Innovations and patents
Hot water bottle
In 1903 Penkala patented his first invention – a hot water bottle, which was a predecessor of today's thermos flask. Although the invention was patented in Budapest (No. 29276) the idea was stolen by a certain Mr. Mayer from Wolfenfeld, who presented the thermos flask to the market under his own name.
That was the first case of theft of Penkala's inventions, which was to be followed by many others, and it is still not known who stole them and how.
Rotary toothbrush
In 1905 Penkala registered his invention of a rotary toothbrush under No. 25153 at the Austrian Royal-Imperial Patent Office.
This invention is directly linked to an anecdote from his family life. Every time she was told to brush her teeth, his daughter Thea would run from room to room crying, begging them not to make her brush her teeth. It seemed that a harsh toothbrush was too rough for her gentle gums. So one day daddy Penkala, having spent nights drawing the details of the design on paper, produced a rotary toothbrush. With the assistance of a locksmith he produced its prototype – the first in the world.
When he showed it to his children and demonstrated how it worked, everybody wanted to try it. And, holding two symmetrical levers which resembled the nutcrackers he held in his hand, he promptly cleaned everybody’s teeth.
The principle of this toothbrush was that it did not require a person to brush his or her teeth themself, instead the brush rotated around its axis and in the process brushed the teeth on both sides.
Concurrently with his inventions, Penkala was actively working on his invention of a mechanical pencil and the fountain pen.
Mechanical pencil
On January 24, 1906, Penkala patented, under his family name, the first mechanical pencil in the world. It was registered at the Budapest Patent Office (No. 36946), and in the Patent Office in England (No. 3690 / 1906 and 183242).
Just a few moths later he opened the first penkala workshop at 3 Marija Valerija Street (today, Praška Street.). As he was not happy with the mechanical solution of the penkala mechanism, on September 24 of the same year he registered the invention of an improved type of mechanical pencil at the Royal Hungarian Patent Office in Budapest (No. of 38353).
In order to ensure that his mechanical pencil had a fine line, he produced thin leads himself and inserted them into a metal holder. He also invented the spiral insert which, when turned by the outside extension, pushed the lead out of its holder to the desired length. And the principle of that invention remains unchanged to this day.
His invention of a mechanism which replaced a wooden pencil which always needed sharpening was to earn him worldwide fame.
The success was huge. On the first ten samples of the penkala alone orders began to arrive from towns all over Europe which soon amounted to 100,000 individual items.
A further improvement was the invention of coloured leads. One holder contained blue and red leads, – one end red, the other blue.
Penkalas were produced from a type of ebonite again invented by Mr. Penkala himself.
Having achieved such a massive success with the classic form, Penkala came up with the idea of producing silver penkalas for ladies, with a cap attached to a small, fine chain.
Penkala also designed flat penkalas in a range of colours for carpenters and foresters, whose profession required such writing utensils. Newspapers published pictures of and articles about a pencil which needs no sharpening, which is always long enough and suitable for every hand...
Orders for penkalas of different types arrived from all over Europe and from lands across the ocean. As Penkala himself did not possess sufficient capital, on October 5, 1911, he signed a 10-year contract with the Edmund and Gavro Moster & Co. for the production of penkalas and other affiliated inventions, on the condition that his share be 6000 kronen per year and 33 1/3 of shares. Although the contract was not the best possible for Penkala as the inventor, on his own and with only a few workers he was no longer able to keep up with world demand.
The contract also indicated that Penkala sold the right to 12 of his patents, which he had in other countries, to the Moster Company
At that time Penkala pencils and fountain pens were sold in over 70 countries around the world. In 1911 the factory, which initially employed 300 workers, had a labour force 800 strong. In the period between 1912 and 1926 it was one of the largest factories of writing utensils in the world.
Fountain pen (with solid ink) and clip
In 1907, on May 31, Penkala patented the first fountain pen in the world using solid ink (No. 193717 DRP).
The fountain pen patents have been registered in over 35 countries around the world.
The fountain pen was filled with a pipette, and its nib was made of 14-carat gold.
One problem was that the fountain pen could not be allowed to turn upside down in a pocket because the ink would leak. In order to resolve that problem Penkala came up with the clip which, from that point onwards, was fitted to every fountain pen and, if a customer so wished, on the penkala as well.
Each clip was engraved with the words: Penkala Patent.
In the early spring of 1907 Penkala opened a laboratory at 5 Tuškanac, which he named “Elevator”. He also opened the company “Elevator”, Vinovica, production E. M. Penkala and Associates, where he produced different chemical products.
It was there that he invented dry ink. A fountain pen with dry ink was filled with water. Until that time ink stains on jackets, shirts and cardigan were common, but the improved version of the fountain pen with dry ink which did not leak resolved that particular problem.
In 1927, on August 19, Penkala Werke A.G. and Eng. Theodor Kovacs, Penkala's associate, signed a contract with Gunther Wagner A.G., a large German producer of ink, on the production of writing utensil Model 100.
Penkala and Kovacs contributed their patents and Wagner guaranteed production.
Model 100 is probably the most legendary fountain pen in history, better known as Pelican.
Its production began in 1929.
Insecticide (Krepax)
During his frequent travels Penkala stayed in numerous hotels, but he found that even in the best of them guests were plagued by all kinds of pests at night - bed bugs, cockroaches and even the effects of woodworm. Back then there were no bug repellents which would not be harmful to people.
Widely applicable insecticides were unknown.
Being of a tidy and clean nature Penkala was extremely bothered by bugs.
And being of a mind that was not prepared to simply accept things as they are, Penkala began to mix different types of powders and tested them on various kinds of bug. It did not take him long to come up with positive results, and once he was himself convinced of the effectiveness of the chemical compound he launched it onto the market under the trade name of Krepax.
Krepax had a broad spectrum of efficacy on various types of bug. And so the world was given its first insecticide.
Anode battery
In his laboratory, Elevator, he began tests with anode battery cells (the principle which is today frequently used for the so-called “button batteries”).
He was determined to find a chemical product which, added to an enclosed lead casing, would produce electrical energy of low power, 6-9 W. He also studied, and solved chemical equations aimed at finding the best composition of electrolytes. And he created a mixture of manganese dioxide, acetylene soot, graphite and salmiac.
Although the principle of the Leclanche battery was known at the time, Penkala wanted to produce a source of electric energy of as high an intensity as possible. He noticed that square batteries with plates possessed a higher capacity, but also a higher inner resistance.
After his death, drawings of the “eternal” dynamo battery were found among his papers, and judging by the perfection of detail he would have probably patented the invention. One of the problems he always encountered was a lack of qualified workers who could produce the prototypes of his inventions. Notably, in Penkala's time there were very few highly qualified artisans. And when any of his patents proved itself to have practical value the money men of Zagreb would come forward with their exploitative offers. Consequently, Penkala always endeavoured to finance his works himself.
Detergent and laundry bluing
Almost every day, exactly at 10 a.m., Penkala would leave his workshop in Praška Street and take his favourite mid-morning snack at the Jägerhorn in Ilica: fried liver or fried egg and a mug of beer. On his way back he would drop into the Corso coffee house where, over a cup of cappuccino and a few cigarettes he would leaf through foreign journals, always on the lookout for new technical achievements. Both in the restaurant and in the coffee house, as well as wherever his travels took him, he noticed stained tablecloths. And he decided to find something that would remove such stains.
He spent days experimenting, mixing various chemical ingredients, until one day he came up with a powder which eliminated stains not only from fruit but also from ink. And so the first detergent was born. Finding no understanding among the financiers and industrialists Penkala kept this detergent only for his home use - to the delight of his wife.
At the same time he discovered laundry blue. Unlike detergent, it sparked a great deal of interest among all the laundries in the town where officers' white shirts were being washed. Once shirts and other clothes were washed and rinsed, they would be given the final rinse in water in which small balls of laundry blue had been dissolved.
Laundry bluing became an essential necessity of an ever growing number of households, since it replaced the bleach used up to that point, which after prolonged use makes clothes threadbare.
Rotary turbine (Hovercraft)
In September 1908, in the Budapest Patent Office, under No. 47149, he registered a patent for the rotary turbine, which could be water or air cooled.
This invention ultimately resulted in a floating craft, i.e. what we today know as the hovercraft, produced some 50 years later as a new means of transport.
Xylolite
The list of registered patents include a liquid preparation for the impregnation of railway sleepers – Xylolite. It was used for conservation of railway sleepers, preventing the rot induced by atmospherics and parasites. This invention was exceptionally important to the safety of rail transport since the problem of the life of such sleepers plagued every railway company in the world.
Innovations in the field of audio technology
In 1906 Slavoljub Penkala and Edmund Moster began their cooperation, which resulted in the “Penkala-Moster” company. Together they started the construction of a new factory in the Baroš Street (today, Branimirova Street) where, in 1908, Penkala moulded his first gramophone records. Only a year later he was the first in these parts to record the voices of our opera and operetta singers on Edison-Bell-Penkala records in Nikolićeva Street (today, Tesla Street) using a microphone designed by the Englishman, Goutman.
The gramophone pickup of the day had an inbuilt membrane onto which the mechanical vibrations of the needle were transferred and transformed directly into sound. In order to achieve as faithful a reproduction of the human voice as possible, being as he was a passionate music lover, Penkala produced thin membranes which greatly improved reproduction.
He also perfected the gramophone needle, which up to that point it was made of steel and good for use on only two records. He produced a chrome needle which could play 10 records, while the synthetic two-sided chrome needle gave good performance on 40 records.
Immediately before WW1 the Austrian military authorities became interested in Penkala's improvements in gramophone microphones.
Using his innovations the Austrian authorities achieved significant improvements in their military radio tracking stations, which they even named “Penkala”. But Penkala himself never learned about that since he was never on the battlefield.
Aeroplane
Flying on the wings of ideas
Whenever time allowed, Penkala spent time with his son Eduard catching different types of butterfly and in studying their flight. That which delighted him most was the silhouette of the Neptis Lucilla which, as a rule, he found at the foot of Medvednica (a mountain on the northern side of Zagreb) on the site known as Kraljičin zdenac ( Queen's Well). It was in this butterfly that Penkala saw the vision of his aircraft, a vision that was to remain with him until the end of his life.
With stability of the aeroplane in the forefront of his mind, Penkala constructed a specific type of aircraft which had not been built anywhere else in the world.
He was inspired by the flight of birds which he observed with great attention, as he did the Neptis Lucilla, which behaves like a bird during flight. He noticed that while taking off and landing pigeons and swallows fan their tails and turn their side slightly upwards. This mechanism of nature preoccupied him for days. He wanted to create the construction of an aeroplane tail which he could, should he need to, move by way of steel cables, thus altering its configuration during take off and landing, while elevating it in flight.
Needless to say, Penkala succeeded in his intention to create such a mechanism. The tail area was able to assume five positions.
In 1909 he registered a device for elevation into the air and forward movement with he Royal Hungarian Patent Office under No. 47374.
Penkala completed his two-seater aeroplane built according to his concept and drawings in 1909, and in 1910 he flew it.
He named it after the butterfly: Neptis Lucilla.
On December 10, 1909, under Patent No. 50774, he registered with the Royal Hungarian Patent Office his invention of an aeroplane built on the principle of a kite, with a special type of rudder, and on December 28, under Patent No. 50775, he registered a system of aeroplane support wings.
Concurrently with the construction of his aeroplane he also built a hangar for its storage at the military training grounds in Črnomerec, near Zagreb, opened on February 23, 1910, also marking the opening of the first runway in Croatia. That is at the same time the date of birth of Croatian aviation and of the first Croatian airport.
In April he executed his first ascent with his aeroplane, and in June he performed his first public flight for the citizens of Zagreb.
All the money he earned with the sale of penkalas and other inventions, as well as the remainder of his wife's dowry, Penkala invested into the construction of his aeroplane, despite the fact that the whole world viewed the idea of an aeroplane with scepticism, mockery and conservatism. Small wonder that none of the monied people of Zagreb was interested in financing his aeroplane: they saw no possibility of profit in it.
The most important role in the construction of his aeroplane and its flight was played by Dragutin (Karlo) Novak - a young technician. He met Penkala at the recommendation of his guardian and uncle, Koloman Arkus, who was a major in the Austrian army. Dragutin Novak became not only the guardian of Penkala’s aeroplane and tools in the hangar, but also a dedicated collaborator in the completion of the assembly of the aircraft. He lived in a small room in the hangar. Later on, during WW1, he was a flying instructor at a military school in Fischamend, Austria.
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