote, house cleaning was a woman's chronic lot, so she began to dream of a house that would see to its own hygiene, tenderly, washing, rinsing,

and drying itself at the touch of a button. I mean, it's a great obituary the Reindeer, But basically, she built this car wash in her kitchen, and she'd hide under umbrella and then press the fun and suddenly all these sprinklers would wash down all the cabinets and counters and the floor, and then the second spray, which would miss the soapy water, would cover everything, and then a third spray would wash it down again, and finally a gigantic blow dryer would push warm water across all of the

surfaces to dry everything off. The whole process took about an hour, and apparently the thing worked like a charm. Is pretty amazing. That is pretty amazing. And you know what, I think somebody stole this idea. I think I remember Tim the tool Man Taylor himself having a kitchen with pretty much this exact system. But the thing I always wondered there is the same thing I'm wondering here, and

that is where did all the water actually go? So she ingeniously had designed these very slightly sloping floors like they were so gentle you couldn't tell, and then there were these greats where the water would get pushed out of. But apparently even that was ingenious because before the water was sent to the lawn or the drain or whatever, it's cycled through her doghouse where would actually give her dog a shower. My gosh, this is brilliant, Like you

just want to see this whole system in action. All right, Well, I've got a slightly different fact about an invention that that might have been almost as brilliant. So I want to talk about slap bracelets. And of course we remember these from the nineties and they've made a comeback recently, as they seemed to every few years. But apparently they were the invention of a high school teacher and his

name was Stuart Anders. Now, Anders was messing around in his father's shop with some steel ribbon and the idea literally slapped him on the wrist. This was back in the mid eighties, and over the years he decided to put a little bit of fabric on it. He showed it to a friend. That friend happened to be an agent for toymakers, and so they were off to the races with a product they called slap wraps. And so the New York Times wrote about this product and called

it the biggest cheap novelty craze since pet Rocks. Now, I'm sure you've heard how slap bracelets were banned from so many schools and other places because they were truly slicing kids hands up. Yeah, they were pretty dangerous him. I think I'd probably cut myself a time or two with them as well. But you know, that wasn't ander slap rap product. And in fact that he and the toy company that he had been working with initially delayed the rollout of the product because they wanted to make

sure these bracelets were safe for kids. You know, these slap wraps actually changed their product to be able to prevent these injuries. But when they started doing something like fifteen million dollars in sales each year, you had these knockoff toy companies that you know, they smelled opportunity, they rushed their less safe products to market, and those are actually the ones that that you know, resulted in killing

the craze. I mean, it is so weird to me that you could just like put some fabric on some metal and kids just go wild for it. But I know the first time I slapped one on my wrist, I just thought it was magic. You know. Well, I know we've got two more facts to go, but why don't we take a little break first, welcome back to part time Genius who were talking conventions. All right, mego, we've each got one fact left, So what's your last

one going to be? So I'm going to do mine on the band aid because I loved the story of Earl and Josephine Dixon. So Earle was a Johnson Johnson employee and he had a new bride, Josephine, who was apparently super super klutzy every time he'd come home, he'd find she'd hurt herself in some new and different way.

Like the story honestly sounds like she had lived in like some sort of abusive kitchen, because like she'd burn herself on the stove where she'd like hit herself with a cabinet and end up with this cruise And it was horrible. And while Earl was super sympathetic at first, he got tired of dressing all the wounds every day

after work. So he took a long roll of Johnson Johnson's surgical tape, and then he cut these squares of gauze which he spaced out evenly along the tape, and then he covered it all in this layer of crinoline so that it wouldn't stick to itself. And the whole idea was that any time just being banged yourself up, she could simply snip a bandage off the roll and

place it on her new wound. So I've actually heard that part of the story before and and I thought it's really wonderful, But I was always curious, like how did band aids actually take off? And it turns out, once Johnson and Johnson found out about the product, and started making it themselves. They marketed it by sending free band aids to kids in the Boy Scouts. Like, wherever you were in the Boy Scouts, they would send you

band aids for free for the first year. And with all the scrapes and bruises and cuts, you know that could now quickly be remedied and like conveniently treated. Den leaders were all about the band aids, and they spread the word to the rest of America. And that's how band aids became so popular. That is incredible and it makes all the sense in the world. But what a brilliant idea initially to do this. Yeah, I think it's

pretty amazing. So what's your last fact? All right, Well, I thought I could wrap up by celebrating Lillian Gilbreath. And now she's famous for a number of things. She was a psychologist and did some pioneering work and efficiency management, and then two of her twelve kids actually later wrote about this in a book that you might know called Cheaper by the Dozen. But yeah, so she was also

an inventor who led this incredible life. She was the first woman to give a commencement address when she graduated from the University of California. She was the first female professor and engineering at Purdue, and by interviewing housewives and understanding their needs, she came up with a number of incredible household inventions, including I wrote some of these down the shelves on the refrigerator door that hold butter and eggs. She also invented the foot pedal that opens garbage cans,

and for that I cannot thank her enough. I feel like I need to write her descendants thank you note. And then she held the patent on the electric can opener. I mean, what's funny to be about all these things is like there are things you just take for granted, Like I just always assumed that like the shells on fridge door has always existed, or like you know, trash can have had foot pedals forever. But it's remarkable that they weren't only invented by someone, but that they were

invented by the same person. It's pretty pretty amazing. So I I think you have to take home with the trophy for discovering that. Well, thank you very much. This was a fun one to work on, and thanks as always to Eaves jeff Code for all of her great research. For Today's episode. Thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow