May I pause the thread for a moment to re-tell the dinkum true story of the joker valve?
The characters include an emperor or three of Rome, a young Anglo-Australian entrepreneur from my home town, a Canadian company about which I know little (but perhaps a CF
member might add more), and an inventor born in Orange, Franklin County,
Massachusetts.
The story spans an astonishing 1,760 years, at minimum. So it'll take a while.
Our story starts with Caracalla, emperor of Rome 198 to 217. Caracalla had an attractive cousin, Julia Soaemias Bassianus, with whom he may have dallied. Julia Soaemius, married to Sextus Varius Marcellus, gave birth to a son in 198. She may have named the babe Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus and she likely had to face down rumors that the father of the babe was Caracalla himself. Julia Soaemius's
family were the hereditary priests of the sun god, the deity various known as Elagabal, Ba'al, Helios, and (later by the Romans) as Sol Indiges and Sol Invictus. You might have heard of him. Because of that, Julia Soaemius's babe was also called Elagabalus ('god of the mountain'). Later on Elagabalus called himself Marcus Aurelius Antonius Augustus, but those formal details distract from our story.
Emperor Caracalla was touring in what we today call
Turkey in early April 217, busy organising the troops to battle the Parthians. On 8 April 217, a pleasant day, Caracalla was on his way to a temple near a town now called Harran. He felt the call of nature and stepped off the path to void his bladder.
Just then, a disgruntled soldier, to whom Caracalla had refused a promotion, pulled out his gladis (the sword shaped like the leaf of a gladiolus plant) and shoved it into Caracalla.
An enterprising prefect, Macrinus, saw an opportunity to end the dynastic
rule of the Severan dynasty (the
family that included the Bassianus mob) and organised the troops around him to terminate with extreme prejudice the disgruntled soldier and to declare Macrinus sole emperor of Rome!
One of the first jobs of Macrinus was to exile Egabalus and his parents to Syria (their hometown, as it turns out). And of course once there, the family (the extended Severan family, including all the Bassianus mob) started plotting to overthrow Macrinus and, in the view of the lack of anyone else, put Elagabalus on the throne as emperor.
Elagabalus was a teenager. Just 18. Caracalla had gained a rep as a tough or even cruel emperor. Elagabalus was like the teenager from hell: self-indulgent, lazy, and so on.
One of the ways Elagabalus got his kicks was his own invention: a fart cushion. He used a bladder (flattened and dried, collected from the local abbatoir) and made sure that the slave preparing it kept a goodly length of urethra attached to the bladder, like a trouser leg (not that trousers were in fashion there, but you get the idea). Elagabalus would get a slave to inflate, to blow up the baldder. The trouser leg extension sealed the air in the bladder.
When Elagabalus got bored with a companion, he'd give one his slaves the nod to slip the inflated fart cushion into the pile against which the boring one usually leaned. And when the inevitable fart
noise came from the trouser leg that we can now call a non-return flutter valve, Elgabalus would laugh and dismiss the source of his boredom from his presence.
You can see why Elagabalus didn't last long as emperor. Four years only. All over by 222.
Let's fast forward to 1887, when a 2-year old Londoner Alfred Johnson Smith arrived in my hometown of
Brisbane,
Australia. A restless bloke, young Alfred, always looking for opportunities. In his late teens/early adulthood, he started a mail-order
service in
Brisbane, selling rubber stamps for offices ("PAID", "URGENT"). Then he moved to the Big Smoke (Sydney, not then known as the starting point for one of the big ocean yacht races). In
Sydney, Alfred expanded massively, imported gadgets and gee-gaws from all over and selling them by adverts in newspapers and popular magazines.
Alfred became well-known as a buyer of gadgets, gee-gaws, and novelties. A Canadian firm, known to me only as JEM Rubber, used the new-fangled vulcanised rubber to make a copy of Elagabalus's fart cushion. JEM Rubber dreamt up the name Whoopee Cushion and sent a few samples to Alfred.
Alfred grasped opportunity like no other Aussie. He moved to Chicago in 1914, set up his own company (the Johnson Smith Company), and
sold Whoopee
Cushions on the streets of Chicago. Once he had multiplied his capital few times over, he re-built the business he had run in
Australia, just bigger. His big thing was a catalog of novelties, a thick offering of fart
cushions, X-ray specs, fake moustaches, Phantom rings, double-sided coins, you-name it.
Johnson Smith Company struggled on with adverts in comic
books after WW2. Which brings us bring us to the 1950s when Verne Louis Patenaude, born in Orange, MA, was grappling with the problems of toilets. And specificially designing a toilet that could fit into a mobile home. Verne needed an inexpensive non-return valve, a flexible thing that would let solids, semi-solids, and liquids through but not let them return.
Verne was as familiar with the Whoopee Cushion, the fart cushion, as anyone. And reckoned that a rubber bicuspid or duckbill valve would be the perfect way to solve his problem. Of course, Verne was smart enough to know that he couldn't call a valve a "fart cushion valve" or a "Whoopee Cushion valve" on a patent application. So, short on time for his self-imposed deadline to get the patent into the US Patent Office on 4 October 1955, Verne gave that duckbill valve a technical name that has endured: the
joker valve.
So there you have it. The story of the joker valve. Get yourself a copy of US Patent 2,865,028 granted to V L Patenaude on 23 December 1958. Look at Figure 2 and Figure 5 for item 72, the joker valve with a 'generally resilient
member 75 with slits 76 thereacross'.
Verne Louis Patenaude died in
Florida on 17 April 1982, peace be upon him. About 1,765 years after Caracalla met the gladis, give or take a few weeks.
For any Canadian who knows more of the story of JEM Rubber: I'd be v grateful to learn more of the story. Who invented the Whoopee Cushion? Who started JEM Rubber?
Linear Mode
Recent Discussions