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EVERY time anybody in the United States pulls the cap of a beer bottle or a soda water bottle with the. intent to quench a thirst, temperately or otherwise, he puts the fraction of a cent into the pocket of one William H. Painter, of Baltimore. A good many people have pulled these caps in the last few years and Painter is consequently an ever increasing millionaire. Yet the cap for bottles is a small thing, an idea crystallized and patented. The patent is the source of the millions. Painter. however, carried his patent in his pocket for six years before he succeeded in interesting capital in its manufacture. Then a man of means advanced the necessary capital in return for a half interest in the patent and a company was formed. At the end of the first year he and Painter each had a net $27,000 in his pocket. Now the invention has crowded all other stoppers for fizzy water of the market and a big factory in Baltimore turns out the caps by the million every day. Before the time of Painter there was a man by the name of De Quillfeldt who lived in New Jersey and who invented a stopper that took the trade away from the corl,s of our youth. This stopper was of rubber and was tightened by a wire attachment which was pulled down as a lever on the .outside of the bottle. A decade ago they were generally used on milk bottles. De Quillfeldt is said to have made $15,000,000 out of his patent. He might have amassed a competence had it not been for William Painter and another equally clever person who ftted a piece of pasteboard into the neck of a milk bottle and took the business away from him. An idea that is perhaps simpler than the pasteboard stopper is the “hump” on the hooks that furnish so much employ'ment for married men just before theater time. Women had been fastening their dresses up with hooks and eyes for a generation and it is probable that some. one had made a lot of money out of the original invention. But hooks had a way of coming unfastened much to the chagrin of the neat and fussy. Then came the genius of the hook and eye. A man who was wide awake despite his residence in Philadelphia, bent one of these hooks, so as to make a hump in it. He tried hooking it up and found that it remained hooked. He patented it and has monopolized the business- through his “see that hump” advertisements ever since. One day a man stood behind his wife while she put up her hair. The hairpins of those days were straight pieces of wire. They did not “stay put” very efectually. The woman in this case bent her hairpins before putting them in. Her husband saw her do it. The result was the invention of the crinkly hairpin which is to-day used in carload lots by the women of the world. So important an invention as the telephone was made by turning a screw one-fourth of one revolutio:. All the millions that have resulted from the invention of the BeIl telephone, depended upon this slight twist of the wrist of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. Th·we had been men before Dr. Bell who had come near fnding a way to make female gossip and masculine commercial intercourse easier. The Reis patents came nearest success. But in the Reis patents the current wal intermittent. It had to leap a gap. Dr. Bell closed that gap when he turned the screw. But Dr. Bell W,ts not trying to invent a telephone when he incidentally stumbled upon his secret. He was working on a method of making speech visible, for his wife was deaf and dumb and he was seeking an easy method of conversing with her. Instead he found the method of talking over a wire to people at a distance. He did not patent the idea. however, and it knocked about his house for months. Finally he demonstrated it to some friends and they saw the possibility of its application. Upon their advice he patented the invention. His patent was fled at ten o'clock in the morning and at three in the afternoon another man applied for a patent on the same thing and lost a hundred million dollars by a nose. Such are the stories that the veterans of the Patent Ofce gossip about in the moments of their leisure. They tell you, for instance, of the Selden clutch whi!?h is one of the vital patents that has much to do wIth the control of the automobile business of the country. It is this clutch that enables the operator of the machine to stop and start without having to get out and crank his machine-sometimes. It is interposed between the running gear and the motor, where it keeps the car marking time while the crossing is blockaded. This clutch was invented before automobiles were. For a decade after its invention there was no opportunity of applying it to any good purpose. Then the automobile was invented. In fact George B. Selden was one of the early builders of automobiles and it is logical to suppose that he built them that he might make an opportunity to use his clutch. Certain it is that he long had a clutch on the automobile business. Before his patent was declared invalid about $2,000,000 had been paid by nearly ninety automobile makers, who found it cheaper to pay than to engage in ex pensive litigation. Thaddeus Fairbanks was a New' England farmer with long whiskers and much Yankee ingenuity. In his time old-fashioned steelyards were the only accurate means of weighing the produce of the farm. Platform scales were unknown, for nobody had ever worked out a method of arranging the levers th't supported the platform in such a way that an object would pull
