Patent drawing - 1951 wobble board precursor by Samuel L. Jordan Public domain image

These are the three patent drawings for a physical-fitness exercise device.

The inventor was Samuel Lightfoot Jordan of Montgomery, Alabama.

The 1955 U.S. patent for this device was applied for in 1951. Its patent number is 2,714,007.

A case could be made for calling this device (rather than the one invented by Bernard L. Coplin, whose 1957 U.S patent was applied for in 1954) the first patented wobble board, but that claim depends on a too-loose definition of what a wobble board is (a definition that doesn't require a wobble board to be a balance board) because Jordan's patent says that the user "may place his feet on the respective pad elements while supporting his body with his hands in any suitable manner and treads alternately with his feet, whereby his foot and leg muscles are alternately flexed, providing an action similar to swimming or running." (Emphasis added.)

Calling this device a wobble board is calling a tricycle a bicycle. Mechanisms by which the body senses and computes its imbalance and mechanisms by which the body maintains its balance when all of its weight is on its feet on a surface as unstable as a wobble board aren't activated when the hands are holding on to a stable support. The balance training given by a wobble board is much more rigorous than the balance training given by the device that is shown in these three patent drawings.

(This device gives more rigorous aerobic and muscle-building exercise than a wobble board does because a user can move faster and keep from landing longer than a wobble board's user can.)

It might be supposed that the word "may" in the abovequoted sentence from the patent indicates or suggests that the standing user's hands weren't meant to always need to hold onto some external stationary support (i.e., that this device is a wobble board), but there are five reasons to believe that the word "may" there doesn't indicate this:

Nowhere does the patent say that an alternative posture is standing on the board without holding on to something else. The only alternative posture specified is that "the user may recline on the ground and grasp the ends of the bar...."

The patent's mention of alternating the use of the left and right leg as in swimming and running assumes a degree of control that is beyond the ability of someone on a wobble board whose feet are supporting all of his or her weight.

If the device had been intended to withstand the wobbling of a person's entire weight, the fulcrum's post, ball and socket would probably have been thicker than they are in the patent's drawing.

The unlikely "s" in the word "treads" in the above quote from the patent ("may place his feet...and treads") suggests that the writer's original sentence didn't include "may."

Nowhere does the patent say that balancing is one of the user's activities. (Of course, the user does need to balance while standing on this device, as a person also does while walking or sitting, but the patent's omission of this detail seems to indicate that this task is not challenging enough to be notable, which it would be if the user weren't holding onto an external support.)

No matter who receives the future's credit for inventing the first patented wobble board—whether it turns out to be Coplin of New Mexico, Madsen of Illinois or someone from a part of the world where Illinois and New Mexico have seldom, hardly ever or never been heard of—it can be assumed that sometime or more than one time between the appearance of the sphere and the 1950's someone cut one in half or cut off a section of it smaller than a half, ground down its cut surface until it was flat enough and then attempted to stand on it or a broader flat thing placed atop it without sending a picture of this and a description of its operation and purposes to a government office. The perplexity, adoration, ambition and awe that it elicited when its inventor demonstrated it and passed it around in a cave must have equalled those elicited there by the first sphere, that most perfect of all designs, inventions and crafts. But only a patent is an actual patent.

patents patent drawings us patent office wobble board precursors high resolution inventions

1951

USPTO

http://uspto.gov/

public domain