Orla Watson

[1] Orla E. Watson was born in 1896, and after attending Nevada Business College for one year, he worked as a stock clerk in a hardware store in Kansas City, then joined the Army.

In 1946, 50-year-old Orla E. Watson left his job as draftsman at the Crafting and Processing Engineering Company in Kansas City.

Watson's Western Machine Company made examples of this invention, and the first ones were manufactured and put to use in Floyd Day's Super Market in 1947.

[3][4][5] Watson also developed the power lift shopping cart which raised the lower basket of the two-basket design which made retrieval of items easier while at the checkout counter.

Orla Watson was granted a patent #2,479,530 on August 16, 1949 for the "Telescope Cart" which could be "nested" together in order to save space without disassembly after each use.

[10][11] The royalties Watson received for each cart manufactured led to his 1954 claim against the Internal Revenue Service, for refund of taxes paid on the profits of his invention, as a Congressional bill changed the status of invention-derived income from ordinary income to capital gains, thereby lowering the taxes owed.

Original patent documents showing design of the nesting feature of the Telescope Cart. The rear of the cart swings forward when a cart is shoved into it, hence the nesting feature.