Dossa D. Evins

The inventor, 1886 to 1932

Dossa Evins built the first instrument chiropractic used to check its own work

Dossa Dixon Evins patented a process for comparing the temperature of the two sides of the spine, and an instrument sensitive enough to run it. The Omaha Bee reported in September 1924 that tests by the United States Bureau of Standards found the device registered thermal differences of one hundredth of a degree centigrade. Over a thousand were in field use within four months of the first deliveries in June 1924. Evins built the machine. The lease price that made it notorious was set by the Palmer School.

Evins was born at Blodgett, Missouri, on February 13, 1886, and died on November 15, 1932, of pneumonia, at forty six. He took a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas. John Nash, writing in Chiropractic History in 1995, records that Evins was a vaudeville entertainer with his wife Billie, an inventor, and a radio operator for the Secret Service during the First World War. He came to chiropractic as a patient.

Evins held a patent before he ever saw a spine

Evins filed his first patent on April 24, 1914 and received it on September 21, 1915. It covers a method of making electrotype embossing dies, and it has nothing to do with the body. The record matters because it establishes what kind of man walked into Davenport six years later. Evins was already a working inventor who could take an idea from a bench to a granted claim. Dye's history records that nobody had seriously attempted a mechanical means of locating spinal heat differences until the early 1920s.

Evins enrolled at the Palmer School in August 1920 and filed a chiropractic patent two months later

Evins entered the Palmer School of Chiropractic in August 1920 and graduated in 1922. On October 23, 1920, ten weeks into his first term, he filed a patent for a motorized attachment that raises and lowers a chiropractic table between horizontal and vertical. It was granted as US 1,504,111 on August 5, 1924. B.J. Palmer later listed an Evins Palmer hi lo among the school's table designs. The first thing Evins did as a chiropractic student was build a machine.

What the neurocalometer measured

The neurocalometer compared the two sides of the spine and reported the difference between them

The neurocalometer Dossa Evins built did not measure a temperature. It measured a difference. Two thermocouple junctions rode down the spine, one on each side of a segment, and a galvanometer needle deflected toward the warmer junction. A balanced segment left the needle at zero. An unbalanced one swung it. Evins stated the claim himself in the patent: his invention consists in comparing the simultaneous temperatures of separated areas along the spine.

The process patent, filed January 1924

US 1,552,284, Process of Spinal Analysis, was filed on January 18, 1924 and granted on September 1, 1925. Evins assigned a one half interest to Frank W. Elliott, the business manager of the Palmer School. The specification is precise about what the process is for. It enables the detection of inflammation or other conditions which cause local increases in temperature, through the detection of the local differences in temperature. Nothing in the claim is about a bone being out of place.

The instrument patent was filed the day after the launch

US 1,610,271, Temperature Detector, was filed on August 25, 1924 and granted on December 14, 1926, again assigned to Frank W. Elliott. The Canadian patent, CA 266,602, is titled Neurocalometer and issued on December 7, 1926. The filing date of the American hardware patent is the day after B.J. Palmer announced the instrument to the profession at the 1924 Lyceum. The device carries a thermopile, a stack of thermocouples in series whose exposed junctions absorb body heat quickly and drive a galvanometer.

It took six months to find the range

B.J. Palmer wrote that Evins spent six months establishing the minimum and maximum of the human abnormal heat produced by subluxation interference before he could design anything (The Great Divide, pp. 58 to 59). Only then could he build an instrument to work inside that range. Palmer listed the variables Evins had to control. The number of thermocouples in each terminal, the length of wire in each, and the metals used. Then the balance between the left and right terminals, and the sensitivity of the galvanometer. The instrument was not electrically powered. It generated its own signal from heat.

How the neurocalometer reached the field

B.J. Palmer saw the neurocalometer in April 1923 and launched it at the Lyceum on August 24, 1924

The Omaha Bee reported on September 14, 1924 that laboratory work on the device began in 1920 and that the invention was brought to B.J. Palmer's attention in April 1923. Palmer dated his own adoption to 1923 in the 1951 research volume, writing that the neurocalometer took the guess out of finding which vertebra was producing pressure (p. 694). The Palmer School put it into daily use on the faculty floor by June 1924, with eight technicians booked solid. On August 24, 1924, at the Palmer School Lyceum in Davenport, Palmer delivered the address he called The Hour Has Struck. By late October more than a thousand instruments were in the field.

The instrument was never sold, only leased

The neurocalometer was manufactured by the Palmer School under exclusive license from Evins, and it was leased on a ten year contract. The price when it first went east was 500 dollars. It rose to 600, then to 750, and the resentment started there. Through midnight on September 14, 1924 the terms were 100 dollars cash and thirteen monthly payments of 50 dollars. From the following morning the price was 2,200 dollars, with terms of 200 dollars cash and 100 dollars a month until 1,000 dollars had been paid, at six percent interest. Palmer wrote in the same period that he was thinking of raising it to 3,000 dollars after January 1.

The contract fixed the minimum fee the patient could be charged

A lessee was contractually required to charge no less than 10 dollars for a neurocalometer reading. The requirement is printed in the Fountain Head News of October 18, 1924. Joseph Keating, who reconstructed the terms for the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association in 1991, notes that 10 dollars in 1924 was conservatively equivalent to about 60 dollars at the time he wrote. The lease also restricted access to Palmer graduates, and the school required a two day technique course before it would deliver a unit.

Evins was inside the enforcement

On August 2, 1924 the Fountain Head News printed a letter sent over Evins's name, on behalf of the Palmer School, warning the J.W. Healey X-Ray Company that patent applications would shortly issue and that actions would follow against the company and its purchasers. Palmer told the field that Evins had seven patent applications pending covering designs, devices and processes, in this country and sixteen others. Evins was not a bystander to the commercial program. He was its named inventor and its licensor. The price schedule was not his to set.

The controversy was the lease

The 1924 split turned on the pricing and the claims, not on whether the instrument worked

August Dye, writing the profession's first history in 1939, put the cause plainly. There was much condemnation of B.J. Palmer because of the manner of the introduction, the leasing system, and the frequent raising of the lease rate (Dye, 1939, p. 210). Joseph Keating's later assessment separates the two things the same way. The instrument was presumably reliable as a thermometer, and it was Palmer's claims for its validity as a method of detecting subluxation that the profession would not accept.

What the enrollment figures actually show

Federal funding for the vocational training of veterans after the First World War pushed the number of chiropractic schools past eighty in the first half of the 1920s. The Palmer School reached an enrollment of more than 3,000 students. When the veterans' benefits expired, most of those schools disappeared and the survivors contracted hard. Keating records that the Palmer student body fell by as much as ninety percent by the end of the decade. The neurocalometer launch sits inside that collapse. It is not the whole explanation for it.

The price came down to 150 dollars

Dye records the end of the story on the next page. Because of the disturbance created by the methods of distribution, B.J. Palmer had to acquire all rights to distribution himself, and by 1939 the instrument leased for 150 dollars with a monthly rental of five dollars for servicing and repairs (Dye, 1939, p. 211). The same machine that had cost 2,200 dollars in September 1924 cost 150 dollars fifteen years later. Nothing about the hardware had changed to justify the difference.

What Evins is blamed for and what he did

The 1924 episode is remembered as the neurocalometer debacle, and the instrument's name carries it. The documents distribute the responsibility differently. Evins invented the process, built the hardware, filed the patents and licensed the manufacture. The lease structure, the ten year term, the September deadline, the escalating price, the exclusivity to Palmer graduates and the mandatory patient fee were announced in B.J. Palmer's own newspaper over his own name. Nash titled his 1995 study of Evins with the point: he was in the eye of the storm.

The other machines

Evins patented an x-ray method, a table mechanism and a musical instrument as well

Five United States patents and two Canadian ones stand in Evins's name, and two of the American ones cover the neurocalometer. US 1,592,348, a method of and apparatus for producing x rays, was filed on May 23, 1925 and granted on July 13, 1926. The Canadian patent CA 327,172, for a musical instrument, published on November 1, 1932, two weeks before he died. Evins played the English cornet on the vaudeville stage, and the 1932 patent shows he was still designing musical instruments at the end.

The table

Evins worked on the mechanical adjusting table through the whole period. Dye records that Evins worked with a Palmer graduate named Stiles on the Stiles hi lo as it moved from compressed air to springs and then to an electric lift by motor (Dye, 1939, p. 180). B.J. Palmer listed an Evins Palmer hi lo among the steps that led to knee chest posture. That table lineage still runs under the H.I.O. knee chest procedure.

The radio

Evins put his wartime radio work to use at the Palmer School's broadcasting operation. Otto Schiernbeck built the recording equipment for B.J. Palmer's 1935 research clinic. The 1951 volume describes him as having a long association with Dossa Evins and his neurocalometer, along with expert knowledge of radio and electricity (p. 269). The instrument line that ended in the electroencephaloneuromentimpograph of the 1940s runs back through Evins's bench.

What the instrument was actually for

The neurocalometer's real function was the retest, not the diagnosis

The claim that mattered was not that the neurocalometer found the subluxation. It was that the same reading could be taken again immediately after the adjustment. B.J. Palmer wrote in the Fountain Head News of November 22, 1924 that the profession had assumed that if the bone cracked or moved, the pressure was released. The instrument showed otherwise. Thousands of segments had been adjusted for weeks and months with no change in the reading. The machine's most uncomfortable function was checking chiropractors.

Knowing when not to adjust

Palmer restated the point in a letter to M.W. Garfunkel on March 24, 1941. A chiropractor has no way of knowing when or when not to give an adjustment, he wrote, or whether there is or is not interference, unless he has an instrument and uses it correctly. The 1951 research volume puts it the same way. The neurocalometer establishes competently when interference is present and when it is not. It proves whether an adjustment was one, or just another wrong punch somewhere in the back (p. 694). Lyle Sherman ran that discipline inside the research clinic and turned restraint into a clinical act.

Evins ran the first sham control in chiropractic

In the early 1920s a manufacturer in Omaha invited B.J. Palmer to endorse a radionic machine for a commission on every unit sold. Palmer insisted on bringing Frank Elliott and Evins with him. At about four in the afternoon Evins stepped behind the console and kicked the power plug out of the wall. The operator went on producing positive and negative findings for two hours on a dead machine. Told at six o'clock, he said it would work as well without current as with it (Chiropractic Clinical Controlled Research, 1951, pp. 214 to 216).

What the Omaha test established

The Omaha demonstration is the earliest deliberate blinding of an instrument in chiropractic that the literature records, and an engineer ran it. Evins did not argue with the manufacturer about theory. He removed the variable and watched what happened to the readings. That is the whole method: if the output does not change when the input is removed, the output was never a measurement. He then built his own instrument so the same test could be run on it: read the spine, deliver the input, read it again.

Tone in Dossa Evins's work

Dossa Evins's contribution to tone is the demand that the variable be readable off an instrument

Dossa Evins built a difference detector. The neurocalometer never reported an absolute value, and it was never meant to. It reported the relationship between two sides of one segment, read continuously down a column, before an input and again after it. That is the shape of every tone measurement this library uses. The Unified Model of Tone holds that tone is a real state variable rather than a way of speaking. It is real because it can be recorded before the clinical outcome is known.

Tone shows up in relationships, not in averages

Tone is legible wherever a rhythm can be measured for more than its average. It shows in the variability of a signal rather than its mean, in the coupling between two rhythms rather than either alone, and in how a system answers a challenge. Heart rate variability is the clearest modern case. The mean heart rate says little, and the structure of the variation reports the state of autonomic regulation. Evins built the same kind of reading in 1924 at one hundredth of a degree centigrade, out of two thermocouples and a galvanometer.

The pattern, and why it was the real finding

By 1951 the Palmer clinic had accumulated 203,824 graphs from a shielded and grounded booth. What those graphs produced was not a location. It was a pattern for each person, developed over roughly three weeks with no adjustment given, which held true to itself and did not change until an input was delivered. A stable individual signature that persists until it is disturbed is a description of a set point, and the rate at which the new pattern replaced the old one is time course. Evins built the instrument that made the pattern visible.

Where the model parts from the neurocalometer

The neurocalometer was read as though it located one place, and its promotion promised that a zero across every segment meant a normal spine. This model holds that a body ordinarily carries several points of critical tension at once, and that the reach of each one shifts with the system's state from week to week. It also holds that no single instrument is the variable. Thermal asymmetry, cortical excitability, autonomic regulation and tissue compliance are readings of one underlying state, and the claim that they share one underlying factor, with compensation deciding how far each one moves, is the model's real test. What survives from Evins without revision is the requirement: read it, deliver the input, read it again.

The dated record

Eight dated facts about Dossa Evins, with the source for each

April 24, 1914. Evins filed his first patent, a method of making electrotype embossing dies, granted as US 1,154,179 on September 21, 1915. He was an engineer with a granted claim six years before he entered chiropractic.

August 1920. Evins enrolled at the Palmer School of Chiropractic. He graduated in 1922 (Nash, Chiropractic History, 1995). The Omaha Bee reported in September 1924 that laboratory work on the neurocalometer began in 1920.

October 23, 1920. Evins filed the patent for a motorized chiropractic table attachment, granted as US 1,504,111 on August 5, 1924. It moves the table between horizontal and vertical under foot pedal control.

April 1923. The invention was brought to B.J. Palmer's attention, according to the Omaha Bee of September 14, 1924. Palmer dated his own introduction of the neurocalometer to 1923 in the 1951 research volume (p. 694).

January 18, 1924. Evins filed Process of Spinal Analysis, granted as US 1,552,284 on September 1, 1925, with a one half interest assigned to Frank W. Elliott. This is the patent that defines what the instrument does.

August 24, 1924. B.J. Palmer delivered The Hour Has Struck at the Palmer School Lyceum in Davenport. Evins filed the hardware patent, US 1,610,271, the next day. It was granted on December 14, 1926.

October 18, 1924. The Fountain Head News reported more than 1,000 neurocalometers in actual use within four months of the first deliveries. The same period carries the rule that a lessee must charge a patient no less than 10 dollars per reading.

November 15, 1932. Evins died of pneumonia at forty six. Two years later B.J. Palmer dedicated The Subluxation Specific, The Adjustment Specific, 2,070 pages, to him, writing that so long as the neurocalometer exists the name of Dossa D. Evins will be a household thanks.

The library web

Where Dossa Evins's line runs in this library

Dossa Evins connects the people who built chiropractic instruments to the measurements this library still uses.

B.J. Palmer adopted the neurocalometer in 1923, set its price, and built a research clinic around instrumented readings. Lyle Sherman ran the pattern analysis inside that clinic and used it to decide when not to adjust. D.D. Palmer supplied the variable the instrument was pointed at when he wrote that chiropractic is founded on tone.

Toftness and Pierce Stillwagon both carry the instrumented line forward, the first with a radiation detector and the second with thermography built into a protocol. Tone is the variable, heart rate variability is the modern reading of the same kind, set point and time course name what the clinic's graphs were showing, and input quality is what the retest measures. The Unified Model of Tone carries the whole argument with the measurements attached.