Draft:Bernhardt Stahmer
 | Review waiting, please be patient.
This may take 3 months or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. There are 2,508 pending submissions waiting for review.
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
Reviewer tools
|
Submission declined on 21 January 2026 by Pythoncoder (talk).
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
This draft has been resubmitted and is currently awaiting re-review. |  |
Comment: overattribution —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 19:52, 21 January 2026 (UTC)
- Comment: Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve now added Newspapers.com URLs to all cited historical newspaper sources, and also added a URL to the federal court case citation for ease of verification.
- Comment: Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve now added Newspapers.com URLs to all cited historical newspaper sources, and also added a URL to the federal court case citation for ease of verification.
- Comment: For your references that are from historical newspapers pages, please include a URL that points to the page where you found the information. It could be either from an aggregator like Newspapers.com, or from the newspaper's on website. While it isn't necessarily required, it makes it MUCH easier for readers (and also us, the reviewers) to verify claims in your text and do further research. EatingCarBatteries (contribs | talk) 04:07, 7 January 2026 (UTC)
- Comment: Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve now added Newspapers.com URLs to all cited historical newspaper sources, and also added a URL to the federal court case citation for ease of verification.
 | This is a draft article. It is a work in progress open to editing by anyone. Please ensure core content policies are met before publishing it as a live Wikipedia article. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL Last edited by Friendlydaddy (talk | contribs) 41 hours ago. (Update)
This draft has been submitted and is currently awaiting review. |
Bernhardt Stahmer (1899 – 1975), known by the initial B.,[1] was a businessman and inventor from Omaha, Nebraska. He held around 70 patents, many of them related to his invention of Ruffles potato chips.[2] He also designed and manufactured electrical reels, including some used by Saturn rockets during NASA's Apollo launches, then thought to be among the largest ever produced.[3]
Life and career
[edit]Stahmer was born in Omaha to German immigrant parents. He left school at 14 to work as a clean-up boy for an electrical contractor. At 23, he founded his own contracting firm, Industrial Electrical Works.[4] The firm initially served Omaha's agricultural industries, such as slaughterhouses, grain elevators and breweries.[5] After WWII, Stahmer spun off Industrial Electrical Reels to produce heavy-duty reels for applications including deep-sea exploration, high-rise window cleaning, and rocket launches.[2][4][5] At their height, the companies reportedly employed over 200 people.[4]
In 1948, Stahmer successfully filed a patent for the "Eccentric Potato Slicer," a machine “adapted to form potato chips of a corrugated appearance and which have greater strength than heretofore.”[6] That same year, he trademarked the name Ruffles.[7] He sold franchise operations to regional chip manufacturers before Frito-Lay purchased the Ruffles brand from him outright in 1958.[4] In addition to producing a novel shape, Stahmer claimed his ruffle-cut machine was also many times faster than conventional potato chip machines.[4][5]
Hailed as “Nebraska’s most prolific inventor,” Stahmer credited his success to reading widely and having a photographic memory.[4] Many of his other patents related to aviation,[1] and he claimed one of the earliest designs for the modern helicopter.[2]
References
[edit]- 1 2 "Inventor: Main Use of Patents to Provide Jobs". Omaha World-Herald. 1964-03-08. p. 21. Retrieved 2026-07-18.
- 1 2 3 "Omaha Inventor Stahmer Dies: Industry Founder". Omaha World-Herald. 1975-01-23. p. 28. Retrieved 2026-07-18.
- ↑ "Made in Omaha; Destination: Moon". Evening World-Herald. 1962-09-28. p. 8. Retrieved 2026-07-18.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Sun-Up Interview: Bernhardt Stahmer". Omaha World-Herald. September 20, 1969. Retrieved 7 January 2026 – via Newspapers.com.
- 1 2 3 "Profile of the Electrical Contractor: B. Stahmer". Electrical Contractor. August 1974. Pp. 32-34.
- ↑ US 2567248, Bernhardt Stahmer, "Eccentric Potato Slicer"
- ↑ Frito-Lay, Inc. v. Bachman Co., F. Supp. (United States District Court for the Southern District of New York 1989).
LLM-generated pages with certain obvious signs of being machine generated may be deleted without notice.
Instead, only summarize in your own words a range of independent, reliable, published sources that discuss the subject.
See the advice page on large language models for more information.