Yep. In grade six (1981) we had a ‘shaggy dog’ drive - where we all brought in our old toothbrushes (shaggy dogs) and for about 10 cents we could get a brand new toothbush (part of the government’s dental program). I remember thinking how cool would it be if you could just replace the head of your old toothbrush with a brand new one, and keep the original handle. Curse you Colgate!!!
Many years ago, on this very message board, I proposed an idea I had: pre-measured peanut butter sticks for baking. Like sticks of butter or shortening, but peanut butter, so you wouldn’t have to measure for recipes that called for peanut butter. They came to market about four years later, although they may not have caught on, because I haven’t seen 'em lately.
And I have an idea for a great alarm clock for hard-to-awaken people, but if I tell you you’ll just steal it.
Fuck! I have been mulling over a GPS driven version of this idea…
I came up with a digital thermometer in a pacifier when I was a kid. D’oh!
I thought of a travel toothbrush with the toothpaste in the handle, where you could squeeze it out of the toothbrush head, when I was in 3rd grade (20+ years ago). I now see them in discount stores.
If it’s a clock that “hides” itself somewhere in your room during the night, forcing you to get out of bed to find it and turn it off, then it’s been done.
Or maybe your idea is a complex system of button pushes/switch swithcings to turn off the alarm? Also already done.
Not me, but a friend of mine had the idea of doing “Anne Frank: The Musical.” It wold a huge farce of The Diary of Anne Frank, culminating in a lightsaber duel between Hitler and Anne Frank. He then saw “The Producers,” and was heard to remark: “That God-damn Jew bastard Mel Brooks stole my idea!”
We didn’t have the heart to tell him the movie was made before he was born.
Reality TV. In the 70’s there wasn’t a whole lot more than The Brady Bunch on TV. I thought to myself, “my family is way more interesting than the Brady’s”. Someone should just follow us around with cameras.
Wow, I was going to mention this one. I “invented” it too, but I only invented it a couple of weeks ago.
I also invented cell phones with MP3 players in them. And I invented the shower thermostat that everyone else in the thread also invented.
Friendster was the first social network site in that model. It started in March of '02.
If you count Candid Camera, Reality TV started in the late 40’s. The “follow people around with cameras who know they’re being filmed” thing debuted on PBS in 1973 (it was shot in 1971). It was on PBS. It followed around a typical American family. I remember watching it as a kid. Wiki Link
I totally came up for the concept for this game about 12 years ago: Khet
I’m not bitter though, the game is really fun, and I didn’t have to do any work to actually build the thing
I came up with the idea for a light meter that could measure overall exposure to determine if you were close to a tan or burn. You calibrate it based on your skin sensitivity, tell it what SPF you are wearing, and leave it out in the sun with you. It goes off when you should go in.
A friend found the thing on line, though as I have never heard of it it doesn’t seem to be doing so well. I have a great idea I am working on now, though. If it comes out I will be set for life.
In 1987 I made a traveling bird cage for my parrot. I was in vet school at the time, and a classmate thought my idea was great. He wanted to make them with me to sell to the public. He looked into small business loans for start-up capital, but I wasn’t interested, so I told him to go for it.
It was moderately successful, although his divorce a few years later led to the eventual dissolution of the company. I googled the company name and found numerous references, but nothing current.
In the early 90s I “pioneered” the use of a small crochet hook as a surgical tool for doing prepubertal spays in dogs/cats under 12 weeks of age. I am relatively certain others had the same idea at around the same time.
Fine, I’ll spill the beans: I’m hard to awaken, and once I’ve learned how to turn off an alarm clock, I’ll do it in my sleep. To combat that, my idea is a clock with a keypad on top and a random number generator built into it. When the alarm goes off, the clock generates a random three digit number and displays it on the clock face. The person must enter that three digit number for the clock to switch off. This means that the person must actually open their eyes to view the display and be sufficiently awake to read and enter the code, which is something that I have not so far seen in any available alarm clock.
While working around with computers, for some time now, you have the ability to “switch keyboards” so you have different layouts. It’s useful for people like me who need to use programmer-oriented character sets (ampersand, backslash, etc.) and still have to write text sometimes (accented words, the occasional umlaut, etc.)
So I find the keyboard-switching feature which I first saw around Windows 95 particularly useful . And from there I got the idea of a keyboard that actually reflects those changes, since its keys would actually be leds that could be programmed to show different characters. This led to an idea to make these switches user-defined, so people wouldn’t have to use qwerty-keyboards anymore.
Anyhow, it seems a russian firm patented the idea about one or two years ago.
Observe the Optimus Maximus keyboard!
ONLY 1500 dollars? Sign me up!
Yeah. Rub it in.
Well, sir, if you are excited by that, we can offer it half price!
Our company has yet to build one of these, has tested it for none of the available OS and/or configurations available. We are not liable for any malfunctions it might have nor fires it might start. Oh… and we don’t have a patent for it…
I invented the double bladed light saber.