This online exhibition celebrates the ingenuity of the people of the Santa Cruz Mountains through the patents they filed or the patented machinery they built here. Enjoy exploring this exhibition by clicking the links below.
1862
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. Click Here to Read More.
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. Click Here to Read More.
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. 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. Click Here to Read More.
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. Click Here to Read More.
Right: Mammoth Blackberry from The Loganberry by Mary E. Logan.
1900
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. 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. Click Here to Read More.
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. Click Here to Read More.
1906
Up until the 1950s, the branch of mathematics called spherical trigonometry, was an important part of school curriculum being central to the study of astronomy and vital to navigation. To help students visualize the concepts a spherical blackboard was often used. In August of 1905, Roy Ernest Dickerson filed a patent for an "Educational Device for Teaching Spherics." These spherical blackboards are still in use today. Click Here to Read More.
While alone at night working as the watchman at the McAbee mill near Boulder Creek, Y. M. Crechriou invented a street car fender and an automobile fender. He patented both in 1909 and 1910 respectively, after moving to Monterey to open a shooting and billiard gallery, where he also invented a mechanism for tightening billiard table cloths and straightening billiard cues.
1920
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. Click Here to Read More.
1952
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 a truck spewing 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. Click Here to Read More.