History

Our founder, Austin Enos “Brick” Kness was born in Chadwick, Illinois on June 19, 1889. He was the second of eight children born to William and Clara Kness. The family settled on farms near Olin and Monticello, Iowa in the mid 1890’s.

"Brick" attended school through the eighth grade. He left home at the age of fifteen. He worked on various farms and wrestled professionally. He even enjoyed some success traveling as a wrestler.

He traveled West in his early twenties as a man seeking adventure and his place in life. He worked odd jobs before returning to Iowa in the late twenties. During the time Brick spent in the West, he worked in logging camps where he learned to be a barber, cutting the hair of the other loggers. He also worked the orchards in Washington state near Yakima and found employment on a dairy farm near Astoria, Oregon. When he returned to Iowa, he attended an automotive repair school in Omaha, Nebraska. After he finished his schooling, Brick took employment on a farm near Audubon, Iowa.

Brick married Bessie Anderson in 1915 at the age of twenty-five. She died nine years later. Brick was left to raise their six children, three girls and three boys. The depression forced him to seek employment as the custodian of the Audubon High School in 1924.

The various places Brick worked inspired him to build tools to assist his work. He built an orchard pruning saw, a boat powered by a vehicle, a light bulb extractor for high ceilings, a one-wheel trailer, a rural mail box, a garden hoe, a repeating rat trap, a contour plow and harrow, a left-hand turn signaling device for an automobile, a lift box on the three-point hitch of a tractor, a machine for mixing poison bait to kill grasshoppers and chinch bugs, and many other things. However, the one invention Kness is noted for is the Ketch-All Multiple Catch Mousetrap.

Mice were prevalent at the Audubon High School, and when they were caught in the small wood traps they would die behind obstacles in the school. Brick would have to set numerous traps, empty them and clean up the mess. He conceived the idea of the "box" trap. He built the first trap from a square oil can, a tuxedo tobacco can, a spring from a curtain rod and the wood base from a crate. The first night he set his trap he captured five mice. He was elated and showed the teachers and his friends. He was encouraged to build others for his friends and to seek a patent.

In 1927, Kness Mfg. Co. was formed and Brick began an earnest manufacture of the Roto-Bow tree saw and the Ketch-All Automatic Mousetrap.

The U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was the organization that finally made the mousetrap and the company successful. The food processors in the United States were told by OSHA to confine the rodent in a box trap to reduce hair particles in the air.

The pest control industry was responsible for controlling the food processors’ rodent and insect problems. At the time the only trap available was the Ketch-All Multiple Catch Mousetrap. The Pest Control Distributors requested the small Albia, Iowa company increase its production of the trap to meet the new demands.

Brick left the world with a better mousetrap and the world did beat a path to his door. His trap is still being constructed today very similar to the same principal of the first trap he built in 1924.