Dad, Marlin Elller learned the hard way about the importance of getting a patent! In the last essay it way explained how my father Marlin Eller, bought his father’s garage on Dixie Highway in Deerfield, where the tennis courts are now, for $900 to start his own business at age 21 in 1937. It was already a small machine and welding shop providing services to the local farmers.

However, Dad had much bigger ideas. For instance, he had noted the frustration of the farmers trying to plant their seeds at a set distance apart so that one plant would not interfere with the other. Doing it manually was tedious work and difficult to manage. So Dad came up with an idea to place the seeds in a special bucket which could be pulled from behind a tractor. The bucket was built with two bottoms. The first held the seeds and allowed them to fall through a small opening at the outer edge of the bucket into the second bottom which was actually rotating in a circular motion, and contained evenly spaced seed sized openings. As the compartment with the seed turned through a mechanism timed with the tractor’s forward motion, it would drop the seed down a tube adjusted to place the seed evenly spaced every few inches laterally, and an inch or two below the soil surface. It was a brilliant idea which eliminated an enormous amount of labor and standardized the quality of the crop.

Dad started building these “seed planters” for the local farmers, but quickly realized that there was a much larger potential which would require much greater manufacturing capability. Thus he sent drawings of his design to all the main farm implement manufacturers in the Midwest and North asking them if they would be interested in manufacturing his new product.

He quickly received responses from some of them indicating a great deal of interest and suggesting they would like to come down and see it for themselves.

Dad was very proud. He invited them all to come and see for themselves his new product. They came, they marveled, they asked him if he had a patent!  Dad did not. They smiled and went back north. Within a few months they all came out with their own “rotary seed planter”.  They started selling them even in Florida at less than Dad’s cost for building them one at the time.  

Dad learned his lesson well and he taught it to me, and I’ve taught it to my engineer children in the business:  never reveal to others a unique new product idea on which you do not have at least a patent pending.  About thirty patents and patents pending later, we still remember the story of Dad’s rotary seed planter, and we file a patent on every idea before introducing it to the market place.  Not every patented product turns out to be financially successful. However, like Dad used to say: “we manage to keep food on our table with those that have been...”

David Eller