A Patent for Calvin
On Saturday, May 6 Calvin College engineering majors gathered for a banquet and an opportunity to present the results of their Senior Projects.
The year-end gathering has been a tradition on campus for over a decade now.
But this year Calvin seniors witnessed an inspirational first at the banquet.
They saw three former Calvin students receive a plaque and a check saluting them for landing the school's first-ever patent -- United States patent number 5,984,416.
The trio -- Rachel teBrake, Alsion Stahl and Stacey Waldo (pictured above from left to right) -- earned the patent as a result of a Senior Project they did during the 1996-97 school year.
They worked with Prince Corporation's David Spykerman who asked them to think about how to design an adjustable armrest for a vehicle. But not just any adjustable armrest, one with "memory." In other words, if it was raised and lowered it would return to the exact same position it had been in. Not only that but it had to be simple to make and cost under $10.
The trio delivered. They invented an armrest that, says Calvin professor Ned Nielsen, is "so simple you think anyone could do it. But they didn't. These three women did it, as Calvin seniors."
Nielsen has 16 patents to his name and when he saw the women's design he thought it might be patentable. So Calvin worked with a law firm to produce the paperwork, some nine pages of description and pictures. The patent application also has 22 "claims," what Nielsen says is the heart of a patent. The claims help make the patent unique. All 22 were approved.
The patent includes the names of the three women and Spykerman as "inventors" and of Calvin College and Prince Corporation as "assignees." Nielsen says his research has not uncovered another patent assigned to Calvin College. And the great thing, he says, is that three seniors landed the honor for Calvin.
All three women graduated with degrees in Engineering and are working in engineering-related fields.
Stahl works in Holland for GMB Architects, Waldo works in Coopersville for Delphi and teBrake is in Detroit with Citation Casting.
Waldo grew up in Spring Lake and is a graduate of Western Michigan Christian High School. Even as a high school student, Waldo (then Stacey Ippel) best liked math and science classes, so engineering was a natural major for her at Calvin. She now works at Delphi Automotive in Coopersville as a Statistical Engineer and lives in Grand Haven.
Stahl is a native of Fridely, Minn., a burb of Minneapolis. She is a grad of Fridley High. She now lives and works in Holland, Mich., as a design engineer for GMB Architects and Engineers. Stahl designs HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems for buildings.
teBrake is a native of Hilton Head, S.C., and attended Hilton Head High School. Since graduating from Calvin in 1997 she spent over two years working as a product engineer at TRW Automotive, including a year of work in Koblenz, Germany. About four months ago she took a job at Citation Casting Corporation near Detroit.