To understand this story, it helps to understand my mindset at the time it happened.

Start with the day I invented the Newbould Indexer May, 5, 1971.

That night, I don’t think I slept a wink. The first half of the night was spent listing all the possible applications I could think of for the indexer. The second half, was totaling up all the money to be made with it.

Keep in mind, I was an owner of a small shop. I had no training or experience in...

rj newbould

What got me into the Smithsonian Institution? The Wall Street Journal…. sort of.

I had read an article in there about the Rolamite. They said something like, “History’s 27th basic mechanism hasn’t revolutionized industry.” That’s not an exact quote. I can’t find the copy of the article that I saved. I only hope that I didn’t throw it out accidentally in one of my spring cleaning fits.

I contacted the writer at the WSJ and asked him the source of the list of basic...

rj newbould

From my thread in General...

My answer to him:

Not really. I had studied patent law and procedure for 7 months in order to write and prosecute the patent myself. I knew that this was one of those rare patents which no one could get around. It was the main reason for making no application aspects...

rj newbould

After visiting AA Gage, and bearding the lion, I felt confident that no one else had an indexer like mine. I was ready to tool up and go into production.

The first order of business was to get some way of indexing the teeth on a mold for the indexer. I had gone through the process of what to make the indexer from, and decided that plastic would be the way to start.

I needed a master indexer, or good rotary table. Moore advertised both. A 2 arc second rotary table,...

rj newbould

In patenting procedure is a thing called “Interference”. It is a court type hearing wherein two competing applications for the same invention duke it out to see which applicant has the valid claim to the patent.

Normally speaking, (in 1971 at least) the patent examiner guidelines called for not declaring an interference if there was at least a three month separation between to applications for a SIMPLE invention, which I considered the indexer to be. In such a case, the first application...

rj newbould