Cynthiana Engineer Father of Many Inventions:

In March, 1962, Paul Ward, 87, received patent number 3,018,742 from Wood, Herron and Evans law firm in Cincinnati, for an apparatus that proofed and baked bread. The machine was eight feet high and four feet square and it could bake 4,000 pounds of bread in one hour without being handled by human hands. It could do in 18 minutes what the conventional method at that time required two hours to do.

Receiving a patent was nothing unusual for Ward. He had more than 100 inventions to his credit with 50 or 60 of them patented in his name. Ward's philosophy was: learn to use your brain and keep on and on using it. He said, "If you don't put anything into your brain, you can't get anything out of it."

He was born in Cynthiana, Kentucky, January 8, 1875 and at age 15 1/2 he entered Kentucky State College (University of Kentucky) as a junior. He took entrance exams to achieve that. He said that mathematics tests extended from Monday until Saturday and he never missed a question. He got his bachelor's degree the next year, then a civil engineering degree and a mechanical engineering degree.

Ward worked for two years with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Co. He borrowed money from his father to study two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concentrating on mechanical design. University of Kentucky's College of Engineering dean, Paul Anderson, gave him a fellowship to teach practical mechanical training courses. Ward made machine parts himself when they were lacking, having learned to do this in the railroad company's machine department.

In 1898, Ward left UK to work for the J.H. Day Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio, and got a patent the first year with the company for a bread making machine. He also designed a machine for rolling cracker dough and cutting it into uniform size. His first pilot model was shown to Streitmann Biscuit Company and they bought it on sight. He secured 15 patents in the five years he was with the Day Company.

Ward designed a machine for cutting dough for Matzos, the Orthodox Jewish Passover bread. Then he worked for the Lynn Filter Company in Cincinnati for four years where he patented a water filter using crushed quartz as the filtering medium. He developed a single valve control for filtering systems that replaced a machine with many valves.

In an interview with 0. Armleder Company, a leading manufacturer of farm wagons, buggies and delivery wagons, he was asked if he knew anything about building trucks. He said he had three degrees and some years of engineering experience and if he didn't know about building trucks, he'd never learn any younger. The company asked him to design a two ton truck. It was tested by hauling a 6,600 pound load of metal castings to Tennessee. It passed the test and 500 trucks were built from that prototype. This was just before World War 1.

Ward went from the 0. Armleder Co. to the Hess Spring and Axle Division in Cincinnati of the Standard Parts Co. which made chassis parts for ambulances and supply trucks for the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Europe under Gen. John Pershing. After the war there was no market for those vehicles. Ward went to the Triangle Manufacturing Co. and back to designing machines for bread making. He became their chief design engineer and in six months, he obtained five patents on bakery equipment.

Ward designed a precision label and printing ink machine for the Cincinnati Printing Company and worked on a design for a machine to distill industrial alcohol. Before World War 11 he developed conveyer machines for the assembly of shells, primers, projectiles and fuses with identifying dates and serial numbers printed on the shells. These machines speeded up the loading of ammunition.

The assembly line conveyer was Ward's last design of any magnitude but he never stopped finding better ways of doing things and developing machines to do it. He said that his mind was never idle. He was always working on something until his death

March 13, 1963, one year after he received the patent for his baking machine. He gave the rights for his last patent to his daughter, Mrs. Whitworth Taylor of Cincinnati.

Information from a Lexington Herald-leader article by Malcolm Patterson, Asst. State Editor, April 1, 1962

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