This picture shows inventor Clarence Rand’s machine shop in Lewiston about 1905. Rand was known for his inventions both practical and silly, including a ring-adjusting machine for bobbins and a two-bicycle set-up that featured a mannequin dressed as a woman. After he appeared in Lewiston’s centennial parade in 1895 on one of the bicycles and the mannequin on the other, Rand placed the mannequin and her bicycle atop his machine shop’s sign. Lewiston Evening Journal

LEWISTON — In a small blacksmith’s shop on Park Street back in 1898, Walter ‘Jack’ Frost nursed a little oil-powered engine as though it were his baby.

Walter ‘Jack’ Frost, a Lewiston inventor Lewiston Daily Sun

He hadn’t invented or manufactured the engine, but it was the essential machinery for the tinkerer’s latest task: trying to create what he called “a sparker” that could efficiently combine a squirt of oil with an electrical current to ignite the fuel and operate the engine.

From early morning until late at night, the Lewiston Evening Journal reported, Frost worked tirelessly to find the right combination of wiring and crafted metal to get the process right.

The paper reported that after weeks of work, Frost believed he’d figured it all out and planned to convince the engine’s maker to buy his idea.

Meanwhile, Frost told the paper, he intended to make a better horseless carriage over the coming winter. He even speculated about the likelihood of a battery-powered flying machine in the not-to-distant future.

When Frost died in 1941, the Lewiston Daily Sun said he’d invented machines “for making paper hoops, for stripping leather board, for crimping boots and shoes, for driving loose tacks, for making leather board shanks, for skiving heat counters, for an automatic fire alarm, heating devices for gas stoves, time stop motions for gasoline engines, railroad telephones and signal systems” and more.

It’s not clear whether Frost ever made any money, but he most assuredly embodied the quest for innovation that has spurred many in Maine to try.

Lewiston, like many of New England’s manufacturing cities, has always had more than its share of tinkerers angling to invent something that would make them rich, famous or at least provide enough income to let them keep on trying to innovate.

Most, though, remained obscure and their work, however useful, was rarely noticed and quickly forgotten.

A MAINER HOLDS PATENT #1

Among the constitutional provisions for the creation of the United States government is a section that grants Congress the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

With that in mind, lawmakers quickly created a patent system to be overseen by a three-member board. Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and a future president, was one of the initial trio charged with deciding which discoveries should be granted a patent.

It didn’t take the board long to decide that Samuel Hopkins deserved the first patent, for a process of making potash, an ingredient used in fertilizer. President George Washington signed that patent.

John Ruggles Maine State Museum

But the system was more than a little slapdash and disorganized in its early decades, much like the government as a whole as it stumbled toward the discovery of bureaucracy.

In the 1830s, a U.S. senator from Maine, John Ruggles of Thomaston, used his position as chairman of the Committee on Patents and Patent Office to push through a bill to reorganize and standardize the Patent Office beginning in 1836.

The Patent Act of 1836 that Ruggles championed declared that once it took effect, each patent would be given a number in order starting with 1. Early patents would simply carry an X to indicate they preceded the system.

On July 28, 1836, the Patent Office issued Patent #1 for a “Locomotive Steam-Engine for Rail and Other Roads,” an improvement in the traction wheel used by the primitive engines beginning to run over newly laid tracks in America.

The inventor rewarded with that first numbered patent? None other than John Ruggles of Thomaston.

In his letter to the Patent Office, Ruggles said he had “invented a new and useful improvement or improvements on locomotive-engines used on railroads and common roads by which inclined planes and hills may be ascended and heavy loads drawn up the same with more facility and economy than heretofore, and by which the evil effects of frost, ice, snows, and mud on the rail causing the wheels to slide are obviated.”

Drawing submitted by U.S. Sen. John Ruggles of Maine for what became Patent #1: a “Locomotive Steam-Engine for Rail and Other Roads.” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

“The obstacles met with in ascending inclined planes with locomotives drawing heavy loads after them, are the want of power in the engine, and the deficiency of adhesion to the rails, my improvements are designed to give a multiplied tractive power to the locomotive and to prevent the evil of the sliding of the wheels, and for these improvements I have made application for a patent to be issued according to the provisions of law,” he wrote.

Oscar Douglass, inventor and Lewiston politician Lewiston Evening Journal

He had the patent in hand within two weeks.

He wasn’t the only politician trying to make a better widget.

A Lewiston city councilor in the 19th century, Oscar Gardner Douglass, had an “inventive turn of mind,” the Journal reported in 1894.

“His latest scheme is a sectional rowing boat which is built in three parts like boxes and can be taken to pieces as easily as a modern gun and packed one inside of another” that would all fit in the back of a carriage, the Journal said.

He didn’t drown, so maybe it worked.

CLARENCE RAND

Holding a patent doesn’t mean inventors are going to get rich. It only means they have an exclusive right to use, or sell, their patented work for 20 years.

That proved long enough to make huge fortunes for some people, but for every Thomas Edison there have been a thousand Clarence Rands.

Rand, who came up with an astonishing array of ideas, was an oddball from the start.

When Lewiston held its centennial parade in 1895, an event that drew hordes of people amid much hoopla, Rand captured an outsized share of their attention.

It was a time just before automobiles when newfangled bicycles were all the rage — and women were carefully finding ways to join the fad.

During the 1895 centennial parade in Lewiston, inventor Clarence Rand fooled the public into thinking he was riding a newfangled bicycle in tandem with a woman. The woman was, in fact, a dummy and the bikes were “ironed together” so that Rand’s pedaling alone propelled them both through the streets of his hometown. Lewiston Evening Journal

During the parade, Rand rolled along the route pedaling in tandem with a woman riding a bike right beside him, a splendid sight.

What they didn’t know, until he confessed later, is that he had welded the two bicycles together so his pedaling alone provided the power — and propped up a well-dressed dummy to fool the audience into thinking they were a happy couple riding along in tandem.

The fake woman on a bicycle lived on as a prop atop the Rand & Harvey Machine sign in front of Rand’s Main Street shop.

Rand could usually be found inside, weaving inventions after work hours, as the Journal wrote in 1905.

At one point, he trained the local rats to come climb into his lap and eat oyster cracker crumbs. He even invited a reporter to come watch them clamber up his legs one by one for their evening repast.

Rand was always a tinkerer — and he got at least one patent along the way, in 1927: Patent number 1649186 for a “Ring-adjusting machine for bobbins,” something to help the machinery at the mills operate a little better. It’s not clear whether anyone ever used his invention.

NO SHORTAGE OF INVENTORS

Maybe it’s the long winters, but plenty of Lewiston and Auburn residents have devoted lifetimes to the quest for innovation.

Carlyle Whipple of Lewiston came up with a patented method of hanging reciprocating saws in 1857 that was cool enough to earn notice in Scientific American.

Rendering for a patent for a “Ring-adjusting machine for bobbins” submitted by Lewiston inventor Clarence Rand. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Orren Dinsmore, who in his youth tried to figure out how to allow marbles to roll uphill, became a blacksmith on Bates Street back in the age of horseshoes.

At a banquet one night in Lewiston, he noticed that waiters had to turn around and back through swinging doors when they had their hands full.

“By the next night,” the Journal reported, “he had made a machine that opened the door whenever anyone approached it.” It looked like a mat on the floor, the paper said.

Automatic doors like the one he created are commonplace today, but without Dinsmore, perhaps nobody would have ever conjured one into reality.

Not every idea turns out to be useful.

E.H. Kimball took aim at the invasion of brown-tail moths more than a century ago with his Kimball Insect and Brown Tail Moth Trap. It didn’t work well enough.

Among the devices developed by Frost, the tireless Lewiston inventor, was “a contrivance for locating lost vessels.” It consisted of a huge steel buoy attached to a long chain that would, in theory, bob around on the surface of the water directly above a known shipwreck, with the name of the ship painted on the buoy’s side.

Frost included a tiny chamber in the buoy for the crew to leave a written account of what had gone wrong, though why people struggling to save a ship would stop to leave an account of the struggles was not explained.

But some inventions, for sure, helped humanity.

An employee at Bates Mill in Lewiston, John Polland, earned several patents in the 1880s for parts used in modern washing machines: the centrifugal wringer, the automatic reverse-spin mechanism and the two-roll press mangle, which at least sounds impressive.

Over the years, a great many things have come into being because someone in the Twin Cities got an idea and pursued it.

Perhaps the most famous was Dr. Bernard Lown, a refugee educated at Lewiston High School who later in life invented the direct current defibrillator, a medical device that has already saved tens of thousands of lives.

Lown, whose work for a safer world helped him win a Nobel Peace Prize, is so well-known that the United States Mint put him on a dollar coin this year as part of a program to honor America’s innovators.

J. Lincoln apples displayed in black and white in a patent application approved in September 2024. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Inventions are ongoing, of course.

As recently as Sept. 17, a Mainer got a particularly fruitful patent.

Jared Carr of Cornish received one for developing a new apple variety called the “J. Lincoln” that is “distinguished by its resistance to the disease fire blight, and its flavorful fruit, which is well-suited for hard cider production.”

He found the seedling by chance in 2015 “along the edge of the forest on private family property” near an abandoned orchard and was able to graft it after ascertaining that it was something new to the world.

Jared and Jacqueline Carr run a small cellar cidery, the Cornish Cider Co., on 20 acres in Cornish that includes a young orchard, a field and forest.

Apple varieties like the newly patented one contribute to the couple’s effort to create new ciders “made from wild yeasts and wild seedling apple varieties found in and around Cornish along with specific apples from local orchards.”