143rd Edition
The Three Greatest Inventors
I’ve decided to take a different approach to the three greatest inventors. The obvious ones, like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, are so well known that there is nothing I can add that just about everyone doesn’t already know. So, instead, I’ve searched for people that invented or discovered something that made a huge impact at the time, but also had a lasting impact, even up until today, despite the fact that each inventor never became a household name. My three unsung heroes of discovery, so to speak.
The first is Curtis G. Cullin, a Sergeant in the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in WWII. Shortly after the D-Day landings, the Allied Forces faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge – the impregnable Norman hedgerows. Nothing, it seemed, could break through these barriers, some of which were centuries old. Then some unknown GI came up with the idea of welding metal prongs to the front of a Sherman tank (legend has it that this idea came from some Tennessee hillbilly named Roberts). Sergeant Cullin realized the potential of the idea, and he worked to perfect the system and helped develop a prototype that could be used by other tankers. The term Rhino-Tank was soon coined and, as they say, the rest is history.
Sergeant Cullin was awarded the Legion of Merit for his ingenuity, which undoubtedly saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives as Allied forces eventually broke through the hedgerows on their way to liberating Western Europe from Nazi occupation. The ingenuity of the Allied forces, particularly the British and Americans was a decisive factor in their ultimate victory.
My second is Charles “Gus” Dorais. In 1913, Gus spent the summer at the beach in Cedar Point, Ohio as a lifeguard. In his spare time, he worked on perfecting a new football strategy – the forward pass. His teammate, who caught his passes that fateful summer, was a relatively unknown football player from Norway. While the forward pass had been a legal play for several years, no teams had used the strategy effectively or decisively in a game. Gus and his teammate spent their summer perfecting their aerial strategy for one important reason, to overcome the overwhelming size and strength of their archrival, the nation’s preeminent college football powerhouse, Army. In that historic game, Notre Dame, led by Gus and his soon to be famous teammate, upset the heavily favored Army team, 35 – 13. College football had changed forever.
The rest of the story… Who was that teammate from Norway, who caught a 40-yard touchdown pass in that game, the longest pass play in Notre Dame history at the time? None other than Knute Rockne. I think it is fair to say that the legend of Notre Dame began with Gus Dorais. The inspiration of Win One for the Gipper, of an underdog overcoming insurmountable odds, and of course, the heartwarming story of Rudy, all owe their origin to the golden arm of Gus Dorais.
Number three is Ruth Graves Wakefield. Ruth was born on June 17, 1903, in East Walpole, Massachusetts. Ruth and her husband Kenneth purchased an historic building and turned it into a lodge called the Toll House Inn. Due to Ruth’s excellent cooking the Inn became very popular. In 1938, Ruth was searching for new and improved cookie recipes and was experimenting with adding pieces of chocolate to her current recipes. Her Toll House chocolate chip cookies soon became wildly popular. During WWII, Ruth’s cookies were sent to the troops overseas.
Where would we be without chocolate chip cookies? As a child, any time I was sad, my grandmother would bake Toll House chocolate chip cookies. How much love have moms and grandmothers put into chocolate chip cookies over the years? How many relationships have started by neighbors sharing homemade chocolate chip cookies? How many birthdays have been celebrated with the same? It’s hard to overstate the significance of such a simple item, isn’t it? Thank you, Ruth. And thank you, Grandma Hazel.
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Michael Kayes
*These views are my personal opinions and are not the viewpoints of any company or organization.