Born of personal necessity, devices do Houston proud
Screwpull deemed a wine lover’s must, while Weed Eater tamed unruly lawns
By most accounts, Herbert Allen had already led an illustrious career as an inventor in the oil and gas industry. Then he produced the device that brought him fame: the Screwpull wine opener.
George Ballas, a military veteran who eschewed college, launched a dance studio and dabbled in real estate before developing a product to ease yard-care frustration that made him rich: the Weed Eater.
Both men offer contrasting portraits of the varied ways that inventions came to fruition during the 1970s in the Bayou City, affecting their respective industries far and wide.
Allen: ‘Help is on the way!’
A native of Ratcliff, Allen graduated in 1929 from what is now Rice University with a mechanical engineering degree. He soon began work as chief engineer for Cameron Iron Works, having impressed the company’s owner with his inventive problem-solving. (The oil industry at that time, as Allen recalled, was beginning to build deeper wells, “so everything failed. … You didn’t have to look around for something to improve.”)
Allen steadily rose up the ranks: Cameron Iron Works named him vice president in 1943, then general manger in 1950. But even as an administrator, Allen delegated tasks so he had time also “to dream up new products,” an article in Oil and Gas Investor said.
In 1951, as Allen’s success grew, he took his first trip to Europe and enjoyed his first glass of wine. A penchant for collecting began, remaining a sidebar to a life of developing patents. Allen became president of Cameron Iron Works in 1966.
“It was under his leadership that Cameron became the major industrial giant that it is today,” read a biography of Allen in 1978 when he received one of his many awards.
The pivot to the corkscrew occurred in 1977, when the renowned engineer, then largely retired, found he could open wine bottles but knew of no easy-to-use corkscrew for his wife. He sought to enhance improvements to the corkscrew made since the first patent for one was issued in 1795, including the double-level “Wing” corkscrew that arrived in the U.S. in 1930, according to an article on vinepair.com.
Allen spent two years developing a solution from the basement of his River Oaks home. As his wife would recount, he also took prototypes everywhere.
The difficulty of opening wine bottles, it seemed, was a widespread source of frustration: along with a 1978 clipping of a feature on corkpulls, for example, one man wrote to Allen, “I hope your project is progressing as I am not very good at using any of the cork screws mentioned in this article.” (Responded Allen: “Help is on the way!”)
Come 1979, Allen introduced a device called the “Screwpull.” Its design, billed as fool-proof, proved revolutionary. A Teflon coating reduced friction as the spiral twisted into the cork. A frame fit onto the lip of the bottle, centering the operation.
The press raved: “Struggle if you wish with the creaking box-wood double-screw jobs; cut your palms if you must, by failing to emulate the skill of the wine waiter with his type of folding corkscrew… it is entirely up to you,” Michael Broadbent wrote in Decanter magazine in 1979. “But once you have tried the rather ingeniously named ‘Screwpull,’ you will never use another.”
A number of columnists — as well as friends and those in the wine industry — declared they would never open a bottle of wine with anything else. Uncorking a bottle was now easier than ever, they declared, “with no sweat, no straining and no crumbling.”
Allen — who went on to invent other wine-related devices — died at age 83 on June 12, 1990. After his death, he was lauded as an undoubtable genius, a “Renaissance man” and the creator of what a New York Times reporter declared in a 1998 review of the corkscrew, “the greatest contribution to the industry in this century.”
A trustee emeritus, Allen left his company, which he’d formed to produce the devices, to Rice University — “a rare form of philanthropy,” the Chronicle reported.
The university sold it to Le Creuset, which “continues to produce openers in their intended premium form that utilize his insights and are inspired by his original vision,” company spokesman Will Copenhaver said in a prepared statement.
Ballas and The Weed Eater
For Ballas, a native of a small town in Louisiana, the story of invention took place at a different point in life, building on a different sort of experience but, like Allen’s, born of personal necessity.
At age 27 in San Antonio, Ballas was near the end of his military service (he’d served in World War II and in the Korean War) when he saw an ad seeking dance instructors. He opened Dance City USA in Houston, which he described in a 1980 book about entrepreneurship as “the biggest and best dance studio in the world.”
In that book, Ballas described how he sat on his idea for the Weed Eater for years. As the story goes, the concept came to him while taking his Cadillac through the car wash in the 1960s. But a fit of anger over the weeds and hard-to-reach blades of grass in his yard struck Ballas one day in 1971. He grabbed a can from the trash, punched holes through it and knotted a wire in each perforation.
Removing the blades from a standard edger, Ballas then placed the contraption on the end and turned it on. He watched his device spin long enough to see that it worked. The Weed Eater was born.
The idea’s potential became that which could provide him “everything I dreamed of and hoped for,” Ballas said in his book, co-authored with business teacher David Hollas.
The work on producing the Weed Eater began months later, after Ballas sat down for what he thought would be a real estate meeting. As it happened, the man who wanted to discuss a property was also a machinist. Ballas told him about the Weed Eater.
They developed a prototype, which — as with Allen and his corkscrew — he presented to anyone who would pay attention. He drove around asking residents if he could cut their weeds, a process that proved to Ballas that his device uniquely saved time and strain.
Ballas began selling a gas version of the product in 1972, then an electrical model in 1973, finding success when he ran TV ads that showed the myriad ways to use it, like trimming along fences, between walkways or around trees.
In 1974, sales reached $7.8 million, the Chronicle reported. Ballas told the newspaper that he expected that 1975 sales would approach $15 million and that 1976 sales would double to $30 million. In 1977, he sold the corporation to Emerson Electric Co.
Like Allen, other ideas came next for Ballas: there was Nooners, a restaurant in the Westchase Hilton (which he developed) that promised lunches that lasted no more than 20 minutes; and there was the Swan Horse, a trailer hauled by a bicycle.
But Ballas, who taught a course at Rice on entrepreneurship and died on June 25, 2011, at age 85, would always be known as the inventor of the Weed Eater.