Ray Townsend invented the Frank-a-Matic, the machine that revolutionized the hot dog industry.
Mr. Townsend, who died April 2 at age 97, was an inventor who made several important contributions to the meatpacking industry, including the first practical mechanical hog-skinner and a 178-needle saline injector that helped make barrel-brining of bacon a thing of the past.
A man of restless imagination, Mr. Townsend patented such inventions as a ladder-like stirrup that would enable a short person to mount a tall horse and a device that used the heat from a boat's engine to neutralize waste from the latrine.
But it was his contributions to the meat industry that touched the most lives.
Mr. Townsend's frankfurter machinery reduced labor requirements and vastly increased production, spinning out as many as 30,000 links per hour. The Frank-a-Matic integrated the main steps of creating skinless hot dogs, including stuffing, cooking and removing them from their temporary casings.
Within a few years of being introduced in 1962, the machine became the industry standard, used by upward of 90% of domestic manufacturers.
"If we went back to the pre-Frank-a-Matic days that hot dog in your bun would probably cost you twice as much as it does today," said Bob Rust, an emeritus professor of meat science at Iowa State University.
Likewise, Mr. Townsend's hog-skinning machinery mechanized a process that formerly had been done by hand, by a worker with a drawknife skinning a ham held in a kind of vice. Mr. Townsend's machine was faster and safer, although, Mr. Rust said, "it could still bite you."
A native of Des Moines, Mr. Townsend grew up working in his father's machine shop. During World War II, he worked in a ordnance plant and developed a machine to disarm faulty bullets.
While helping to repair machinery in a local meatpacking plant, he saw manual hog skinning and set about finding a better way. In 1946, he sold the first of his skinners to meatpackers in the Chicago stockyards. The machines sold to packers around the country, and Mr. Townsend founded Townsend Engineering Inc., now owned by food processor Marel.
The Frank-a-Matic—which he first sketched on the back of a napkin after a visit to a meatpacking plant—proved so popular around the world that even the Soviet Union got into the act, purchasing 100 of the machines from Mr. Townsend in the late 1960s.
His bacon injector, introduced in the early 1970s, helped create a more uniform product and was adopted across the industry.
In 2009, Mr. Townsend was inducted into the inaugural class of the Meat Industry Hall of Fame, alongside Frank Purdue and Jimmy Dean.
Mr. Townsend's inventions spanned more than meatpacking. He developed some flight instruments for the Learjet he piloted, and a complicated set of adjustable weights meant to make his golf putter behave. For sportsmen, he developed a fish skinner that promised: "Clean the fish, remove the head and fins, and the skinner tidily does the rest." But it didn't catch on.
He also produced exercise machines including jogging treadmills, but was about a decade early to the fitness craze starting in the 1970s and 1980s.
"His favorite number was 127, the number of patents he held," said his son, Ted Townsend. "Late in life he couldn't tell you what it was for, but he still knew it was his favorite."
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