Mobile is home to many mothers of invention

Mobile is home to many mothers of invention

By Peter Teske

Lagniappe staff

Sundays should be reserved as a time to relax on the couch, watch football, maybe even get some yard work done. Seriously, there’s not much wrong with that. The NFL has become a Sunday staple all over America amongst men and women alike. It’s right up there with domestic light – or lite (depending on loyalties) – beers and raking leaves, no doubt.

And, while lazy Sundays are certainly a peaceful reality for most of society, imagine stumbling past a severely neglected lawn on the way out to a musty garage, passing up that rusty lawnmower and settling down in your inventor’s chair, right under an insufficiently bright laboratory light and beginning work on the first battering ram with explosive discharge capabilities.

Now you’re talking!

A wise man once famously said, “You haven’t lived until you’ve punctured a four-inch-thick steel door and unloaded a couple rounds.”

Yeah, it went something like that.

Surely, the voice in your head that’s always told you you’ll earn that ever-important “street cred” if you only had some way of shooting at things without having to look at them, did so after some thoughtful deliberation. And, if a B.R.W.E.D.C. seems a little too personal, you could always pull out that catapult from your kids’ old toy box and fashion it into a grenade and bomb-throwing device.

Or, maybe you’d rather invent something a little more useful to the majority of society; maybe you’re a utilitarian at heart. Maybe, just maybe, creating something along the lines of a reusable diaper would give you the extra satisfaction you don’t find at your 9-to-5.

But why stop there?

Really, where would our society be without a hat mirror, a submarine detector, a multitude of feminine hygiene devices or most importantly, deep sea tongs?

The answers to such a question should really be left to the experts or politicians maybe. But feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Regardless of how little sense any of that made to you, there’s one common thread in all the nonsense spattered on the page thus far.

Drum roll please. Mobile! Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!

All of these devices, or intellectual properties, whether you can actually purchase them or not, were, in fact, invented in the Mobile area.

The patent scene in this city under several, to many, unrecognizable flags, has a long and detailed history. For part of that you may wish to thank the United States Patent and Trademark Office. For the rest, you can thank a group of people who don’t think like everyone else and the lawyers that help the two work together.

Mobile has played an integral role in roughly 470 patents, according to Google Patent search. Thomas Edison, with his measly 1,093 patents is surely rolling over in his grave right now.

There’s something to be said about our long list of creative, irreverent and sometimes downright bizarre patents. There’s even more to be said about the arduous struggle to attain a patent for intellectual property. And there is, with little doubt, millions of dollars in lawyers fees and invention budgets tied up in those 470 or so creations.

All the patent process needs to begin is a person, an idea and some time.

According to uspto.gov, patents are granted to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale or selling the invention in the United States or importing the invention into the United States.

So, lesson number one: Don’t go out and re-market the dental mirror you found laying in the insulation of the attic in your historic home until you know if the patent has expired. Patents are generally protected for only 20 years after approval, so chances are you’ll be OK.

Those 20 years of exclusive rights to intellectual properties are usually well earned because of the long back and forth process involved in ensuring an intellectual property is unique, useful and progressive in nature. A patent attorney will assist you in a patent search to find out if your intellectual property is new, useful and “nonobvious to one skilled in the art to which the invention pertains,” according to U.S. patent laws.

“Based on the patent search review, the client makes a decision on whether or not he wants to go forward,” said Fairhope patent attorney George Williamson.

Then it’s time to file an application and wait, wait, wait.

“I would prepare a patent application. It’s filed with the patent office and after some period of time they’ll review it, do their own search and study of it, and then they will respond back. That’s the point at which you begin to get their input into the process,” Williamson said.

If the invention is a dud, or needs minor or major improvements, the U.S. Patent Office review will make you aware of any such needed corrections.

“You won’t know if there are any problems until they review it. You don’t know what problems they will find. That’s really where the problems begin,” Williamson said.

At this point there’s a lot of fine tuning and with enough research and development, eventually a patent will come to fruition for your sausage-making machine.

Sacro Wedgy

Regardless of how complicated an invention might be, there’s always the chance that it might really help people. Case in point: The SacroWedgy.

On June, 16, 1982, Hurshel Meares, a high school football coach and trainer in Baton Rouge filed his application for a patent.

During the course of many previous football seasons, Meares, who is now 84, found himself searching for a way to correct the back problems of several players on his many teams. He found that by placing a hand under the sacrum, the muscles in one’s back and hips would relax completely creating “natural” traction.

A light had gone off. Meares began consulting a friend who happened to be an osteopath and together they began devising a way to fix these back ailments for good.

Cindy Ballis, Meares’s daughter, runs the family operation out of Tillman’s Corner these days and was able shed some light on the early days of the SacroWedgy.

“His friend said, ‘Coach, there’s a little thing that I do and a lot of the osteopaths do. If you get them on the training table and get your hand right in the middle of their hips, on the sacrum, and hold it and lift up it relieves tension.’ Daddy did that for years, but you have to hold it a good 20 minutes,” Ballis remembers.

“He said it felt like a war zone in his hand with the muscles quivering, but once you hit that magic 20-minute mark, everything just subsided,” she said.

Realizing he only had two hands and far more people with the same problem, Meares saw an opportunity to help people with his knowledge of this type of treatment.

“People kept tracking him down at work and years after they graduated. He would help them whether it was on a coffee table or any type of table. So he began getting X-rays of the anatomy and whittling shapes until he got to what would mimic the hand,” Ballis recalled.

News of the final approval of Meares’s patent came on January, 22, 1985. He had found that shaping two simple molds would satisfy the stringent requirements set by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

“It was years in the patent pending and then whenever you finally do get the patent you go into trademarking the names and copyrights for instructions,” Ballis explained.

“It’s just a simple little device, but not many school teachers are going to do a second mortgage for $40,000 to get a mold built. He just knew it would help people,” she added.

Now, Ballis and her family are running the business and Web site locally. Part of that business includes attaining trademarks and copyrights through an equally long process, but Ballis and a massage therapist are often traveling the country to attend seminars and conferences to market the SacroWedgy, which is sold internationally.

“We’ve shipped to Poland, South Africa, England, Canada, Japan and China. There’s two people on the island of Malta, a rock off the coast of Italy, who have SacroWedgys,” said a laughing Ballis.

A strong presence in Malta and the rest of the world has much to do with the success of sacrowedgy.com. Ballis says the Web has allowed her to keep the business alive without an extravagant business model.

“We’re doing it all right here out of Mobile, Alabama!”she exclaimed.

Top 5 Mobile Patents: Pros and Cons

As the Mobile area is home to more than 400 patents, according to Google Patent Search. Some display a genius that is, um, perhaps a bit difficult to understand at first glance.

With that in mind, we’ve run down some pros and cons of our favorite local patents:

Battering Ram with Explosive Discharge Capabilities

Pros: This nifty device is useful at high school reunions. No longer will the captain of the football team mess with you and get away with it. Also, looks great in the hands of a large-breasted woman in a smallish bikini.

Cons: The idea of shooting without looking is frowned upon in some more civilized cultures. Not always easy to get the License Commissioner to grant you a permit for a Battering Ram with Explosive Discharge Capabilities.

The Verdict: Inventor John McLain’s name is eerily similar to that of Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain. Did Barack Obama miss a solid rebuttal/talking point to all those terrorist claims?

Personal Feminine Hygiene Device

Pros: With a direct spigot hookup option, women can clean the most intimate of areas in the shower, yard or any truck stop bathroom. There’s an obvious double use if you exercise a little creativity.

Cons: Although there is a built in overflow prevention feature, a failure of that feature could potentially turn the user into a very reluctant and doubly embarrassed human water balloon.

The Verdict: A douche that could become a dear friend, but only if you can keep the water pressure down.

Bedside Commode

Pros: Equipped with a vomit tray, this device makes puking and pooping at the same time not only a possibility, but guarantees easy clean up as well.

Cons: Double use as a walker could make for quite a messy fall. Toilet option is close enough to the ground for a medium-to-large sized dog to mistake it for a food bowl.

The Verdict: Consider the walk to the bathroom exercise if your under the age of 82 and have functioning legs.

Reusable Diaper

Pros: Makes the Bedside Commode look like an invention for the ambitious at heart. Has the potential to be at the forefront of a new fashion trend. Makes the obese look active with sumo-wrestler mystique.

Cons: Your washing machine will hate you, as will the rest of your clothes. You’ll never get it to fit the same as that 100 percent satisfaction guaranteed time period. Loses functionality after a serious hot wing eating contest. Personal odor becomes an issue if ignored for longer than seven minutes.

The Verdict: It’s called a toilet. Get acquainted sooner rather than later.

Hat Mirror

Pros: Looking at boobies can’t get any easier with this invention from 1928. Integration into bowlers hat is seamless. There’s proof that a deviant pervert existed in 1928, not only in Mobile, but also a couple in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Cons: Design needs to be adapted to a regular ball cap to fit into current fashion trends. Could mistakenly catch a glimpse of some guy’s joint if worn into the men’s bathroom.

The Verdict: Good intentions have never been more apparent. The inventor of this mechanism should be considered a hero among all men.

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