The Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch

When I dropped out of college, I went to work for Automix Keyboards in Bellevue, Wa. They manufactured information feed keyboards for phototypesetters. They were one of the first in the US to use computer-in-a-chip technology. I ran a flow solder machine and did general machine repair and maintenance for a printed circuit board assembly area. The firm was very high tech for it's time. They had a Dee System 8 flow solder machine that was so advanced it wasn't even on the market yet. They had bought it as a prototype off the floor of a trade fair. It was a very well designed and efficient machine.

The keyboards were all Reed Switch actuated, and very robust, but pretty expensive. They were combined with the interface machine that allowed a single person to produce a multiple font, multi-color document, like a small newspaper, from a single terminal. Basically you can do the same thing from any computer now, but at the time it was innovative.

Our product was expensive. The same technology that is included in every computer available for desktop publishing cost about $20,ooo.oo at the time.

The consoles we made produced tape, Magnetic tape or paper punch tape similar to Telex tape, which was then fed into the actual phototypesetter.

I was staying late, repairing the pump in a Freon cleaning system that had a bearing go bad, and ran into one of the head Engineers. I asked him what he was doing there so late. He was literally pacing the floor and muttering to himself. "Waiting for the @#$%^&* punches to come in."

"What punches are those?" I asked.

"The Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch" he replied.

"What the heck do they have to do with Phototypesetters?"

"You know how the Keyboards and consoles work?"

"Sure, they use magnetic or paper tape to feed instructions to the Phototypesetters."

"When you are making a paper tape, each letter of the alphabet is represented by a combination of holes in the tape .Little pins feeding through holes in the paper tape to read the combinations. If you make a mistake, you have to correct the tape by manually punching out the line on the tape, creating a null. When we designed the machine, we had to have a unique size and shape of punch to null out the holes in the paper tape. On of the guys had a punch that he had laying around the garage, so we used that. We started up the business with that one punch, and we found someone to produce additional punches."

When we went to Patent out system, they found that the punch we were using was already patented. That particular size and shape of punch was patented by the Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch Co. and we were infringing on their patent."

The only address for the Perkins Co. was a P.O. box in rural Georgia. No phone, no address. The company sent a representative to Georgia to meet with Mr. Perkins. He lived in a modest shack out in the swamps. The punch was used to make a small hole between the tendon and bone in a chicken's leg so that they could be hung upside down for processing at the chicken processing plant. It had been invented by his dad as a young man, and every chicken processing plant had to have several. Replacement kept him as busy as he wanted to be, and he could work at his own pace. He made punches according to his own whim and time table.

If he wanted to buy a new pair of shoes, he could make up a couple of punches and mail them out to whoever was on the top of the order list, buy whatever he wanted, and stop until he needed something else.

Was he willing to sell the patent? Absolutely not, he had regular customers who depended on his product.

Would he allow us to manufacture the punches and pay him royalties? Absolutely not. He didn't trust us to maintain the quality control he infused in each and every Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch. What if inferior examples found their way on to the market place? What would people think? How could he trust us to faithfully report how many we produced?

So we were stuck with Mr Perkins. He produces the Punches at his leisure, and mails them out when he feels like it.

Here we were, sitting there with 10 completed units sitting on the loading dock, waiting for the punches to come in. We had no way of contacting Mr. Perkins except through his P.O. box, and no way to lean on him to step up his production.

I have always wanted to invent something like the Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch that would give me the independence to thumb my nose at the world, live off the grid, and have just enough to meet my needs as long as I didn't need too much.