1862 & 1871
In 1869, a fuse factory was erected on Zayante Creek in Felton. The company was incorporated as Lake Superior and Pacific Fuse Company and the principal stockholders were the inventors and patentees Richard Uren, Thomas Dunstone, and Joseph Blight. The plant was also known as the Eagle Fuse-works.
The machinery was driven by three 5-hp water wheels. Water was supplied to the factory by a flume from a reservoir fed by water from Bean Creek.
The main building was three stories high with a two story wing. The wheels, pulleys, shafts, etc. that drove the fuse making machinery were on the lower floor; the actual fuse making on the second and third.
The fuse making process was kept a tightly held secret. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported: “We did not see the second story of the works in operation, as that portion of the building is private and sacredly confidential, the various processes and machinery being a profound secret, never divulged by the inventors and patentees.”
Jute, one of the raw materials, was imported from Dundee, Scotland. The finished product, which was “used all over the Pacific Coast,” was also exported to Australia and Central America.
In 1871, the factory production capacity was increased to 120,000 feet of fuse per week. After Thomas Dunstone’s death in 1878, his son-in-law William H. Talbot took over the operation of the factory. In 1881, South Pacific Coast railroad employee, Joseph H. Aram, married Evangaline, Dunstone’s daughter. SPCRR issued the following congratulatory statement: “SPCRR tender you and your bride our sincerest congratulations on your marriage, with the hope that your future happiness will burn as bright as the fuse, and never die out till it burns to the end.”
In 1883, Talbot, Dunstone’s widow Susan, and Aram formed a partnership under the name W. H. Talbot & Co. “for the purpose of manufacturing patent fuse and farming.”
On a fateful day in August just one year later, Aram was working at the plant, when there was an explosion in the room above him. He was watching the machinery that fed powder from hoppers in the room above into the fuse, to ensure that it was working correctly. Aram saw the roof raise up, and the sides of the room he was in spread out. Hurriedly he ran to a window intending to jump out, but as he reached the window a second explosion occurred throwing him out. He suffered a fractured arm and was badly bruised. The building was soon engulfed in flames and burned to the ground. It was uninsured and never rebuilt.
Uren, Dunstone, and Blight's Patent No: 37,079.
Uren's Patent No: 114,233.
1870
Romanzo Erastus Wood, better known as R. E., and his wife Mary Olmstead Wood, arrived in Santa Cruz County around 1868. The register of voters in 1869 describes Wood's self-stated occupation as a broom-maker. What an understatement! Wood was an incredibly talented individual. An inventor, industrialist, landscape photographer, traveler, showman, and a talented, opinionated, sometimes cryptic, writer with a poetic bent, who wrote under many pseudonyms.
In 1870, he was awarded a patent for "an improvement in animal traps." This patent for a cylindrical gopher trap was reportedly the first such trap to be produced commercially.
He made his home at Troutdale Farm on Bear Creek Road where he had a fine vegetable garden, cornfields, and a vineyard of 3,000 vines with 35 varietals. He had workshops for his manufacturing with the best tools and machinery of his own manufacture, a stock of chemicals and acids, and a foundry. There appeared to be no branch of art or science with which Mr. Wood was "not familiar, especially mechanics, chemistry, etc." He also repaired guns, sewing machines, "in fact everything made out of wood, iron, steel, copper or brass."
Wood had a four-horse team and wagon that made monthly visits to each of the towns selling the goods he had manufactured. Besides his traps he sold potato-knives, brushes, and dusters among other things. The Sentinel noted that his traps would be indispensable "now there was a premium of 8 cents on each gopher scalp."
By 1874, he was producing 8,000 traps annually at his factory, at Troutdale Farm. Two sizes of traps were produced, selling for $1.00 and $1.50 each.
His manufacturing business also included a corn-broom manufacturing plant and a match-making factory. And he was purportedly going into the cutlery making business too.
In 1875, Wood used his newly acquired camera to document the building of the San Lorenzo flume. He had six different size lenses for either single or double (stereoscopic) views. Noted county scenery and buildings were also photographed, with the goal of the images being displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
At the 1877 Mechanics Institute Industrial Exhibition in San Francisco, Wood won an award for his cylinder gopher trap. One of his advertisements extolled the virtues of the rodents as pets and boasted that when the trap was placed appropriately in their boroughs it will "about half the time take them alive, so they can be put in a coal oil can or dry aquarium, half filled with dirt, and their interesting habits studied, to the great delight of all."
R. E. Wood put his broom and match manufacturing businesses up for sale and he and his wife took again to the road; they traveled around California and beyond, putting on lime-lighted optical lantern exhibitions with "newly imported European double mammoth oxy-hydrogen stereopticons." Around 200 oil-painted transparencies of noted scenes were projected ten feet in diameter and "laughabilities" made the show one of the most entertaining and instructive for just 50 cents a person. They also offered their services as photographers and at the same time, introduced the gopher trap to a wider audience.
R. E. Wood's Patent No: 109,789.
A page from R. E. Wood's Scrapbook in the collection of the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico.
R. E. Wood's gopher trap based on a drawing by T. Butler.
1880
Emphrey Jones Rubottom was a prolific inventor. He was born in 1856 in El Monte, Los Angeles. His father passed away when he was just two years old. His mother, Elizabeth Hidreth, remarried Almus Rountree, and around 1864 the family moved to Santa Cruz, living on Ben Lomond Mountain and then in Felton. Almus became the Felton Justice of the Peace. Elizabeth bore eleven children, two by her first husband and nine with Almus.
At age 24, Emphrey was a teamster but soon became Felton's "vulcan," the town blacksmith. Always described by words such as energetic, popular, and enterprising, Emphrey applied for his first patent in 1880, for a beer faucet. He married Mary Kelley of Felton in 1883. Besides his blacksmith shop, he built a carriage and paint shop, a heading mill (for making redwood barrel heads), and a box factory.
He invented a machine for making barrel heads, and one for the manufacture of barrel staves. He invented a harness strap for attaching reins to bridle rings, a brake, a non-refillable bottle and a saw handle which met "with great success" and was "introduced in all timber localities."
In 1890, he built a new blacksmith shop described as one of the finest and liveliest to be found outside of the Santa Cruz city limits. It had a planer, band saw, a lathe, a drill press, and a blower.
He built a steam wagon in 1893, which he contemplated running to the World's Fair and in 1898 he built a boat. Not just any boat. This boat was 45 feet long and was framed so that it could be dismantled for transportation. Emphrey intended to take this boat up the Yukon River to the Klondike gold fields. The boat in pieces, with Emphrey and three others, was taken down to the beach in Santa Cruz to be shipped to San Francisco, where it would be assembled. "As the timbers of the boat were hauled through town they attracted considerable attention, more particularly the large iron scoop in the front of the wagon, which is to be used to bring up the sand from the bottom of the Yukon [River] in the search for gold."
How the boat faired on its journey or if it saw operations in the Klondike, we may never know, but Emphrey and his friends William Glass and Joseph Mongomery did make it to the gold fields. Emphrey returned in December 1900, and returned there the following summer. Meanwhile, back home, Emphrey's wife Mary filed for divorce. In 1902, Emphrey remarried Nelly Hickey of Felton, and it was shortly after that he developed one of his most successful inventions - a plow. A key feature of the plow was that it had a reversible side-hill shear, which made it "invaluable for working mountain grades by enabling the dirt to be always thrown toward the outside of the road, no matter which way the team is being driven." It also meant that only half the labor was needed when the "Side Hill Plow" was being operated.
Emphrey passed away suddenly at the age of 57 and is buried in the Felton Cemetery.
E. J. Rubottom's Patent No. 241,823
E. J. Rubottom's Patent No.783,595
1881
In 1880, Judge James Harvey Logan began experimenting with blackberries. He considered the “flavor of the wild blackberry of the Pacific Slope unrivaled.” Logan planted wild blackberries and variety called Texas Early, a domestic blackberry that bloomed at the same time, in adjacent rows in his Ben Lomond Mountain garden. He also planted a row of Red Antwerp raspberries.
By 1882, Logan found that his plants had born a new large berry. This berry would be come known as the Mammoth Blackberry. But he also found that the Red Antwerp Raspberry had naturally crossed with the blackberry to produce a new fruit, neither a raspberry nor a blackberry, which would become known as the Loganberry.
These new fruits could not be patented however, as the US patent office did not begin granting patents for plants until 1930.
The Loganberry: From Seed to Fruitage by L. F. Kinney, courtesy Google Books.
1900
On March 30, 1907, Engineer William Robert Dow suffered a severe stoke while driving a Southern Pacific steam locomotive on his usual route between Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek. Earlier that day, Dow seemed in the best of health, but on the run home, just opposite Old Felton, he succumbed with “his hand at the throttle of the steel steed which he had driven and controlled so carefully and so well.”
Fortunately, Fireman McDaniels, while backing the engine from a slide where they had been working, noticed that Dow was unable to use his hand to operate the air-brake. McDaniels stopped the engine and Dow was taken to his home where he passed away shortly after. He was one of the most popular engineers employed on the run, which he had operated for the prior twelve years.
Engineer William Robert Dow was the inventor of a new type of compound steam engine, that is a steam engine where the steam is expanded in two or more stages. At the time of his passing, this new engine was intended “to overcome the limitations of the present types in the service of the Southern Pacific Co.” He was also the holder of a patent for a gas engine, filed in 1898, while he was living in Boulder Creek.
One of his gas engine patents, witnessed by Boulder Creek residents Billy Dool and Arthur Stagg, was cited as prior work in a patent applied for and granted to Major Frank Bernard Halford, a renowned British aircraft engine designer, in 1945, for the patent of a Jet Propulsion Plant. Halford's jet engine company was bought by the De Havilland Aircraft Company. Dow's patent has also been cited more recently, in 1976 and 1984.
The winter of his passing, 1907, had been a wet winter. The San Lorenzo Valley had suffered badly; storms and floods had wreaked havoc. Just a few days before he died, Engineer Dow was pronounced a hero. While transporting a train loaded with school children and passengers just south of Felton his keen eyes noticed the brush on the top of the mountain above Big Trees Park bend and “move slowly down the hill preceded by rolling stones which were beginning to strike the track and the train.”
Quickly, Engineer Dow thrust the engine into reverse and not a moment too soon, “for with a thunderous roar the whole mountain side broke loose.” Five hundred feet of the track was buried in mud, rocks, and trees, to a depth of forty feet, and some of the tracks and ties were thrown into the river below. But the train, and all of its precious cargo, although damaged from the pelting of rocks, were saved.
But even worse weather was to come. The storm on the night of March 23, 1907 saw forty mile an hour gales; the San Lorenzo river rose four and a half feet, and all five of the bridges crossing the river in Boulder Creek were completely swept away, carried by masses of drift material. Roads were impassible with slides and washouts. It took days for the debris to be cleared and it was while clearing one such slide our hero, Engineer Dow, was taken.
William Dow's Patent No. 647,651
William Dow's Patent No.786,432
1901
In 1901, John Armstrong of Santa Cruz patented an automatic water-elevator. The device used a small flow of water with considerable fall, to move a portion of that water to a higher elevation.
A tower would be erected in a gulch where the top of the tower would be around five feet below a spring. Water was piped to the top of the tower and allowed to fall into buckets attached to an endless chain. When the buckets were full, about every four minutes, the chain moved, setting the pump to work for one minute forcing the water upwards to its destination. Advertisements for the elevator boasted it could raise water up to 450 feet.
One of the first to be installed was on Love Creek, Ben Lomond for Martha Hume. Her home was 400 feet above the creek and she had no convenient way of getting water to the house. It was highly successful. Sadly, it was vandalized two years later when someone with a sharp hatchet cut and destroyed all the buckets on the machine. A second elevator was installed for her in 1904 which raised water 523 feet.
The elevators were manufactured by Joseph Harveston at the Lukens Carriage Works in Santa Cruz. In 1904, Harveston installed one in the San Lorenzo River at Boulder Creek for farmer Conrad Schroeder. Schroeder had tried using a rotary pump driven by an undershot water wheel but “utterly failed; then he bought one of the Harveston pumps and at once his trouble was at an end.” The elevator raised a one-and-a-half-inch stream of water to irrigate his land.
The same was true for orchardist Charles Kohler of Ben Lomond. He needed to raise water 200 feet and was trying unsuccessfully with a ram pump. So he too bought a water elevator to solve his watering needs. “He got out of patience … and now gets all the water he needs.”
In 1905, the new Harveston & Lukens Automatic Water Elevator was awarded first prize at the State Fair.
In 1905, this poem was written for the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
Way down a steep flight And quite out of sight, There’s a magical mill, Built under the hill, And run by a stream, Without any steam.
It runs day and night By the same silent might, And though in a deep gorge, Shut out from the light, It seldom murmurs Of its lonely plight.
A grander machine The world never seen; ‘Tis like a rare jewel
In a crown that was set, Although never wore, It shines ever more.
Thus the glory of the pump, Its true worth unseen, Except by the trickle Of the ascending stream, Its true value is known In the stream that is thrown
To the tank far above In the broad light of day, Silent but constant It forces its way, And giving full credit To the mill that just had it.
John Armstrong's Patent No: 682,378.
Patent No. 682,378 Figure 1.
Santa Cruz Sentinel, March 14, 1905, courtesy newspapers.com.
1906
In 1905, the Boulder Creek Union High School was established and the members of the board of trustees were on a quest to find the perfect principal. They had a vision of a modern, unparalleled, yet to be built school building, with physics, chemistry, and physical geography laboratories, a library, as well as recitation rooms. They were to hire renowned architect William Weeks to design the building. The course of study would prepare the students for entry into Stanford and the California Universities, or for business, with four years of classes in English, History, Latin, Grammar, Algebra, Physics, Chemistry, Physical Geography, Plane and Solid Geometry, and Book-keeping not to mention the optional programs, such as sports and orchestra, in which the students could participate.
In July 1905, they hired a young UC graduate named Roy Ernest Dickerson. Professor Dickerson, a Berkeley High School graduate, had graduated university in 1900 with a BS in Natural Sciences at the age of 23. He taught science in Ontario, Cloverdale, and San Luis Obispo, where he was also the principal until moving to Boulder Creek.
Dickerson was a brilliant scientist and would become a renown geologist. Remarkably, in August of 1905, he filed a patent for an "Educational Device for Teaching Spherics."
Up until the 1950s, the branch of mathematics called spherical trigonometry, was an important part of the curriculum being central to the study of astronomy and vital to navigation. To help students visualize the concepts a spherical blackboard was often used. These spherical blackboards are still in use today.
The problem as stated by Dickerson in the patent application was that the opaque surface had two pronounced disadvantages the first being "the difficulty of delineating with sufficient accuracy antipodal [on the opposite side] figures" and the second being "the difficulty of visualizing successively seen figures on opposite sides of the board long enough to permit a proper comparison." So, Dickerson proposed a transparent globe instead which he suggested could be made of glass.
The patent for his remarkable invention was granted in February 1906. However, to our knowledge, it was never built.
The concept would be re-invented by István Lénárt in Hungary in the late 1980s, some 80 years later. Called the Lénárt sphere, the product was realized in clear plastic and is the modern replacement of a spherical blackboard. Lénárt's patent, and subsequent similar patents, make no reference to Dickerson's prior work.
Roy Dickerson's Patent No: 812,408.
1920
Few female inventors filed patents in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The reason was discrimination, particularly in education and business. Even in the first half of the 20th century, some believed that women were not equipped for solving problems or scientific thinking, and some believed that women would become ill if they used their brain too much. Jennie Elizabeth Stevens (nee Lewis), who was born in 1871 in Wisconsin, was an exception.
Jennie married mining civil engineer Albert Freeman Stevens in 1890. They moved to Ben Lomond around 1905, to a property named Glen Artney on Love Creek. They continued to have business interests in Silver City, Idaho and travelled back there occasionally. Albert passed away in 1916 while on such a trip.
Jennie was a talented embroiderer; the Santa Cruz Sentinel referred to her work as magnificent and, in 1915, exhibited a piece of her work in their offices on Locust Street before it was sent on to the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
In 1920, she filed a patent for technique for creating an artificial flower, which was granted in 1922. Her goal was to create a realistic three-dimensional artificial flower for use on hats for example, that was robust enough to be re-usable. She achieved this by attaching a rigid fabric to a wire frame that constituted the flower petal using a buttonhole stitch. Then with varying shades of a color, light to dark, she used a radial Kensington embroidery stitch to gradually cover the fabric from the outer petal edge inwardly to the stem. Once the petals were formed, she secured them to an artificial sepal. The gradual change in color, and the fact that the stitches were on the back and the front of the petals, gave the flowers a realistic look. This is a technique still used today in three-dimensional appliqué.
Jennie is also the co-inventor of a gadget. In 1923, along with another Ben Lomond resident Henry H. Olson, she jointly filed a patent for a false-teeth cleaner. Henry, a carpenter who also lived on Love Creek, is credited with the construction of several Valley homes. The patent, which was granted in 1924, was "a false tooth cleaner comprising … a plurality of bristles secured upon opposite sides of the handle …" a feature still present on denture brushes today. It also had a blunt scoop and a pointed cleaning blade, which could be folded back into the handle.
Jennie left the area in 1938 to be with her daughter. She passed away in 1947.
Jennie Stevens' Patent No: 1,418,846.
Jennie Stevens & Henry Olsen's Patent No: 1,487,075.
1952
It was in the early 1950s and Lorenzo "Larry" Ponza, a first generation Italian-American, was driving a Nevada mountain road behind a logging truck when POW! a stone propelled by the truck in front of him hit his car. POW! another and another stone effortlessly but with great force struck the car. Larry did not back off. He was mesmerized by the projectiles. SMASH! One broke his windshield. He pulled off the road to contemplate what he had witnessed.
Larry was a machinist. He was born in 1918 on his parent's ranch on Bean Creek Road, graduated from Santa Cruz High and a trained in the high school's machinists trade class. When he returned to Santa Cruz in 1949 after spending seven years in Hawaii helping to rebuild Pearl Harbor as a senior civilian supervisor for the US Navy, he became involved in the relatively new sport of Little League Baseball.
Larry took the advice of industrialist and entrepreneur Henry J. Kaiser to "find a need and fill it." He knew that the young baseball players needed more batting practice and the logging truck projectiles gave him an idea. He had noticed that the rocks that were propelled from between two close rotating wheels flew straight and fast.
In 1952, he demonstrated his first baseball pitching machine and patented it two years later. One demonstration took place at the Harvey West stadium. The Ponza Mechanical Pitcher held 35 balls and could throw a ball every eight seconds.
According to the patent, Larry's objectives were to build "a simple mechanism which obviates the necessity for complicated or intricate parts and reduces maintenance costs to a minimum, means to provide a smooth mechanical action with follow through and shock absorbing capacities so as not to require securing the machine to the ground to prevent shifting while in operation; a light-weight portable designed [sic] to facilitate quick and convenient movement of the machine onto and off the pitcher's mound; means to quickly and easily adjust while the machine is in continuous operation, the trajectory of the ball for horizontal and vertical flight, and the speed of the pitched ball; an automatic warning bell mechanism to alert the batter immediately prior to each delivered pitch; an automatic feeding mechanism to feed balls into the machine from a volume supply hopper; a construction and operating design completely safe for the operator with no moving parts exposed; provision for projecting fly balls and ground balls with its subsequent practice potential by simple adjustment while the machine remains in continuous operation; accurate delivery of the pitched ball into the strike zone with maximum of efficiency for batting practice and complete safety to the batter; and in general, a completely automatic, safe, practical and economically feasible batting practice machine."
These objectives were clearly exceeded and the pitching machine was a resounding success.
Larry went on to patent new and improved pitching machines, and develop a highly successful batting cage, the Port-O-Net, that automatically retrieved the balls. Larry is pictured here with his first pitcher, the original of was donated to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, NY in 2000. Larry passed away in 2004. After his death, two of his pitching machines, along with other related ephemera, were donated to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
Larry Ponza's Patent No: 2,792,822.
Larry Ponza's Patent No: 3,470,859.