Weed Eater was a string trimmer company founded in 1971 in Houston, Texas by George C. Ballas, Sr., the inventor of the device.
The idea for the Weed Eater trimmer came to him from the spinning nylon bristles of an automatic car wash. He thought that he could come up with a similar technique to protect the bark on trees that he was trimming around.
His company was eventually bought by Emerson Electric and merged with Poulan. Poulan/Weed Eater was later purchased by Electrolux, which spun off the outdoors division as Husqvarna AB in 2006.
Inventor Ballas was the father of champion ballroom dancer Corky Ballas and the grandfather of Dancing with the Stars dancer Mark Ballas.
George Ballas died in June 2011.
Famous quotes containing the words weed and/or eater:
“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle.”
—Bible: Hebrew Samson, in Judges, 14:18.
To the men who had answered his riddle, “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”