When the idea to build a better mousetrap afflicted the common American, and was gung-ho to get a patent awarded him, he normally would file a patent model with the United States Patent Office. Practically anything and everything that was patented in this great country of ours was accompanied with such a model - medical quackery, outhouses, toys, kitchenware, oil lamps, you name it, it had a patent model.
Imagine being a clerk in the Patent Office as model after model was submitted year after year. Why, there probably could be millions of these things piling up around your head, right? Well, that's exactly what happened. The Patent Office soon found itself up to its eyeballs with patent models, even after thousands of them perished in the great Patent Office fire during the earlier part of the 19th century.
It soon got to the point where the Patent Office stopped accepting patent models, after having first limited them to a size no larger than a foot cubed in hopes to solve the storage problem. So there the Patent Office was, jammed with all these models, along with all their paperwork and drawings that were filed with them. The Office ultimately decided to store the things, followed soon by ridding themselves of them once and for all. A few great visionaries had the foresight to preserve the models, but many perished.
This model is of a boring machine. Such machines were designed to sit atop a timber, with the workman sitting atop the machine. The machines often had two opposing cranks that the workman would furiously turn to drive an auger into the wood. With a series of auger holes bored out of a beam, another man would come to chop the waste out, squaring it up to make a mortice. This was state-of-the-art framing back then, and with these machines a quantum leap in perfomance was realized over the primitive T-shaped augers. Just imagine the pectorals on the dude cranking a machine such as this all day for a living - must have been one buff mother.
This model is an actual working specimen, and were one to timber frame a dollhouse, this model could be put to work to do that. And here's a real surprise that's sure to startle your basic normite - the auger fits inside a square chisel just like that plaid paint-by-numbers TV woodworker's morticing machine has. Shazaam, or what?!
The model also has gauges on its underside so that the next mortice can reference off the previous mortice. There is another gauge that aligns the bit off the edge of the timber by a desired amount. The model also has a lever to switch the gear in order to back the bit out of the work.
So far, no production example of this model has surfaced.
pal, February 17, 1998