EVERETT – Thanks to a woman from this region, men can find out what it’s like to be pregnant. Sort of.
The empathy belly was invented in 1980s by Linda Ware, a Redmond teacher who “wanted to give high school boys an idea what it was like to be pregnant,” said Adam Woog, author of a book on Northwest inventors, in a talk at the Everett Public Library on Sunday.
“It’s heavy, it hurts, it makes you have to go to the bathroom,” Woog said of the contraption.
“Did they try driving with it?” asked Liz Carpenter of Lynnwood, drawing laughs from those at the talk.
Woog, Seattle author of “Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats: 100 Years of Invention in the Pacific Northwest,” discussed and showed slides of many inventions that have come into everyday use, and others relegated to the ideas-that-went-nowhere bin.
Thanks to people from the Northwest, Woog said, we can stay warmer in the winter, keep bread fresh, go water skiing, eat better oysters, get kidney dialysis, have our hearts defibrillated, listen to electric guitars and put on a happy face.
Eddie Bauer of Seattle in the 1930s was the first in the United States to manufacture the down vest and down parka, according to Woog. Bauer got the idea from an uncle who had been in the Russian army, where they used down coats, he said.
In the early ’50s. Floyd Paxton of Yakima invented the Kwik-Lok, the omnipresent plastic doohickeys used to close plastic bags of bread and other food.
Don Ibsen of Seattle is credited along with two others with inventing water skis in the 1920s. He fashioned two cedar planks 8 feet long and “spent the rest of the summer bumming rides on speedboats all around Lake Washington,” Woog said.
The “sexless” oyster is really an oyster that’s been genetically altered to put its energy into growth rather than reproduction, created by Kenneth Chew of the University of Washington in the early ’70s. It was one of the first genetically altered animals, Woog said.
The dialysis machine was created by UW professor Belding Scribner around 1960. The heart defibrillator was invented by Karl Edmark of Seattle in the ’60s, leading to the creation of the Medic One emergency response unit, according to Woog.
Paul Tutmarc of Seattle was one of several men who simultaneously invented the electric guitar, by putting an amplifier inside an acoustic guitar, in the early 1930s. Many of Tutmarc’s family members lived in the Lynnwood area, according to Carpenter, a former school teacher there.
Seattle ad executive David Stern created the now ubiquitous yellow “happy face” symbol in 1967.
Some of the ideas that went nowhere could be useful today, or at least make people dream, Woog said. The “aerocar,” developed by Molt Taylor of Longview in 1949, was equipped with detachable wings and tail that folded up into a trailer. Three or four were custom-made, but it was too expensive to produce on a large scale and was dropped, Woog said.
Frances Gabe of Newberg, Ore., built a self-cleaning house, in which furniture and walls could be hosed down, dishes washed and stored in the same place, and clothes washed in their closets.
August Dvorak of UW professor created a simplified typewriter keyboard in 1936 that made typing much easier and faster, according to Woog. The most frequently used letters and numbers are in the places where they’re the easiest to hit. The standard keyboard was made difficult on purpose to prevent fast typing from jamming typewriters, according to Woog.
Finally, the self-tipping hat, conceived by two Spokane men in the 1890s, would enable men to doff their cap to women when their hands were full, Woog said. With a slight lean forward, the hat would tip, spin around and settle back on the man’s head. None were produced, Woog said.
“You get the impression (the inventors) had their tongues wedged in their cheeks,” he said.
Reporter Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439 or sheets@heraldnet.com.
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