People thought Luther Crowell was insane, but he wasn’t. He was the greatest inventor in Cape Cod history.
OK, he did try to do things like fly (in the late 1850s, more than 40 years before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk), which made locals think he should be assigned to the “loony bin.” But his patents prove otherwise – 293 on file when he died in 1903, right up there with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
To this day, we all use one: The folding brown paper bag with a flat bottom.
Born in West Dennis in 1840, as a teenager Luther was so obsessed with experimentation that his father, “in order to preserve their home as a dwelling place, turned over to him a two-story building standing on high ground overlooking the little Cove” by their home, writes Marion Crowell Ryder in “Cape Cod Remembrances.”
One day, a crowd gathered below, Crowell opened second-story doors and emerged wearing two huge white wings attached by a series of straps. He jumped, gliding on a southwest wind until he tumbled into the marsh. He wasn’t hurt, but neither did he fly on his own power.
His Dennis neighbors drew up a petition asking a judge to rule on his sanity. The judge gave him a clean bill, and by 1862 Crowell applied for a patent for “a new and Improved Aerial Machine.”
His design included propellers that could set horizontally for lift-off (like a helicopter), then shift to vertical (like a plane) for flight. There was a cab to hold a pilot working a rudder, adjustable wings filled with hydrogen for buoyancy, and a small steam engine for power. He also had a prescient destructive vision, inspired by the raging Civil War, and wrote:
“When it is desired to employ this aerial machine as an engine of war, it could be elevated, loaded with shell, and when arrived over the desired spot the shell could be discharged.”
That invention never got off the ground; a key investor went broke. But Crowell kept patenting.
He got practical about one of his passions, origami; he always kept paper in his pocket to fiddle and fold (many a paper airplane no doubt). In Boston in 1867 his origami tinkering led to the first square-bottom paper bag, one of life’s ubiquitous objects, taken for granted but ingenious in its utility and deceptive simplicity.
Unfolded it stands, holding plenty of goods, but a few well-conceived creases allow it to flatten for easy storage. Prior to this, customers often twirled paper into a cone that didn’t hold much and couldn’t stand.
Crowell patented a machine to manufacture his new bag in 1872, which also helped printers grappling with how to create collated newspapers, each sheet origami-style requiring multiple folds. This made him a wealthy man. His wife was a Wellfleet native so they moved back, Crowell buying a fair amount of land.
The family name, including branches unrelated to him, remains current across the Cape, and his paper bags still appear at every market check-out. But Luther never achieved the notoriety of Thomas Edison, who patented the electric light bulb just eight years after Crowell’s big hit.
His success did prove one thing however:
The judge was right.
