Lonely Oregon boy grew up to be a comics legend (Part 2 of 2)

ON SEPT. 14, 1964, the steamship Al Kuwait was moored at the dock in Kuwait City when something terrible happened: The ship capsized and settled to the harbor floor.

The solution came from a Danish engineer named Karl Kroyer. Kroyer’s plan was to rig a pipe to the ship and blast thousands and thousands of small polystyrene balls — Ping-Pong balls, basically — into the hull of the ship. Eventually, he reasoned, there would be enough balls in the ship to float it to the surface; and he could, by carefully choosing where to inject the balls, bring it back onto an even keel at the same time.

Kroyer was given the green light, and on New Year’s Day he was ready to do the job. He turned on his Ping-Pong pumps and blasted 27 million of the balls — 65 tons in all — into the sunken ship.

It rolled upright and lay there low in the water, ready to be towed away from the water plant to safety. Success! The city was saved!

Kroyer promptly filed patent applications on this ping-pong ball method. But he ran into trouble in the Netherlands. There, his application for a patent was denied. It seemed someone in the Dutch patent office recognized Kroyer’s “new” technique … from a Donald Duck comic book, “The Sunken Yacht,” published in 1949.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/24-03a.carl-barks-the-duck-man.html)