A THOUSAND INVENTIONS

Evening Star, Issue 19619, 27 July 1927, Page 6

A THOUSAND INVENTIONS

AMERICAN RIVAL TO EDISON Mil E. I. DODDS. Life lor the housewife is one long, restful romp compared with what it lined to be. At least, so the men say, and to prove it they point to the multiplicity of modern inventions and devices for making housework easy. One of the pioneer inventors in this line, wc are told, was Ethan I. Dodds, who has .since become a close competitor of Edison in the number of his patents.

In twenty-five years Ethaii_ 1. Dodds has put 1,800 patents to his credit. That is at the rate of seventy-two a. yt"", or one and two-filths a week, or one every fiftli day. Act iwhen lie was twenty-one years old ho" could not read. Ho does not read with great case today. Yet, on the other hand, he gets the whole secret of a' blue print at a single glance. Ho has been for thirty years one of the wheel horses of American mechanical engineering. He was the right-hand 111011 of George Westingbouisc, a giant in industrialism. E. H. Harriman built for him a laboratory alongside his own home at Central Valley, New York, in order that ho might bo at the call ol the financier by day or by night. Ir. was Dodds who made for Harriman the plans for the electrification of the Erie a entrance into New York, a work that was perforce abandoned when Harrimait's death withdrew the financial prop from the railroad that Jay Gould had buried under a mountain of debt. “Old Man” Flannery, of Pittsburgh, the greatest chain and bolt maker of his day, relied upon him. Dodds proposed to make all-steel sleeping cars for the Pullman Company that should be longer than any other steel ear ever built. The technicians protested.

“The cars that Dodds wants to build,” they said, “would rumble like an empty boiler rolling down hill. They would sag in the middle. They would warp and bend.” Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was then president of the Pullman Company. “Wo will build them,” ho said. “ Dodds says lie can do it, and I know Dodds.”

An interviewer frees through _ a routine of questions, but the underlying thought is to prime the pump—to get the interviewed talking about himself. Thus it was gathered that Dodds was born in 1878, and is married and has four children, and lives at Central Valley, New York. “ And of what university are you a graduate, Mr Dodds?” , Ho began to grin again. After a moment he explained in his soft, gentle drawl that ho was not a graduate of any university. In fact, he had attended college only one week in his life. At the end of that time—this was in the days when college presidents attended personally to such chores—the head of the little school sent for him and asked him to go away. “We cannot do anything for you,' Dodds,” said the president. “ You are wasting your time—and ours.” The man who has 1,800 patents to his credit, and who has had trouble over only one of them, said the president was quite right. A student of his sort would have been a nuisance.

Then the whole story came. He was the son of the village miller and storekeeper at New Gallilee, Pennsylvania His father owned a small coal mine, too, in which the several boys of the f. nily worked afternoons and Saturdays. Ethan I. was maybe nine years old, very red-bended and freckled, when ho was first sent into the mine to push out the little wagons of coal. When Ethan was seventeen or eighteen he caught a freight thiin_ for Pittsburgh, and made for the Westinghouse works. The next morning be was at work there as blacksmith’s helper. One day George Westinghou.se came into the blacksmith’s shop to order something made. He drew a. few wiggles on a sheet of paper, and the helper understood them. More than that, (he helper took a pencil and made a few unrelated strokes on the sheet. “ Like that?” he asked. And it was just what the owner of the plant wanted. Ethan was given an errand boy’s place in the drafting room, and began to copy designs. Eventually he was promoted to the boss’s own drafting room. George Westinghouse sometimes did not see the shops lor weeks on end. Then ho might get to work before daylight and work all night. One morning ho came in at G o’clock to find his protege, the ex-blacksmith’s helper, in possession of the place. In reply to questions, f)odds explained that as it was a bad morning he had been obliged to come early. It was tills •trilling incident that rcaroused Westinghouse’s interest, and decided the career of Dodds.