Trivia questions

[Carl-NC]

I have a bunch of questions about metal detector history that I hope the local denizens can help answer:

1. Who founded Bounty Hunter? In what year? Were any of them ex-White's?
2. BH was bought by Space Data Systems (19?), Ray Smith (1979), Teknetics (19?), John Turner (Techna?) (19?), and now First Texas (1990). Anyone else? Looking to fill in the missing years.
3. Who founded Compass?
4. Who bought Compass before the fire? Year? What year was the fire?
5. Who founded Teknetics, besides George Payne?
6. Who founded Discovery?
7. Who founded Minelab?
8. Who developed the first automatic ground tracking? What model?
9. Who developed the first 2-filter detector? What model?
10. What was the first S-rod detector? Year?

Thanks for any help.

[ivconic]

The last time I did this was the dialup era!
Part of the answer to your questions, I believe, can be found in patents.
I did a cursory search and looked through some old patents and was blown away by some of the details all over again!
A lot of what appeared here on the forum as a "new idea" someone already had and elaborated on it a long time ago!
I would even say that there is not a single new and original idea on the forum since the creation of the forum!
I apologize for the hurt egos! (Not you Carl, I'm thinking of you the least here)
But I will not make it easier for such people, let them try to browse the patent database themselves and find "their ideas" already published a long, long time ago!
...
Carl I believe you have already searched the database thoroughly... but here is just a reminder, try again.

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/





There is an additional difficulty in searching for patents because a mass of good patents cannot be found if the search terms are "metal" and "detector".
You should use your imagination and search the database with different terms.
The "apparatus" is often a fruitful term!
Although there are a lot of patents on these topics in the titles of which there is not a single word that would be associated with a metal detector.
However, I'm not skilled enough, I can't manage to set the database search criteria by author names.
Because I noticed that most patents are not signed by the authors themselves, but by their lawyers, whose names mean nothing to us.

[kt315]

1. may be Mel? her list.
The below information is not entirely accurate, it covers Tek Ltd who was up in Oregon, then jumps to First Texas Manufacturing Co in Texas, and misses some of the detector models. There is a lot of guess work here on the year dates… I did not create this file, I only commented here in blue text. Beyond the blue text, it all belongs to another person… Not me!

Melbeta



Bounty Hunter I ( BFO ) - introduced 1971 ( per Ad )
Bounty Hunter II ( BFO ) - introduced 1971 ( per Ad )
Bounty Hunter IIII ( BFO ) - introduced 1971 ( per Ad )