Hired Girl, Inc.

Hired Girl, Inc. is the automation company founded by Dan Davis, Miles Gentry, and Belle Darkin, whose first commercial success was an unsupervised floor-cleaning machine called Hired Girl. Its development makes the company more than a setting for invention: its fortunes turn on the practical assembly of existing technologies, the organization of production, and the struggle over who controls the patents and shares. Decades later, Davis returns to the firm he created and finds a business transformed by mergers, licensing, and contested ownership.

Founding and the First Product

The company began with a specific domestic problem and a deliberately pointed name. Davis thought household automation had lagged behind industrial automation, while women continued to complain about the servant problem. He called the machine Hired Girl partly because the name recalled the exploited immigrant domestic worker his grandmother had bullied. The first model was not the semi-intelligent robot Davis would later develop; it was, in practical terms, a better vacuum cleaner, intended to sell at a price competitive with ordinary brooms.

Hired Girl Mark One cleaned floors without supervision. It could sweep, mop, vacuum, or polish, selecting among these operations from tapes in its limited memory. It picked up objects larger than a BB shot and left them in a tray for a person to decide whether to keep or discard. Its search pattern carried it across floors looking for dirt, and it retreated from occupied rooms unless its mistress switched it on. Near dinnertime it returned to its stall to recharge. The distinction from an ordinary vacuum cleaner was narrow but decisive: it could keep cleaning on its own, and that difference was enough to make it sell.

Davis assembled the design from components and precedents rather than claiming a wholly unprecedented mechanism. He adapted a prowl pattern from the Electric Turtles described in Scientific American, used a memory circuit taken from a guided missile, and combined cleaning mechanisms and linkages from a floor polisher, a soft-drink dispenser, and remote-handling devices used in atomic facilities. In his account, the invention lay in putting existing parts together; obtaining a patent also depended on hiring a good patent lawyer. The company’s origin therefore rests on a mixture of technical recombination and the legal means of turning that recombination into a commercial asset.

Production, Growth, and Corporate Roles

The decisive business achievement was production engineering. Almost the entire machine could be built from standard components listed in Sweet’s Catalogue; the exceptions were two three-dimensional cams, which Davis made himself in a shed, and a printed circuit produced by a subcontractor. At first Davis and Miles did the assembly themselves, fitting, filing, and painting the parts. The pilot model cost $4,317.09, while the first hundred machines cost a little over $39 each. They sold those units to a Los Angeles discount house for $60, and the retailer sold them for $85.

The young business could not afford sales promotion and initially relied on consignment, nearly starving before receipts arrived. A two-page feature in Life changed the scale of the problem: orders and demand meant the company needed enough workers to assemble the machines. Davis improved Hired Girl and established a proper assembly line, eventually placing a shop master in charge. The commercial success opened space for further household inventions, though Davis remained skeptical of the period’s rhetoric about functional kitchens. He regarded the home as a domain where industrial-scale changes had not yet reached, and continued to design devices aimed at cleaning, cooking, and child care.

Belle Darkin joined after the initial launch, first as a typist and bookkeeper. The company moved from letters typed by Davis and Miles on a 1908 Underwood to a rented electric typewriter, and Davis designed its letterhead. The founders reinvested their funds in the business: Davis and Pete slept in the shop, while Miles and Ricky lived in a nearby shack. They incorporated because the business needed a corporate structure. Since incorporation required three people, Belle received shares and became secretary-treasurer; Miles became president and general manager, and Davis served as chief engineer and chairman of the board, retaining 51 percent of the stock.

Davis’s majority share reflected both financial and personal claims. He said that more than 60 percent of the savings that started the company were his and that the inventiveness and engineering behind the product were his as well. He credited Miles with working hard and acknowledged that Miles was the businessman of the partnership, but believed he could have built Hired Girl with another partner, or perhaps alone. His stated aim in keeping control was to remain his own boss; he gave Miles broad latitude over the business side, a freedom he later judged excessive. The arrangement embedded a tension in the company from the start: Davis’s technical authorship and desire for control coexisted with a commercial organization that depended on Miles’s business judgment.

Patents, Ownership, and the Founders’ Separation

The firm’s later history sharpened the distinction between inventing a product and owning the rights to it. When Davis examined the documents surrounding his departure, he found registered assignments of his patents for Hired Girl, Window Willie, and several lesser inventions to Hired Girl, Inc. In fact, he had never assigned those patents or formally licensed their use to the corporation; he had considered the company his own creation and had not thought formal paperwork urgent. Flexible Frank, another of his inventions, had not been patented—or, as he later discovered, he had misunderstood its patent status.

Davis also encountered a five-year restriction on competing work in his employment contract. Under its clause, the former employer could pay to option his services on a first-refusal basis, leaving him able to return to household-appliance work only by asking Miles and Belle for a job. Although the company offered him money connected with that provision, the restraint would have prevented him from working independently in the field. The patents, stock, contract, and salary settlement thus made the break more than a personal falling-out: they determined who could exploit the technology and what Davis could do next.

After Davis’s long absence, the company’s trademark was still visible in advertising. He saw Hired Girl and its related products using the husky girl with a broom that he had first designed for the company letterhead. The sight brought regret that he had disposed of his shares, but he reasoned that Miles and Belle might otherwise have taken them from him through a false assignment. He believed Ricky had received the stock and took comfort in the possibility that it had made her wealthy. The familiar image survived even as the original partnership and its ownership arrangements did not.

The Company Davis Finds in 2001

In 2001 Davis chose to seek work at Hired Girl rather than at another automation firm. It was one of the leading names in appliance automatons, comparable in its field to Ford and General Motors in the era of the automobile. His choice was partly sentimental: he wanted to see what his old company had become. On Monday, March 5, he applied for a white-collar job, completed a dozen forms unrelated to engineering and one that was relevant, and was initially told that the firm would contact him. When he forced a meeting with a senior executive, old records established that he was both the company’s founder and a man the firm’s official history had declared dead. Once his identity was accepted, he met department heads and was welcomed into a company that had, in effect, remembered him as a ghost.

The intervening corporate transformation emerged through Davis’s conversations with Chuck Freudenberg, an assistant chief engineer. Freudenberg understood that the business had once been a manufacturing company that rented Davis’s patents from Hired Girl, Inc. About twenty years before 2001, a tax-saving merger exchanged Hired Girl stock for stock in the manufacturing firm, which then adopted the Hired Girl name. Davis learned that the full corporate name was now Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc., though its signs still read simply Hired Girl. The company’s identity had persisted through a change in corporate structure: the name and products endured, while the original firm’s relation to the manufacturer was reorganized through patent rental, share exchange, and merger.

The stock’s separate histories exposed how unevenly ownership had survived. According to a corporate record, dividends on the larger block were paid from the first quarter of 1971 through the second quarter of 1980 on the original shares into a trust for a party named Heinicke. After the 1980 reorganization, the equivalent shares appear to have been sold to Cosmopolitan Insurance Group, which still held them. A smaller block had been held by Belle D. Gentry until 1972, when it was assigned to Sierra Acceptances Corporation and sold off piecemeal over the counter. The record did not establish the subsequent history of every share, leaving the company’s past legible only in fragments of dividends, trusts, transfers, and reorganized stock.

Later Development and Significance

Davis’s return did not restore him to his former position as the company’s controlling engineer. He worked there, caught up on developments in the field, and relied particularly on Freudenberg’s technical criticism to distinguish useful new ideas from devices that were already outdated. The firm itself continued to develop through the merger with Geary Manufacturing, while its old patents and product lineage remained part of its identity. Davis’s experience makes the company’s history a measure of technological and institutional change: the founder had to learn the new state of engineering, while the business built on his inventions had acquired new owners, names, and structures.

By the end of the story, Hired Girl’s shares again have practical consequences. After marrying Ricky, Davis votes her block—the largest single block of Hired Girl stock—and uses the resulting influence to move McBee to the position of Research Engineer Emeritus. He places Freudenberg in the chief engineer’s role. The scene reverses the earlier separation in a qualified way: Davis does not reclaim the company or return to its board, but the stock associated with Ricky gives him leverage over its technical leadership. Hired Girl remains a corporation operating beyond its founder’s direct management, while the original concerns of invention, ownership, and control continue to shape who directs its engineering.

The company also embodies the book’s practical account of technological change. Hired Girl’s early success did not depend on a machine that emerged fully formed from isolated genius; it depended on standard parts, improvised manufacturing, a subcontracted circuit, patient cost reduction, and a market ready to buy unattended domestic labor. Later, patents could be rented, stock exchanged, and a manufacturing firm absorbed under the name of the business it acquired. Across these changes, Hired Girl stands for both the reach and the limits of an inventor’s control: a product and trademark can outlive their creator’s place in the company, while the company’s continuing history remains entangled with the labor, designs, and ownership decisions that created it.