Here is a 1912 article about a young man who invented a rat trap. The farm boy had no formal training and had never been inside a machine shop. That didn’t stop him from building a trap that would electrocute unwanted rats.
Ben Card, Farm Boy, Invents $100,000 Rat Trap
He Never Saw an Electrical Shop, But He Beat All the Wise Inventors of the World to the Prize
By E.C. Rodgers
Markesan, Wis., May 15. — Ever hear of Ben Card? No? Well, Ben Card is “only a farm boy,” and goes to school yet, and says his mother’s his best girl. Also Ben is America’s champion boy inventor. He has just invented such a good rat trap that he has been offered $100,000 for it by a syndicate headed by ex-Gov. B.B. Odell of New York.
A rat trap that would work incessantly and effectively day and night has been long sought.
That’s the kind of trap Ben Card has invented, he says.
On a little farm just our of Markesan lives the Widow Card and her three sons. The youngest is Ben, aged 17. When I knocked at the door a young man came.
“Yep,” he smiled, “I’m the fellow.”
Ben’s a red headed farm boy, tanned and freckled in real farm boy fashion, didn’t look like a “regular” inventor, but I took him at his word and was soon seated in the kitchen talking with him and his mother.
“Just as soon as I heard that they would pay lots of money for an electric rat trap unlike and better than ever made I started to work,” Ben explained.
“Now I have it.
“It works like this,” Ben pointed out: “The rat comes up this ‘walk,’ goes on this trip, smells the bait, puts its forefoot on this shelf to get nearer the bait, and so doing completes a circuit through its body, and is electrocuted.
“The current releases the catch beneath the trip, one of four revolving levels, and the weight of the dead rat turns the trip wheel. The rat falls into a receptacle beneath, or into a tunnel which may carry it far away, and another trip is ready for the next rat.
“It puts them out of sight one at a time as fast as they can walk into the trap and no rat ever gets a smell of the one ahead. It can be used wherever there is an electric light socket to get the current.”
“What are you going to do with that $100,000?” I asked.
“First of all, I’m going to build a new house for mother. She’s my best girl every day in the week.”
“That’s so,” added his mother and I could see she liked to be her boy’s ‘best girl.’ Ben’s father died 12 years ago, and I was left with three boys. Ben was only five then. We managed to get along here on the farm, and the boys went to the country school, but I tell you it was a hard job.
“Ben always did have a hankering after machines and things like that,” observed Mrs. Card,Having at last got the pies in the oven.
“Once I put him to work shelling beans. At noon when I came in from helping out in the field, I didn’t find any shelled beans. Out there back of the barn was Ben running the beans, pods and all, through a machine and that machine shelled them just as nice as I could do it by hand and a whole lot faster. Ben called is a bean thresher.”
Source: The Day Book (Chicago, Illinois newspaper). May 15, 1912
