Lifetime of Puttering Brings Absent-Minded Inventor Success

It’s 8 a.m. on a rainy Monday morning. Inventor Ed Hunter is walking down the canary yellow stripe that winds--like a yellow brick road--through his factory.

The factory, built only a year and a half ago, is one of a kind. But then, so is Ed Hunter.

“I don’t mind that my family calls me ‘The Mad Scientist,’ ” he said. At 68, in his rumpled tweed jacket, with his longish silvery hair that appears to be growing in four different directions, he has a benevolent look, like a Norman Rockwell painting.

He isn’t good at selling things, Hunter admits as he pushes open the door of his molding room--from which parts for around 2.5 million water sprinklers emerged last year. He dislikes selling things. He’d rather let his two sons and his daughter manage the business.

“I’m a putterer. A thinker. Developing a product is what I do best.”

He’s certainly developed a lot of them. His patents number more than 100. A ditch digger. Tape machines. Venetian blind hardware. (The flexible metal venetian blinds he invented as a teen-ager are the ancestors of today’s Levolors.)

In the 1960s his plastic-headed, gear-driven, pop-up sprinkler revolutionized the irrigation industry. And it’s his intention, he says--”Although I’m not sure how much time I’ve got left”--to revolutionize it again.

On this particular wet Monday, when the hills outside are shrouded in mist, the molding room, smelling of warm plastic and filled with the whirr of 30 machines, seems almost cozy. Plastic sprinkler parts plop gently into baskets. The machines, Hunter explains, are unique. (He knows there’s nothing quite like them because he invented them all himself.) They whirr along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Beyond the molding room, still on the yellow path, is the Carrousel Room.

“Paul’s idea,” Hunter said, speaking of his eldest son, a pilot with Western Airlines for 10 years before he teamed up with his father.

On four raised discs--they look like merry-go-rounds--employees on bright red chairs revolve slowly, each assembling one of the 42 parts of a Hunter sprinkler. (The parts slide down long black tubes, called “gravity chutes,” from the room above.

Anyone seeing Hunter watching as his staff revolves slowly past him, smiling his gentle smile, would be justified in thinking, “Wow! This guy’s been really lucky! He’s got umpteen awards. Research for his work has taken him all over the world. And he has a close family.” (“We only call him The Mad Scientist in an affectionate way,” his daughter, Ann Hunter-Wellborn explained.)

But there is another side to Hunter’s story. Having a mind as brilliant as his can sometimes be a mixed blessing.

Born in Riverside in 1917--his father owned an iron foundry--he didn’t have an easy childhood. He always seemed to be out of step with everybody else.

“When he was at school he felt no one could teach him anything he didn’t already know,” his daughter said. (Naturally, that didn’t endear him to any of his teachers.) He was always the youngest in the class, too.

“And not very tall, and hopeless at athletics,” he said, sounding a little wistful. “And I’m very absent-minded.” Countless times, he says, he has found himself standing in the middle of a store with no idea why he went there.

Fortunately, when he was 20 and working in his older brother Joe’s engineering firm, Hunter met an 18-year-old Riverside City College student named Frances. They were married in 1939, and for 46 years Frances Hunter has reminded her husband of what’s happening, and where he’s supposed to be.

“It’s just routine now,” she said, laughing. “When Ed’s mind focuses on something it focuses. Totally. There’s no room for thoughts about anything else.”

A typical “Ed” experience, Frances said, is one he had in a London airport after a business trip.

“I was flying back to the States. Eddie was going on to Germany. When I left him he was sitting in a comfortable chair reading ‘Darwin and the Beagle.’ Of course, the plane came and went without him noticing it.” When he did pause in his reading long enough to discover that he would have to wait most of the night for another plane, Hunter wasn’t at all dismayed, Frances said. “He just sat down again and finished the book.”

The years of World War II, when Joe Hunter’s firm in Riverside produced tools and parts for aircraft, were hectic ones for the Hunters. Ed Hunter began to accumulate patents. In 1952, after years of working seven days a week, he decided to take a year off. His savings account looked healthy. It would be nice, he thought, to be around his three children, Paul, Dick and Ann, more. And then there was his home workshop.

“I wanted to putter ,” he said.

His puttering plans, however, didn’t quite work out.

“Around that time my neighbor, Dr. Lorenzo Richards, invented a device called the tensiometer,” Hunter recalled. “It measured the amount of moisture in the soil.”

Could Hunter, Richards wanted to know, invent a lawn sprinkler--or an entire irrigation system--that the tensiometer would turn on automatically?

“I started doing it as a hobby,” Hunter said. “Within four months it was a business.” He named it the Automatic Irrigation Co., but, after several friends pointed out the likelihood of it being nicknamed “The Irritation Company,” he changed it to Moist O’Matic.

It took almost three years to develop anything they could sell.

“And then they didn’t sell very well,” he said. “But by that time I’d sunk all my savings into the company. I felt I’d no choice but to keep going.”

The turning point came in 1957, when he figured out how to make sprinkler heads out of plastic. They had always been made out of brass, which corrodes underground.

“Plastic had lots of critics then,” he said. “It was considered shoddy. But there are all kinds of plastics. Made in black, with carbon black in them to help keep out ultraviolet light, the sprinklers have outlasted metal ones by years. Everybody in the business is trying to make plastic ones now.”

In 1962 Hunter’s mind was, as Hunter’s mind usually is, teeming with innovative ideas. But he had limited resources with which to carry them out. In order to grow, he merged his small company, Moist O’Matic, with The Toro Co., a manufacturing giant.

He meant to stay with them for two years. He stayed 19, the last seven as vice president for research and development. During those years he pioneered hydraulic sprinkler controllers, plastic valves--he has a fierce loyalty to plastic technology--and the stream rotor, the sprinkler head well-known for its graceful streams of water.

Toro, Hunter said with a shrug, still owns many of his patents, “and will until the 17-year limit runs out. But I did just win a legal battle to get royalties for them.” (To celebrate he bought himself a Porsche.)

It was Paul Hunter who, in 1981, talked his father into leaving the shelter of Toro.

This time, right from the beginning, the business was a success. This time almost his entire family have been drawn in. Paul, Dick and Ann Hunter all work for Hunter Industries. Their mother works part-time in the accounting department. Three of Hunter’s nephews, and Ann’s husband, David, work there, too.

“That sounds like a lot of us,” Frances Hunter said. “But there are 175 employees, so we’re not all related.”

Hunter likes to start work early in the day; about 7:30. It’s a lifetime habit begun during the Depression. Right now he’s working on encapsulating his sprinkler parts--all 42 of them--into a miniature version, for very small yards. He also gives guided tours of the factory, leading interested people down the yellow brick road.

“The yellow stripe was Paul’s idea,” Ann Hunter-Wellborn said. “It’s to keep people in a safe area, so they don’t wander into the machines and lose a finger or something.”

All the family members, she added, give guided tours, “but my father does the best ones because his heart’s in it.”