We can safely state that the renowned Mr. Seth Wheeler possessed a great dose of such capability and, as an exponent of the Transavantgarde of toilet paper, he enjoyed exploiting this capability in order to invent incredible things, too, and improbable and extraordinary toilet rolls!
It is interesting to find some patents ( … and there are really a great many of them…!) that center around one particular invention of his: being able to tear pieces of a roll of paper tissue so that the resulting sheet has a geometric form! In 1887, Mr. Wheeler thinks up an unusual sheet to facilitate tear-off: square, octagonal, hexagonal and even circular and semi-circular shapes, imagining a simple way to give the reel web all these forms, thanks to a series of blades that define the contours of the perforation breaks. And just three years later, he files a detailed patent relative to the machine capable of making this product. Mr. Wheeler’s was a great example of a Product-Oriented type of R&D, the realization of his dream to see his “extraordinary” product on store shelves even before having precisely studied the machinery able to produce it! And if it is true that the “product oriented” concept defines that the product enters the market practically on its own – since a strong desire for this type of product is generated – and annihilates the competition – because it can be purchased exclusively from the sole producer making it – then Seth’s idea had potentially all the features to yield unparalleled success!
Too bad that this time no one believed in him, considering that still today, we have yet to see such a product in stores and that just one year later, as if awakened from a sort of delirious inventive phase, he filed still another patent to facilitate tearing the sheet. In this one, however, the lines of weakness that partially separate the sheets are, yes, transversal to the direction of the sheet, but they are still perpendicular or,
at most, have a slight angle of inclination, maintaining the sufficient amount of breakage points in order to tear the sheet. A toilet roll that has gone back to normal! Probably Seth – veritable “post-modern pioneer”, was actually beginning to embark on the road to perforation as we know it today!
Pictures 1 - 2 - The Extraordinary roll designed by Seth and his proposal in different geometric shapes, in his patent of 1887.
Picture 3 - The patent for the machine filed subsequently to the roll invention.
Pictures 4 - 5 - Seth’s “return-to-reason”: his hypothesis of a perforation to facilitate sheet tear.
download Seth patents in .pdf
