One of the aspects of being a patent attorney that I enjoy is learning how seemingly simple things we take for granted in modern life are not so simple. I’m not talking computers and smartphones, which no one assumes are simple. I’m talking things like, how does a potato chip factory continuously fill bags with chips?*
So it was that my brother stumbled across a biography of George Roby Dempster, the inventor of the dumpster. I’m sure I’m not alone in not having ever given dumpsters much thought, but it turns out they were quite an advance over prior technology, viz. having a team of people sweeping the streets into individual garbage containers, or even into a larger container pulled by horses. Enabling many people to dump their garbage in a single container for collection significantly increased the efficiency of refuse collection. But that was just the beginning. Many if not most of Dempster’s patents (the first of which was apparently issued in 1912 and the last of which issued after his death 1964) were on modifications that allowed trucks to pick up dumpsters, empty the contents into the truck, and then compress those contents, enabling a single truck to collect several dumpsters’ worth of garbage, with a single driver who never needed to leave the vehicle.
Dempster’s story shows that, with some perspicacity and a plethora of perseverance, it really is possible to turn garbage into gold.
*There’s an essentially endless spool of printed bag material, and a machine that feeds this to the end of a funnel or chute as it spreads the bag material open. The material is heat sealed at the end distal to the chute, the bag is filled, the end proximal to the chute is sealed and the sealed distal end is cut, and the process repeats. There’s machinery to do that. And to make the bags, and to print the bags before they’re delivered to the potato chip factory. And no doubt, when those machines were introduced, someone applied for patents on them and their use.