George Ballas, 1928–2011

George Ballas loved a neat lawn. But the 200 trees crowding his two-acre yard posed a problem: Unless he got down on his knees and trimmed around their roots with shears, Ballas couldn’t achieve the perfection he desired. Then one day in 1971, as he sat in a Houston car wash, Ballas realized that the nylon bristles scrubbing his vehicle could also help tidy his garden. Back home, he rigged up an old popcorn can with fishing wire and bolted it to a rotating lawn edger, and the Weed Eater—now better known as the weed whacker—was born. “It made a helluva noise,” Ballas said in 1977. “But it ripped up the turf and tore away the grass.”

Born to Greek immigrants who ran a restaurant in northern Louisiana, Ballas served as an Air Force bombardier during World War II and the Korean War. After leaving the service, he married Maria Louisa Marulanda—a dance instructor whom “he met when she taught him the tango,” said The Wall Street Journal. The couple went into business together, managing several Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire studio franchises. In the 1960s, Ballas opened his own studio, Dance City USA—a 43,000-square-foot Houston venue that he called “a supermarket of dancing with babes and booze and big bands all under one roof.”

“But after he perfected his invention,” said The New York Times, Ballas focused on the newly formed Weed Eater Corporation. With some smart marketing—each new trimmer model bore a cute name like “Weedie” or “Clippie”—and a high-visibility ad campaign, sales rocketed from $570,000 in 1972 to $41 million in 1976. In 1977 Ballas sold the booming business to Emerson Electric for an undisclosed amount. “It has remained confidential all these years,” his son Corky, a champion ballroom dancer, told the Los Angeles Times. “But it was a happy sum.”

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Ballas continued to tinker with inventions over the following decades, engineering successful gizmos (including tiny engines for leaf blowers) and some notable flops (a football-helmet-sized mobile phone). “A Weed Eater,” Ballas admitted in 1993, “comes along once in a lifetime.”