Lawyer, Lee Spooner Cordova came to St. Louis (Missouri) and lived in Decatur Palmyra, Wisconsin. Besides his job, he seems to have been a self-taught engineer as is attested by a patent for a machine selling cigars he officially filed in the US Patent Office in 1904 — a machine built in the same year by Peter Manufacturing Company. Most of his other plans, signed “L.C. Spooner Inventor,” reflect utopian projects conceived between 1911 and 1934: these machines or everyday life objects based on the principle of self-propulsion (engines, trash cans, scales, self-propelled finger-lifter, etc.). They were originally glued to the pages of a large advertising catalogue devoted to fashion in which L. C. Spooner also hid his explanatory patents, attached with straight pins or safety pins.
SPOONER l. c. (lee cordova SPOONER, known as)
