Inventor of the weed whacker dies

HOUSTON – George C. Ballas Sr., a Houston entrepreneur best known for inventing the Weed Eater, has died. He was 85.

Ballas’ son, Corky Ballas, said his father died of natural causes on Saturday.

Ballas got the idea for the Weed Eater, a device also commonly known as a weed whacker, while sitting in a car wash. He wondered whether the idea of spinning bristles, like the ones cleaning his car, could be applied to trimming grass and weeds in areas a lawnmower couldn’t reach.

He experimented with fishing wire that poked through holes in a tin can attached to the rotary of a lawn edger, and found that the spinning wires easily sliced through grass.

Ballas founded his Weed Eater company in Houston in 1971 and sales flourished during the subsequent decade. He later sold his invention to Emerson Electric.

“A Weed Eater,” Ballas told the Houston Chronicle in 1993, “comes along once in a lifetime.”

But George Ballas was also a dance studio owner.

After his military service, Ballas worked for both the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire dance studio franchises. He was a dance instructor, but also traveled to various cities, troubleshooting to make the outlets profitable.

After moving to Houston in the late 1950s, he built and operated the Dance City USA Studio. With 120 instructors and 43,000 square feet of space, it was heralded as the largest dance studio in the world. He sold it in 1964.

George Ballas also helped develop a Houston hotel and worked as an adjunct professor at Rice University, teaching entrepreneurship.