How many Dopers have come up with a great idea for a product or service that didn’t already (to your knowledge) exist, and later said, “I wish I’d patented that!” because a few years later you see your idea implemented by somebody else?
I have.
Way back in the early '80s, working my first fast food restaurant job, our system for placing customer orders involved the cashier punching each item into the cash register and then calling each individual item back to the kitchen over a microphone. It worked, but to my 17-year-old mind it was inefficient. Inefficient for a few reasons, the main reasons being that sometimes a cashier forgot to call an item back to the kitchen, or the kitchen staff didn’t hear it/misheard it.
So I came up with a brilliant new system. We were already using somewhat primitive, computerized, programmable cash registers that allowed for each individual menu item to be assigned to its own key. My idea involved installing computer monitors in the kitchen, and hooking these monitors into the cash registers. When the cashier punched a key on the register, the corresponding menu item would appear on the monitors in the kitchen. Instead of depending on the cashier calling the item back over a microphone, the cook would simply read it off the screen and prepare the appropriate item. Once the item was assembled, wrapped, and placed in the warmer bin, the cook would just punch a button (this was before touch screens, as far as I knew anyway) to clear that item from the screen.
Guess what nearly every fast food restaurant had installed a decade or so later?
I always thought that showers and baths should have digital controls for temperature (like a thermostat) that could be preset for several different family members. I think this is available now, but I’m not sure.
After seeing a story on “Real Dolls” on HBO years ago, I thought that a great invention would be something that I just read about here a couple of months ago- “Teddy Babes”.
My brother invented Tivo in 1995. He wanted me to make a prototype but I told him that it would cost too much to produce with the hardware available at the time, so nobody would buy it. In retrospect, I was probably right. Tivo is still not a profitable business. Besides, someone else was probably already working on it at the time.
In about 1994 I had the idea of adapting a travel guide and putting it onto a RAM pack, then loading it into a GameBoy. You could also update the guide at selected stations (I hadn’t realised the internet could do this yet). Such a thing now exists in various guises, on SatNavs, PDAs, and so on.
I also had an idea, after seeing how badly they got treated, of sending fragile deliveries (e.g. chips from Korea and Taiwan to the west, or antiquities) in an adapted shipping container with inflatable shelves that fill all available space in the container once it’s been loaded. The shelves would keep inflated via a compressed air tank. Not sure if anything like it’s been done yet.
Not me, but my father has. He had some type of problem with a part on his boat. It was letting in water at the wrong times, and out at other times. It had a simple mechanism, but just wasn’t working. I don’t know the details, but I remember he took two of my ping pong balls and put rubber around them. This made them just big enough to attach to the two holes. He attached a wire/fishing line or something and anchored them. When the boat was stopped, the ball floated upward and sealed (well, somewhat) around the hole. When the boat was moving forward, the balls simply floated behind hooked to the short wire, allowing water to go around.
Two years later, he found one at a Boat US. They were a “new item” that would “fix such and such problems easily”
He complains about it a lot when he’s on the boat.
I once came up with the idea of a kind of gum that would clean your teeth as you chewed it. I hadn’t worked out the details, but I thought it was sure to make me millions. Alas, the evil gum empire (Wrigley’s) beat me to it with something called Orbit White. Foiled again.
My pops built an aluminum catcher for his 36" deck mower, as the canvas ones wore out. A decade later, they were available from the manufacturer. He probably could have retired 20 years early, but oh well.
It is. I remember my husband thinking of the same thing; then he saw a commercial for it last month sometime. All I heard was “GODDAMMIT!” coming from the vicinity of the TV.
I invented the digital camera way before they came out. I kept thinking there must be some way to combine the scanner and the camera so that you didn’t have to develop pictures to see how they came out.
My dad, on the other hand, said in 1980 that phones will become portable, fit in your pocket, have a built in rolodex, and maybe even take pictures. He was a frikkin genius!
Around April or so of 2002, I had an idea of a website where you can meet and socialize with people that share your interests such as roleplaying or camping. I thought it would be cool to use such a site to set up events with those around you (canoe trip for the whole state). A bit later Tribes came out, and after that myspace.
When I was a child (~30 years ago), I looked at record players, I looked at casette tape players, and I said that one day, there would be music players that would fit in your pocket and would play music that came on small rectangles of plastic with no moving parts. I’m sure I had no idea how this would actually be implemented though - so it doesn’t really count as an invention, but the rectangles of plastic I had in mind were about the shape and size of an SD memory card.
I’ve also invented (no physical prototype - just an idea, but I’m certain it would work) a technology for volumetric 3d displays, which I keep expecting to see turn up in the marketplace anytime - it’s such an obvious idea, I can’t believe nobody else has implemented it.
When I was a young child, I apparently suggested to my mother that it was stupid to have one machine for washing clothes and one for drying them, when you could just as easily have one big white box with a round door that did both. About a year later, she saw an advert for a “washer-drier”.
In 2003, I arrived in D.C. after three years in Dayton. I was briefly obsessed with traffic; anyone who has lived near D.C. can understand why. I realized that all of the people in D.C. drive while talking on their cell phones, and that cell towers are constantly handling dozens or hundreds of phones’ traffic at once.
I realized that two or three towers listening for the same phone’s unique identifier could be used with high-precision maps to triangulate the position (and over time, velocity) of that phone. The provider of cellular service could plot velocity tracks of different cellular phones in different colors on a map: gray for stationary, green for faster than 50mph, yellow for 35-50mph, orange for 20-35mph, and red for under 20mph. Plotting the 1,000 most recent tracks in an area using that color scheme would show a map of commuter routes and a real-time graph of flow speed. Add to it the bonus that if there’s an accident, many more cell phones will be used in the vicinity of the accident, leading to better data at trouble spots.
In 2006 or so, Slashdot covered a company that made a business model out of my idea. I could have sold the patent for at least 6 figures. Argh.
