1915 US PATENT DOCUMENT & LETTER MACON GEORGIA INVENTOR & MURDERER BOSE BOWERS for Sale

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1915 US PATENT DOCUMENT & LETTER MACON GEORGIA INVENTOR & MURDERER BOSE BOWERS For Sale

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1915 US PATENT DOCUMENT & LETTER MACON GEORGIA INVENTOR & MURDERER BOSE BOWERS:
$49.99

Please email with any questions. Original January 1915 US Patent Office document for a "propelling apparatus for boats". There are two diagrams and 2 1/2 pages of text explaining the apparatus. The patent was granted to Bose B Bowers of Macon, Georgia who had applied for the patent two years earlier. The patent document has a few hand written notes added later. The paper is quite fragile with some tears and soiling.Included with the patent document is a four page handwritten letter. The letter is dated 1917 and is signed by Edwin H Ries and B B Bowers of Macon, Georgia. The letter is directed at manufacturers in Canada, in hopes of selling the Canada patent, not the US patent. The letter has insertions, words crossed out and several versions of the same opening paragraph on the pages so this was obviously a rough draft of what might be eventually sent to Canadian business people for the "crank propeller" or "crank paddler" invented by Bose B Bowers, useful for powering a boat in shallow water. The letter includes the retelling of a "test run" made with the propeller on a house boat making a 71 mile trip up the Ocmulgee River from Hawkinsville to Macon. "In the shallowest stage of water, when even the small launches could not run, the water in places being only 10 inches deep, sometimes for miles the paddles worked on the sand, stirring it up like mud, you could feel them touching the sand but nothing broke or got out of order the whole way.".Edwin Ries who co-signed the letter was an owner of a Macon jewelry store and an inventor in his own right, holding several patents and maybe was an investor in the business of his friend Bose Bowers. This letter and patent form came from his estate.
I found that Bose B Bowers (1871-1943) was already a patented inventor before this patent for the propelling apparatus having invented a braiding machine for the textile industry and a candy making machine.Bowers was found guilty of murder in February 1930. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1929 murder of his neighbor Jim Beck. Bowers and Beck had a whiskey still hidden in the Ocmulgee River swamp and Bowers killed Beck when Beck attempted to destroy or steal the still (the two newspaper accounts I found online were published a week apart and each suggests a different motive for the murder). Please see our photos in this listing which shows a screenshot of the newspaper articles.Bose Bowers name is on the list of people buried in Macon's Fort Hill Cemetery. Also on the list of those interred is Dora Bowers 1874-1929, possibly his wife. If so, her death occurred in the same year as the murder of Jim Beck which may explain Bowers' state of mind at the time of the murder.