George Blonsky, was born on December 2nd of 1901 in China to Russian parents. After attending a Russian prep school and earning his degree at MIT (class of 1926) he began a career as a mining engineer, traveling all over the world, including Korea, Alaska, Arizona, and Montana with his wife Charlotte (called Lotte).¹

George Basil Blonsky, aka Count, in 1925

In the 1960s, they were living in the Bronx, Lotte worked for the city and the couple enjoyed visiting the zoo to see the animals. Though they loved children, they had none of their own, and though they wrote children’s book, none were published. But during one of their visits to the zoo, an elephant was in labor, spinning before she gave birth. The zookeeper said the elephants always spun like that before giving birth.

Imagine a lightbulb going off over their heads, spinning in place perhaps.

They set to work designing an “Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force.” The couple incorrectly believed that unlike more primitive peoples, who had easy, pain-free, safe childbirths, civilized women could use a device that utilized centrifugal forces to give birth.

“In the case of a woman who has a fully developed muscular system and has had ample physical exertion all through the pregnancy, as is common with all more primitive peoples, nature provides all the necessary equipment and power to have a normal and quick delivery. The is not the case, however, with more civilized women who often do not have the opportunity to develop the muscles needed in confinement.”

The subtext here is that uncivilized women don’t need modern obstetrical care, so does that make it okay that they didn’t have access to it? This was a position that Drs Duncan E. Reid and Mandel E. Cohen strongly criticized in Trends in Obstetrics, 1950 | Read Along published thirteen years prior to the Blonskys’ patent application. And seventy years before that, it was refuted by Robert Felkin’s observations in Africa during the 1870s, “As far as I know, labours are by no means so very easy in this part of the world, and are certainly not the painless, pleasurable affairs which some writers would have us believe.”

But in 1949, Aldoph H. Schultz gave birth to the theory of the obstetrical dilemma, used it to claim that primitive humans were more animalistic so had easier births. This theory was then popularized by an article in Scientific American in 1960, check out my article on this here. But I think the Blonsky’s were genuinely interested in helping women give birth using technology. It’s just that there were some seriously misguided concepts popularized by some of the most educated people in the country at the time. It’s possible that the Blonsky’s felt they were complimenting so-called primitive women for being more fit than weak, flabby civilized women.

How was it supposed to work?

When a woman was ready to deliver she would be strapped down in the lithotomy position, then spun at high speed, up to 7gs (pilots and astronauts tend to black out at 4-5 gs).

The purpose was to:

“assist the under-equipped woman by creating a gentle, evenly distributed, properly directed, precision-controlled force, that acts in unison with and supplements her own efforts”.

Safety features included an emergency brake, “an infant reception net” with a bell to notify doctors of the birth. Though they submitted schematics with an eighty-page explanation and were granted a patent (#3216423) the apparatus was never tested and it wasn’t even built until 2014 by Dublin’s Science Gallery. The idea won the couple a posthumous Ig Nobel price in 1999, which was accepted on their behalf by their niece who said her uncle was an very active inventor and that she had a garage full of his papers. On behalf of historians everywhere, I hope she’s able to preserve them and make them available to an archive.

And one source said it inspired an opera, The Blonsky Device in 2013, but I couldn’t find information about that.

blonsky-patentus3216423 Download

Footnote:

I really enjoy sleuthing out images of the people and places I research. Usually finding folks from the 20th century isn’t terribly difficult. With George, I started on Archive.org, discovering he was mentioned frequently as an alum in MIT Review magazines. There were no photos, though I learned that his college nickname was “Count”. So I checked the MIT yearbook archive, and there he was, on the Tug-of-War Team in 1924, a snapshot of dorm life and then his senior photo in 1925.

But I hoped to find more recent-to-the-invention photos of him, preferably both of them. So I checked the New York Times “Times Machine” (archive) which I get access to through my local public library’s online resources. There was nothing. I checked Newspaper Archive (also through my local public library), plenty of hits on his name, some of which were actually about him, but no photos. I found nothing about Charlotte. No school day activities in the local paper, no wedding announcement, no work-related photos at the Bronx archive– I did find a recipe she published in the paper when they were living in Arizona in 1953, but again, no photos. So disappointing.

I did discover that he got his SSN while living in Wisconsin and she got hers in Arizona (social security was signed into law in 1935). He died on his 84th birthday in 1985 in San Jose, California (where they were living) and she died age 92 in a nursing home in Cupertino, California in 1998. They are both buried in San Jose. ↩︎