There are two sides to every argument, and I’m in no position to take sides in the legal fight between Bad Boy Mowers and Intimidator Inc., the two homegrown manufacturers of lawn mowers and UTVs in Batesville. But I’ll tell you this: Managing Editor Jan Cottingham’s recent interview with Robert Foster, the inventor who founded Intimidator after a painful split with Bad Boy, was a great read.
Foster is one of those indispensable guys who understand how everything works. As a child in the wide spot in Independence County called Thida, he would cut pictures of lawn mowers out of magazines. In my line of work, that’s what’s called a “telling detail,” a small fact that captures the essence of the thing being described.
Eventually he patented the “Independent Four Wheel Vibration Damping System for Riding Mowers” that is the subject of a patent dispute between the companies. And now that Intimidator has branched out from utility vehicles to mowers, he’s designing them with the “curvy … all-steel look” of the old muscle cars.
“Everyone says that if Batman had a mower, it would be a Spartan,” Foster said. At that point in the story, I was ready to buy a Spartan mower for the quarter-acre lawn that I have never once mowed — and that was before he talked about the steel-belted radial tires that are a first in the mowing industry.
People who can visualize things that have never existed are as mysterious and awe-inspiring to me as the people who can hear music that has never been written. (I can’t even make up stories. I couldn’t write fake news if I wanted to.)
As it happens, I was one of about two dozen in attendance at the funeral last week in Jacksonville for another Arkansas-born inventor you never heard of.
Larry Fullerton died on Thanksgiving Day at his home in New Hope, Alabama, a little town near Huntsville, the Space Age technology hub where he spent decades inventing things. He was less than three weeks from his 66th birthday when he succumbed to the brain cancer that had been diagnosed in January.
Larry and I were not close personally, but I attended his funeral in support of his mother, Nell, who is my mother’s first cousin. What’s more, our late fathers were also first cousins, which isn’t as creepy as it sounds but certainly made for overlapping family reunions.
A small funeral was held at St. Jude the Apostle Catholic Church before Larry was buried near his father and brother in Cleburne County. It occurred to me that he had many times more patents — the family says more than 500 — than mourners at the tiny funeral. There might even be one for every person who paid his respects at a subsequent memorial service in Huntsville.
Fullerton was born in Fayetteville. After the funeral, his mother told me the story of his first invention: As a toddler, he stuck a bobby pin into an electrical outlet, and the subsequent noise made him declare, “I made a firecracker!”
A military brat who spent many of his formative years in Europe, Fullerton returned to Fayetteville for college, earning an engineering degree from the University of Arkansas in 1974.
He moved his family to Huntsville in 1979 to work for NASA. Later he began working on (and patenting) practical uses for a wireless technology called time modulated ultra-wideband.
The last decade of his life was fixated on magnets. A company he founded, Correlated Magnetics, received more than 100 patents related to a product called Polymagnets, which are essentially programmable magnets. For his work on Polymagnets, Fullerton received a Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine in 2010.
“The applications appear limitless,” Popular Mechanics wrote, “and include a diverse array of fields: From pick-proof locks and easy on/off snowboard bindings to frictionless gears and robots that can scale walls without touching them.”
After his tumor was diagnosed and excised in a surgery that also removed part of his exceptional brain, one of his brothers suggested that Larry might finally understand what it’s like to be like the rest of us. But no. He continued tinkering and programming until very near the end, his widow, Susan, told me.
That’s a telling detail, too.
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Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |