Duluthian Charles O. Nelson — presumably the same Charles O. Nelson referenced in a PDD story about the West End Furniture Row — filed for and was granted a patent for a “Coffee-boiler” in 1901. The text of the claim is below.
The Green Door, a liquor store and bar in Beaver Bay, has a framed tribute to Ellen E. Perkins. She was the inventor of “certain new and useful Improvements in Sexual Armor.”
The account on the wall of the bar reads:
Surprisingly enough, the sexual armor invented by Ellen E. Perkins of Beaver Bay, Minnesota is not for defense against assault but to keep the wearer from playing with himself. In her 1908 patent she calls the practice that the garment is designed to prevent one of the most common causes of insanity, imbecility and feeblemindedness – especially in youth – and equally true of both sexes. Her profession, by implication nursing, had made her very familiar with the subject.
