Several years ago, during a time when I was wracking my brains out to “come up with a simple invention-idea that would reap big bucks,” it hit me while sitting on a bar stool.
I noticed that the bartender, while getting my beer from the tap, had to keep pouring out beer and suds over and over into the draining tray while trying to top it off so there’d be just the right amount of beer relative to the suds, as it kept foaming up.
And so noticing that this was a huge waste of beer, and knowing too that this problem was universal (as far as I could tell), I thought: “Eureka! I’m a-gonna be a billionaire!!”
But because I didn’t have a workshop available to work on solving the problem, I just blew it off and dropped the idea. Well, a couple years later I’m reading about some dude at MIT winning the Jerome Lemmelson (sp?) Award. (Lemmelson, now deceased, was an inventor that had lots of patents that brought him an $800-mill-$$ fortune; thus he established the award.)
And so that fellow got something like a whooping $500-thou-SS prize as a result of me not making an effort. Plus who knows how much his little spout gizmo made him on the commercial market?
Have any of you had similar disappointments happen to you?
Two that spring to mind are “Hooked on Phonics”. I told my brother you could teach people anything if you set it to music. He thought it was brilliant. We did nothing. Now someone else is rich.
Also, when I got my first SW radio I was listening to one the Time stations doing their spiel -at the tone the time is 14 hours 11 minutes beep- and I thought, maybe there’s a way to piggy back that information in the radio wave so that devices can read it by themselves and set themselves. But I didn’t know where to start with that. Now you have a millionn watches/clocks that set themselves to WWV time signals.
Not exactly an invention, but I did have an idea for product packaging/marketing that I toyed with for a while. I thought it would be great to package Stridex (or similar) anti-acne cleaning pads in little one-use foil envelopes (kind of like condom wrappers.) These could be particularly marketed to boys to carry around in their pockets and wipe their faces in the middle of the day, since most boys aren’t going to keep a jar of Stridex pads in their locker.
About a year later, this very packaging showed up in stores. They didn’t market it very well, though, and I haven’t seen it for a bit. I still think it was a great idea.
To be fair, if this is the same guy I’m thinking of, his spout not only gives you pretty much the perfect pour but also does it like 5 times as fast. So you would have only been half a billionaire.
When I was in veterinary school, I designed a bird travel cage that was very easy to use. A friend kept pestering me to manufacture/market/sell my idea, but I never thought it would fly. I told him he could have the idea and he did very well, creating a bunch of accessories. He eventually lost the company through divorce.
I had one in college. It was a (green) extension cord about 10 feet long that would have outlets (three or four or five, not sure) acorss it’s length and a hook at the top. You would put it up through the middle of a christmas tree and hang it up near the top of the tree. This way you could plug in your lights in various spots across the tree instead of having 10 cords all piggybacked in one location (or 10 cords all strung end to end). Seemed to me it would be safer, or at least easier. I had the idea in my head for three or four years, even went so far as to get some papers from a patent attorney, but I just sat on the idea. To this day I still regret not jumping on it. Now, I’ve never seen one in store but my girlfriend at the time called me from a store one day to tell me she saw one.
The idea was actually a friend’s but he invited me to develop all the blueprints so we could prototype and patent in trade for 50% ownership – so half of the “sat on our hands” blame lies with me. For the hunting crowd, he wanted to develop a ‘tree’ that would fit into your truck’s hitch receiver so you could hang a gambrel and field dress game anywhere, even in a treeless plain.
I noticed the product in a BassPro Shop catalog a couple of years ago.
I thought of combining those keychain thingies that beep in response to a whistle so that you can find them with a TV remote control. I sat on this idea for at least 5 years, but eventually someone else did come out with something very close.
It was a TV manufacturer (Magnavox, I think) and their version would beep if you pushed a button on the TV, but I figure that’s close enough to my idea to make patenting a challenge.
I have a spooky halloween tree that has little glass holders for tea-light candles. I wanted to have it at work to amuse my coworkers, but I figured that HR would frown on 7 open flames sitting on my cube desk. So of course I looked on-line to find a battery-powered equivalent.
Nothing. Anywhere.
I looked again this month, and there are several different brands, from several different distributers - little LCD tea-lights powered by a watch battery. I can’t swear that they didn’t exist last year, but I’m pretty good at finding stuff.
When I was first out of nursing school, I worked on a hematology unit. The patients had very fragile veins. IVs rarely lasted an hour. A pharmacist and I put together a set up that didn’t require flowing IVs through the needle, prolonging its usefulness.
We put together what is today known as a heparin lock. They are now used in every hospital in the country.
They may have been “invented” elsewhere at the same time, but I bet it was a nurse, and I’ll also bet no nurse ever got a cent from it.
I came up with the idea, and the rough design, for a hydraulic elevator with the piston in the shaft, rather than sunk into the ground, long before I ever saw one installed.
Ideas, by themselves, are worth nothing.
We’ve all had lots of them. It’s the execution, sales, marketing, development that is important. All these things cost money and time.
You may have seen ‘your’ idea in a store, but that doesn’t mean anyone made money with it. They may have lost their shirt.
Unless you are willing to risk having to go shirtless, you can’t really complain that someone got rich off of your idea.
Back in the late 70’s I thought up an idea for “3-D” stereo, where you would wear a special headset that had speakers in different spots around your ear so that sound would actually sound like it was coming from anywhere.
Then Surround sound came out in the early 90’s and that was that.
