York. Thus prepared, he undertook the adventurous 
Job of equipping the old Fentress gold and copper 
mine about nine miles due south of Greensboro, 
North Carolina, with operating machinery. That 
mine, sometimes called the North Carolina mine, was 
the first one in that State to have been worked for 
copper. Although the mine is known to have been 
reopened in 1903, 1904, and again in 1906, the news- 
paper article which described Price’s venture did not 
reveal what success was achieved through his efforts. 
Before the end of 1903, Price’s fame as an inventor 
had reached the attention of officials in the Standard 
Steel Car Company of Pittsburgh, and he was ap- 
pointed designing engineer for one of their special 
subsidiaries. Regarding that experience Price later 
wrote: 
I was employed during a period of ten years in the interest 
of Andrew Mellon, now Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, 
under a salary and royalty contract, to invent improve- 
ments in railway equipment. He incorporated the 
Standard Motor Truck Co., especially to manufacture 
and sell my inventions. I placed with that Company, 
on royalty, 34 patents,—and the resulting royalties have 
been coming to me during the past 23 years. 
Many of the motor trucks which Price designed were 
of the type used on streetcars. His scrapbook con- 
tains a photograph of one of them with the following 
note, in his handwriting, below it: 
Car at Niagara Falls equipped with W. G. Price’s 
power brake. President McKinley looking out of the 
window. 
By 1913, the condition of Price’s heart caused him 
considerable worry, and he yearned for the smell of 
clean, fresh air. Moreover, he missed the companion- 
ship of his only living son, William Kelley Price, whose 
inventive talents almost equaled his own and who 
then lived at Selah, a few miles north of Yakima, 
Washington. Price joined his son there and had 
hardly settled down when the old urge to invent 
seized him. Among the problems that intrigued him 
first were those related to packing dried apples into 
shipping boxes. Dried apples, being spongelike in 
nature, were hard to keep compressed within a 50- 
pound box while the workman tried to nail the cover 
onto it. An unidentified newspaper clipping in his 
scrapbook contained the following report on that 
subject: 
Dried apples were shoveled into a 50-pound box and 
then tramped down by the feet of the workmen, who wore 
clean rubber boots. More apples were then forced into 
PAPER 70: WILLIAM GUNN PRICE AND THE PRICE CURRENT METERS 
the box by a hand press having a lever ten feet long. 
Evaporated apples are like rubber, and when the hand 
press was removed, they followed it like a ‘“‘jack-out-of-the- 
box,” and quick work was required to get the cover in 
place: js. 
In the interest of efficiency and cleanliness, Mr. Price 
devised an electrically-operated power press which 
eliminates the foot tamping and which forces the apples 
into the box with a pressure of twelve tons. So great a 
pressure forces out much of the expansive air, making it 
easier to lid the box, and making it possible for one man 
to do all the boxing for a good sized plant. 
Another invention pertaining to the fruit industry 
on which he and his son collaborated was a ‘Fruit 
Sizer.” In one version of these sizers, apples were fed 
in a single row into a pocket at the end of a spring- 
actuated lever. Upon coming to rest in the pocket, a 
tripping device released the lever and the apples 
catapulted into one of a series of cloth bins, where they 
were caught gently and rolled without damage into 
separate wooden troughs, from which workers trans- 
ferred them into shipping boxes. The smallest apples, 
being lightest, would be catapulted into the farthest 
bins; medium-sized apples would fall into the inter- 
mediate bins; and the largest apples would drop into 
the closer bins.* This apple sizer received a Highest 
Award for fruit-grading machines at the Panama 
Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. 
In about 1754 Horace Walpole coined the word 
“serendipity’—an aptitude for making discoveries 
accidentally—which might well apply to the invention 
of Price’s apple sizer. The circumstance was de- 
scribed in an article entitled ‘“‘Latest in Apple Sizing 
Devices” in a September 1913 issue of the Yakima 
Daily Republican. It stated in effect that apples are 
sometimes plagued with a self-explanatory condition 
called water core. Because of water, 
apples so afflicted are heavier than healthy apples of the 
same size. When graded with the Price apple sizer, 
those apples afflicted with water core fell into one of 
the closer bins intended for the larger apples. Their 
noticeably smaller size made it easy for packers to 
identify them and cull them out. Fortunate, indeed, 
are inventors like the Prices who are gifted with 
excessive 
“serendipity.” 
At the age of 70, Price was still maintaining a 
consulting-engineer office in Yakima and supervising 
the Price Manufacturing Company, where he gave his 
5 See U.S. patent 1,288,184, dated December 17, 1918. 
