Archive for the ‘My grandfather’s all-American inventions’ Category

Bornett L. Bobroff and the invention of the roll-call voting machine

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

This post is part of a thread about the world of my grandfather in Russia and in the United States after he immigrated in 1905.  Information and photos of his other inventions in the US can be found here.  An article about his work as a very young man in Russia is here.  A group of articles about his world in Russia is here.

My writing time this week has been swallowed up by an article for an e-zine issue coming out in October about my genealogy research.  So I’ve turned over my regular post today to four “guest bloggers:” a couple of sadly-anonymous writers from the year 1916; Congressman “Speedy” Long in the 1967 Congressional Record; and the 2010 National Conference of State Legislators.

They each published articles about my grandfather Bornett L. Bobroff’s invention of the roll-call voting machine.

First article: from Popular Science Monthly, 1916

Article from 1916 Popular Science Monthly, with a composite photo showing what Bobroff's roll-call voting machine would look like in the United States Congress. Note the two panels on either side of the dais. These list each Congressman's name, along with lights indicating a yes or no vote.

Snippet from 1967 United States Congressional Record listing states in which the electric roll-call voting machine had been installed. Louisiana Representative "Speedy" Long (of the dynasty begun by Huey Long, in whose time Louisiana adopted Bobroff's voting machine) had just introduced a 1967 amendment that the US Congress finally install electric voting.

Bobroff’s most ubiquitous invention was the automobile turn signal, which he patented and manufactured at his Teleoptic factory in Racine, Wisconsin.  But he got more press coverage for inventing the roll-call voting machine.  Bobroff’s own state of Wisconsin was the first to install this machine in its legislature.  Other state legislatures followed.

In 1916, the US Congress was considering installing the machine in the Capitol in Washington DC.  This never came to fruition because  Congressmen were apparently afraid that speeded-up voting would eliminate filibusters.  But meanwhile, there was a brief window of excitement that a Wisconsin inventor, an immigrant from Russia, might make the national scene.

Milwaukee Free Press cartoon and article

My next 1916 guest blogger is the author of a Milwaukee Free Press article about my grandfather, adorned with a wonderful cartoon drawing.

May 1916 Milwaukee Free Press article with a great cartoon drawing of my grandfather, Bornett L. Bobroff

Well, unfortunately this article prints too small for the text to be legible.  And it isn’t available anywhere else online.  At some point down the trail, I’ll try to post it magnified enough to read.  Meanwhile, if you’re writing a school report or doing historical research on the American voting system, shoot me an email, and I’ll be happy to send the whole article to you.

National Conference of State Legislatures article

Last, let’s return to Louisiana.  I’m honored that this past February, 2010, the National Conference of State Legislatures decided to reprint a Louisiana article about my grandfather and his voting machine.   To see this 2010 article in a larger, more readable .pdf version, click here.

2010 National Conference of State Legislatures reprint of a Louisiana article about the introduction of Bobroff's roll-call voting machine into the Louisiana State Legislature.

Mysteries of my grandfather: Introduction

Monday, May 10th, 2010
My grandfather invented the automobile turn signal.  These are a couple of the types he manufactured during the 1930s.

My grandfather B. L. Bobroff invented the automobile turn signal. These are a couple of the types he manufactured during the 1930s.

My grandfather rarely talked about his life in Russia, and he died before I was born.  These two facts of course made me obsessively curious about him.  That curiosity fuels my work, now art, to this day.

There were a few things I knew about my grandfather: he was born Boris L. Bobroff – or Bobrov, depending on how you transliterate the Cyrillic letters into English.  He came to the US around 1905 at the age of 22. Like many Russian men at that time he probably left the country to avoid being drafted into the Russian army to fight in the Russo-Japanese War.

Motor bike rear turn signal made by Bobroff in the 1930s-1940s

Motor bike rear turn signal made by Bobroff in the 1930s-1940s

When Boris came to the US, he changed his first name to Bornett.  Bornett was an odd choice, in my opinion, not in a good way.  So I’ll use Boris as much as I can.

Boris/Bornett moved to Milwaukee and later Racine, Wisconsin.  He invented and patented various electrical signaling devices, including the voting machine used in state legislatures and a version of hospital nursing call lights.  Most ubiquitous was his invention of the turn signal for cars and other motor vehicles.  He held patents on the original invention of the auto turn signal, and on many design improvements over the decades following.  He manufactured his turn signals in a small factory called Teleoptic, in Racine.

eBaySalePhoto

B.L. Bobroff demonstrating his voting invention to Wisconsin legislators

Because of my grandfather’s inventions, the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison holds some of his papers.  Years ago, my mother and I traveled there to look at them.

The most intriguing of the papers was a letter of recommendation written about my grandfather’s work at an agricultural equipment factory in Ryazan, Russia.  There was an English translation of the letter, stamped with a fancy seal that apparently made it an official translation.  The recommendation said that my grandfather had been hired as a “worker,” but performed the function of an engineer.

Now engineers in Russia at that time were hot stuff, like the techies of today, only there were far fewer of them.  So being called an engineer in Russia then was a big deal.  I believe at that time young Boris had no engineering education, so he was probably winging it.  But he must have been naturally talented, especially because, as I’ve since found out, the man who signed his recommendation, Levontin, was the famous founder of what’s become the huge Ryazan Combine Plant, in existence to this day.

The fact that my grandfather was working and living in Ryazan raised in my mind the first of several mysteries I’ve been pursuing ever since.  Jews in Russia were allowed to live only in the Jewish Pale of Settlement.  And Ryazan was outside the Pale.

JewishPaleMap2MRGD&CROPT

Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia, after 1825

There were ways Jews could win permission to live outside the Pale.  One of them was to have a degree in a field like engineering.  But my grandfather, as far as I know, didn’t have a degree.  So how had he gotten to Ryazan?  Had he been born there, the child of parents who did have some kind of engineering education?  Had he come alone?  If so, how?

Another vague family story about my grandfather involved a mysterious trip he had taken to Bolshevik Russia in 1920, involving manufacturing shoes for the Russians.  Traveling to Russia at that time was illegal for a US citizen.  So that was a second mystery.

After a couple years of searching the internet for more information, I suddenly hit on a wildly surprising discovery.  On Bobroff’s return from Russia aboard a steamship, he was picked up by the Bureau of Investigation (BOI, later the FBI) as he docked in New York.  I’d never heard about that before!

1920 Soviet poster: "Without a saw, axe, or nails you can't build a home. Tools are made by workers, who have to eat."

1920 Soviet poster: “Without a saw, axe, or nails you can’t build a home. Tools are made by workers, who have to eat.”

It turned out my grandfather had formed the Bobroff Foreign Trading and Engineering Company in Milwaukee and had gotten more than $6,000,000 in contracts from Russia for American-made machinery and boots.

The BOI agents confiscated several things from my grandfather: materials relating to his engineering work and a long letter addressed to the Soviet Bureau in Philadephia.  The BOI agents believed my grandfather had written this letter, signed “Bill.”  Later, Boris/Bornett testified he had only been delivering the letter, from a mysterious man he ran into in Copenhagen while waiting for his ship back to the US.

So another mystery emerged: did my grandfather write that letter, or was he truly an unwitting courier?

Most recently, thanks to googlebooks’ scanning of obscure out-of-print books, I found 25 pages of testimony by my grandfather to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1921.  Another big surprise!  The committee was investigating “Conditions in Russia” three years after the Bolsheviks came to power.  And Bobroff had just returned from that far off country.

From my book, Working Women in Russia Under the Hunger Tsars

From my book, Working Women in Russia Under the Hunger Tsars

This was the height of the Red Scare in the US, and during the hearing the Congressmen were often belligerent toward my grandfather.  For his part, Bobroff argued back that the US government should reverse its policy against Russian gold being imported into the country.  This gold had been accumulated by the Romanov tsars over the centuries.  The Bolsheviks – by then in power for over 3 years – wanted to use this tsarist gold to pay for trade goods of the kind my grandfather was trying to sell them.

Was my grandfather a businessman just trying to make money in all this?  Or was he politically involved in trying to aid the Soviets?  It’s known there was an effort at that time, both in Europe and the US, to win US recognition of the new Russian government by establishing trade.  It was thought that diplomatic recognition would follow any robust development of trade.

I now have more mysteries than I started with about my grandfather.  So the sleuthing continues….