The scene is Kuwait and the year is 1964 and the month is November. I have no idea what the weather was like, never having been anywhere near Kuwait, but I do know that a Dutch ship, the Al-Kuwait, sank just off the coast of that Persian Gulf nation one day in that month and that year.
The Al-Kuwait had been delivering a cargo of 6,000 sheep for a big cookout to be held that weekend. Well, that was ruined, and so would be the drinking water for everyone in the oil-rich nation, because their water comes from the very harbor where the sheep met their doom, and so getting that ship up off the ocean's floor so it could "limp into port," as nautical tales always put it, was imperative. And the Kuwaiti government's plan to raise the ship with cranes would have taken too long and may have also caused the ship to break anyway.
Well, there are many good Danes, but here is one really Great Dane - an inventor named Karl Krøyer. Mr Krøyer invented the process for continuous conversion of starch into glucose syrup, as we all know, and bicycle wheel rim linings, and a non-skid highway surfacing material. He was a real "idea guy."
So off Krøyer went to the scene of the wreck and soon he came up with an idea. He ordered 30 million tiny (the size of peas) polystyrene balls - 65 tons worth. Divers connected a tube to another ship carrying the pellets and in no time at all, they filled the Al Kuwait and she bobbed to the surface, preventing an environmental catastrophe, by making the sunken hulk buoyant again.
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| "Hello, BASF Corporation? Yeah, I'm gonna need 30,000,000 white plastic balls to go..." |
Krøyer became a worldwide hero among shippers and fans of clever solutions, and earned a handsome dollar from his idea and the execution of it.
BUT...
When Krøyer applied for a patent, he was turned down!
And that was because Huey, Dewey, and Louie, nephews of Donald Duck in the comic books, had the same idea (using ping-pong balls) in a comic book, in 1949.
And, as Paul Harvey would say, Good DAY!
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