Successes and those that make on laugh – or cry!
The major technological inventions that have shaped the success of the Group have all been in metal-mechanical field, more precisely in small metal parts, and in particular in items that can be made from steel wire – horseshoe nails, fishhooks, and screws, hairpins, needles, tacks, boat nails, carding tools, building nails, paper clips, pins, u-nails, foundry nails, aligner nails for coal mines, spacer nails and many, many others.
Other innovations, some of them almost resulting in disaster, but still developed by the same Mustad engineers, were zippers, once a very important company product, as were hydraulic door-closers, roofing fixtures and nail screws. More surprising perhaps were motor scooters, lawn mowers, automatic sand, salt and fertilizer spreaders, electric toilets (burners) and fluidized bed burners! Other more successful products were wood stoves (made by the company for over 75 years), frying pans, waffle irons, hammers, aces and other household hardware.
Another product that became equally important in the life of the Group was margarine. Invented simultaneously and totally separately by Mr. Pellerin at the end of the last century, this product was finally sold in 1996 by our sister company, Mustad Industrier of Oslo, Norway after representing a major division in the Group for almost a century.
Of the list of “curiosa” products, we are proud to present a small selection of practical products invented by Clarin Mustad, the fourth-generation owner with his four brothers. He was an engineer and the brain behind the development of horse nail machines, fishhook machines (together with maybe the brightest inventor of them all: Makus Topp), and screw machines. But that’s not all!
Being a man who valued his personal comfort Clarin Mustad developed the electrically heated toilet seat in 1915, followed by the even more “important” air extractor fan incorporated in the toilet bowl just under the seat.
Water skis equipped with ski poles to walk on the fjords were yet another of his ideas. These were large floating pontoons with pivoting flops that would flip up when the ski was slid forward, to flip down again to “grab” water
when it was pushed back. The poles were bel-shaped at the bottom with a floating chamber and a perforated rim underneath. His children often walked right around the island in front their home on these skis, a total of over 5 km. And being allergic to wasting good products Clarin Mustad also developed a semi-automatic razor blade sharpening machine (something that probably cost him the equivalent of 50 years of disposable blades).
The famous Mustad 6-wheeler. Some of Clarin Mustad’s most cherished inventions (apart, of course, from the machines that made the fortune of the company – see previous page), were automobiles, of which he developed several. Perhaps the most impressive car he developed was the 3-4 ton, 6-wheeler, of which two units were built between 1917 and 1919. The car had a summer coachwork, fully convertible and a winter body where the driver sat outside and the passengers sat inside a spacious salon with curtained windows, lamps and beautiful upholstery. The car had twin rear and a single front axle. The first real axle turned concurrently with the front wheels while the second was fixed. The idea of the six wheels was that the system would reduce wear and tear on tires and road; both of which were of less than optimal quality at the time. In order to stabilize this monster through bumps and turns, the car had the worlds first torsion spring/stabilizer struts. The fist version of the car engine was designed and patented by Clarin Mustad himself. It was a valve-less 4-cylinder, 4-stroke petrol engine of about 80 hp. The valves were replaced by 2 sleeves, each one going halfway around the cylinder, one moving up when the other moved down, with holes on the side for air intake and exhaust. The patent was sold and the famous French car, the Clayette was equipped with this engine for many years. Ultimately it proved to be relatively inefficient due to the rapid wear of the interconnecting sleeves and was finally forgotten on the heap of surpassed ideas.
Pictures:
French patent ('Brevet d'Invention') of the valve-less 4-cylinder engine from Clarin Mustad, dated September 18th 1909
