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Friday, December 5, 2014

Pre-Blonsky, Post-Blonsky, and Non-Blonsky Devices


by Alice Shirrell Kaswell
The Blonsky centrifugal-force birthing device has proved an inspiration for many people for many purposes. This is a brief, partial survey of some of their ideas.
The Blonsky Device
In 1999, an Ig Nobel Prize in the field of managed health care was awarded posthumously to George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City, N.Y., and San Jose, Calif., for inventing a device (U.S. Patent #3,216,423, for an “apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force”) to aid women in giving birth. The woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed. The Blonskys’ niece, Gale Sturtevant, came to the Ig Nobel ceremony and accepted the prize on behalf of George and Charlotte (for details, see the January–February 2000 issue of AIR). In 2013, the Ig Nobel ceremony again honored the Blonskys, this time by creating and performing an opera about them and their invention.
The Blonsky device was never used in an actual human birth, so far as we have been able to determine. But it has not gone unnoticed.
Several patents explicitly cite the Blonsky patent as one of the pillars upon which their innovation is built. Some adapt aspects of or notions from the Blonsky device for different purposes. Other aim to improve on one or another aspect of the Blonsky achievement. And at least one earlier invention seems, in a way, to hint at the coming of the Blonsky idea.
Pre-Blonsky Devices
A general-purpose centrifugal machine appears to foreshadow the Blonsky device, though Amilio speaks only of non-birthing uses.

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