UULYSSES C. OBLOSSER was granted five patents from 1899 to 1914, starting with an emergency railway signal and ending with a hand-push vacuum cleaner. In between there was a clamp for train bed rails, a thill or shaft support for horse-drawn wagons, and a pork greaser.
Of the five, only one is believed to have made it to the market – the pork greaser.
Oblosser, who listed his hometowns on his patents as Millville, Rohrsburg, and Bloomsburg, all in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, described his greaser as a “culinary implement” in his Patent No. 968,968 granted August 30, 1910.
His invention, he said, “has for its primary object a sanitary device for holding a pork greaser for the purpose of greasing griddles, pans and the like.”
The device employed a two-tine fork and a wire holder that could be separated or closed with an adjustable clamp.
The manufactured device came in at just over 8½-inches in length and is marked in small print on the tin clamp ring: OBLOSSER SANITARY GREASER HOLDER PAT’D FEBY. 5, 1910, BLOOMSBURG, PA U.S.A.
Oblosser, who died in Bloomsburg in 1928, or the manufacturer, apparently got mixed up on the patent date. Although the greaser is marked February 5, 1910, the true patent date was August 30, 1910.
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(c) 2020, Donald Thornton. All rights reserved.