Fathers of Invention

From Autobiography of Andrew T. Still

Andrew Taylor Still had a problem: His arm was sore from churning butter. And from what he wrote in his autobiography, he had a lot of butter to churn. "We had a number of cows and a great deal of milk," he wrote. "I churned and banged away for hours. I would raise the lid and lick the dasher, go through all the maneuvers of churning and pounding milk by the hour. I would churn and churn and churn, and rub my arm and churn..."

It was not long after the Civil War, and Still, my wife's third great-grandfather, was living in Baldwin City, Kansas. He was trying to make a living as a farmer, his future career as a physician having not fully materialized yet. Time spent churning butter was time not spent on other, more pressing matters. His solution to this problem was characteristically analytical and creative. He simply invented a better churn.

"I constructed a drive-wheel eight inches in diameter to match the end of a pinion attached to the upper end of a half-inch rod, which extended from the top to the bottom of the churn," he wrote.

A.T. Still's churn dashers.

"On this rod I had an adjustable arm, with a hole through it, and a set-screw to fasten it to a rod so as to raise or lower to suit the quantity of milk in the churn. Tin tubes were fastened to the outer ends of the arm in holes, so as to dip up the milk, by these tubes, which were inclined down for that purpose. The receiving end through which the milk passed was one inch in diameter, coming out through a half-inch hole. Thus you see the tube was made tapering from receipt to exit of the milk. With this drive-wheel, pinion, and rod that crossed into an iron socket at the end of the churn, I could easily get a motion of the cups equal to five hundred or thousand revolutions per minute. This would throw the milk and cream against the resisting wall of the churn with the velocity of three to five miles a minute."

This velocity was the key to rupturing the casein, which Still likened to an eggshell, in order to release the butter.

"I succeeded in breaking the egg that contained all the elements found in butter, and give the hungry children butter from this new churn in one minute and a quarter from the word go, temperature and all being favorable. Three to ten minutes was my average time spent in churning by this new invention."

Patent Number 122,075 for "Improvement in Churn-Dashers" was issued Dec. 19, 1871, by the U.S. Patent Office. After improving on the butter churn, Still turned his critical eye toward improved maintenance of the human machine, a path that lead to the creation of osteopathy in 1874. "This year I began a more extended study of the drive-wheels, pinions, cups, arms, and shafts of life, with their forces and supplies, framework, attachments by ligaments, muscles, origin, and insertion...all awoke a new interest in me. I believed that something abnormal could be found some place in some of the nerve divisions which would tolerate a temporary or permanent suspension of the blood either in arteries or veins, which effect caused disease."

The butter churn was the second of three patents for Still. The first was for a device that aided in harvesting and bundling grain crops such as wheat, oats, and rye. Still's name appears on the patent along with two other men: J.M. Canfield and E.P. Wheeler, all of Lawrence, Kansas. Patent Number 53,409 was issued in 1866.

His third and final patent occurred years later. In 1910, then living in Kirksville, Missouri, he received Patent Number 956,223 for a burner that uses fuel more efficiently.

It was in Kirksville that Still popularized osteopathy and established the first osteopathic school, known today as A.T. Still University. He died in Kirksville in 1917.

Hezekiah Carr Palmer

Hezekiah Carr Palmer

Unlike Still, Hezekiah Carr Palmer did not, as far as I know, write his autobiography. But I wish he had. My third-great grandfather was multi-talented, and must have had some great stories. He was born in Alabama in 1850 and moved to Arkansas when he was young. He served in the Arkansas Infantry during the Civil War and lived the rest of his life in the state, dying in Miller County in 1932.

His life and talents were summed up by a local historian: "Hezie Palmer, Methodist Preacher, who also sold and repaired sewing machines, ran a grist mill on Mill Creek, raised a large family, and taught school. All this he did after he came back from the War Between the States at the age of fifteen. His first flock appears to have been a congregation at Concord Church in about 1875."

A man this versatile couldn't be pigeonholed. According to the U.S. Census, he had at least three different occupations. He was listed as a farmer in 1870, 1900, and 1910. But he was listed as a wagon maker in 1880 and in 1920, a blacksmith. We can only guess how he was listed in 1890; that census was destroyed by fire.

Palmer's saw/planer

He is remembered by his family mainly as a preacher. My great aunt was very young when he died, but she remembered him riding off to Sunday services in his horse-drawn buggy, sometimes visiting more than one church in a day of ministering.  

In the late 1880s, he was living in Bingen, Arkansas, when he and his partner, William G. Scoggin, patented a saw attachment. The device enabled a saw to cut and plane--or smooth--the wood at the same time. It could also be detached so the saw could cut normally, without planing, and the patent even claims that it could increase efficiency by avoiding the customary waiting time for lumber to cure.

"My invention is adapted for sawing green as well as dry timber to effect the saving of kiln-drying the timber, and it is very simple and strong in construction and cheap and inexpensive in manufacture." Patent Number 379,719 was awarded to Palmer and Scoggin on March 20, 1888.

Finding Patents

If you have an ancestor who liked to tinker and managed to have an invention patented, you could be just a few steps from getting your hands on a valuable genealogical document. Patents are a matter of public record, and Google and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can be your friends. But searching can be challenging. It's most efficient to search by patent number, but I didn't have patent numbers for any of the patents listed here so I searched by name. Still's are listed under two different variations of his name: A.T. Still and Andrew T. Still.

As for Palmer, I stumbled over his patent while searching under his name in Ancestry.com at the local library. Which, by the way, can be a great way to access the millions of records available through Ancestry.com without paying the subscription fee. You can even save what you find at the library and send it to yourself via e-mail.

More:

• Still, Andrew T. Autobiography of Andrew T. Still. Kirksville, Mo.: A.T. Still. 1897. Available at: https://archive.org/details/autobiographyand00stiliala
• McFerrin, Frank. Fouke, Arkansas, in Word and Picture. Fouke, Ark.: Miller County Historical Society. 1993. 169 p.
• Google Patent: http://www.google.com/patents
• U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Search for Patents: http://www.uspto.gov/patents-application-process/search-patents