Surely you must have thought of some device, concept, way of doing things, item of apparel, new approach that would qualify as a “neat idea” worth pursuing for the sake of profit or notoriety. Surely you considered the hassle involved in getting that thing developed and presented to the public and, for whatever reason(s), just didn’t quite make it in time to be rolling in dough or appearing regularly on Letterman or Leno or even Oprah.
Tell us about the whole ordeal.
The one I want to share is what eventually became Word Menu. Back in the 60’s, not long after I got out of college, I bought a set of Great Books, an encyclopedia and one of those 3-volume dictionaries. I set myself the task of going through all of them. FWIW, I still have that to do.
But along the way I began to think how neat it would be to have another type of book (or reference source) where you could learn the basics of any topic by way of dictionary type definitions of the important words in that field of endeavor. Like nautical terms or military terms or aviation terms, you name it.
I went as far as starting lists of topics and paging through the dictionary entering words in the various lists. I got well into the A’s before deciding that could keep for a while. But it was a neat idea.
Anyway, in the 80’s or 90’s this book came out that did pretty much that same thing. I bought a copy. The guy did a good job of taking my idea and bringing it to market. I’m mildly jealous.
Have you had such an experience? Or have you actually made a profit off of yours?
That time about ten years ago when I said to myself…
“Grossbottom, you should take all you know about da’Vinci, the Priory of Sion, and the supposed lost descendants of Jebus and write a crappy potboiler about them, just for laughs.”
One of these days, I’m actually going to put my idea for the mistletoe beltbuckle into production and capitalize on the gag Xmas gift market. I hope it will be the singing fish of that year.
Okay. I’ll share another one from the 60’s. Three buddies and I began to expound over our beers one day about the most ridiculous children’s book we could come up with. It had to be an alphabet book and had to make way less sense than Dr. Seuss.
First we came up with 26 of the most unlikely animals that anybody would want for pets. Things like wildebeests, barnacles, yaks, that sort of thing. Then we tried to find the most antithetical names for these pets that we could imagine. And finally we came up with a little nonsense story for why the pet had that name. The book was to be in alphabetical order by name of pet. I can barely remember more than a few, but one example was:
Jake, the Amazon tarantula, was named that because Queen Anne wore an amulet around her neck that looked like a lighthouse.
Needless to say, by the time the beer ran out so had the idea. But within a couple of years I saw a book like that. No lie!
Sometime around the year 4 BI (before internet) I had an idea for a database of music information.
I started building a database of Musicians, band associations, song names, album titles, label information, etc. from the liner notes of my music library intending to post it as shareware on different bbs’s. Hopefully someone would take my file and incorporate the information from their library and pass it along. Eventually I’d have a cross-referenced, searchable, open source version of what (later) became Allmusic.com. Or maybe a cross between Allmusic and Wikipedia.
After about eight months of “all-my-free-time” data entry, my XT-clone up and died taking all my (non-backed-up) database files with it. Maybe I shoulda thought it through a little better, hunh?
Before the Internet I tried to get a bulletin board for resumes. And one for electronic yellow pages. I’ll have to think about it some more, there are a couple of others.
Me to Pal 1990:“I think that even today we could pull DNA from a Mammoth Bone and almost re-build Mammoths. Could you image a Zoo or preserve like that, with Neanderthals, Giant Bison, Deer, Cave Bears and maybe Dinosaurs, if we could find a way to get thier DNA? They could live wild and we could safari out to see them. We should pitch a TV show about that! Maybe I’ll get an outline together …”
Pal about 1 month later: “Hey remember your idea about a Dinosaur Zoo? Well there is this new book …”
The idea wasn’t Jurassic Park, really. More Ice Age Park with Dinos “if we could find a way to get their DNA”. It wasn’t a book or Movie – it was to be a TV show (or maybe a TV movie pilot). And I was too late – the book was written and about to be published before I even thought it. But it was close enough, and Jurassic was successful enough, to still make me say :smack:
About 4-5 years ago, I had an idea to start a web based site in which one can log on and create groups of interest and meet people that share those interest. The idea came to me when I really wanted to go on a float trip, but none of my friends of family is into that sort of thing. I thought it would be really cool if there was a place that I could go and meet people that were into canoeing or white water rafting, but found no such place. My idea: start an online service where you can log on and meet people with similar interests- want to start a local softball tournament, log on, create a group and attract similarly interested parties. Into roleplaying but only have one other friend that can play? Log on and find others in the are to play with. Sort of a matchmaking site for looking for friends and interests instead of romance.
About a year or two later Tribes and several other similar sites came online and seem to work pretty well. They are all free sites as far as I know, but still don’t have the network capacity for what I was looking for. Still similar enough that I was amazed when I ran across them.
Late 1940’s, my Dad built an electric lawnmower. It had a plywood body and was powered by the vertical shaft motor from a Hoover vacuum cleaner. He fashioned the blade from an old metal serving platter. I think he got the idea from a magazine, maybe Popular Mechanics. It worked pretty good, if you didn’t run over the extension cord.
In 1973 I rec’d. an insurance settlement of about $6000.00. I planned to invest most of it in stock. I had run across an article about a small company, w/ a strange name, that was buying up the rights to old films and asked a broker to see what he could find out about it. He seemed skeptical, but said he’s research it. A few days later he told me he couldn’t find anything, I suspect he never looked, and I invested elswhere. The company?.. Home Box Office.
in 1984 (?) I BEGGED my apents to invest in Microsoft or lend me $10,000 to do so myself.
A year or two earlier (I was arounf 16 or so) I begged them to give me the money to start up a business selling single serving sized bottles of mineral water. They said no idiot in their right mind would pay for water when drinking fountains were everywhere.
Not on the same scale, but in the early '90’s I had an idea to hide various documents of my creation throughout various sites on the Internet so that it appeared to the conscientious researcher that there was a mystery out there he could solve by following the clues on several different websites and newsgroups and putting them together. Five or six years before Microsoft paid Sean Stewart and Elan Lee to do the same thing as a viral marketing effort for the film A.I. (And which itself has spawned an whole active genre of the things.)
I envisioned a first-person shooter type game back when the very latest in video game technology was Galaga. Of course, seeing as how I was in 7th grade at the time and not exactly a budding computer genius, I really didn’t have much opportunity to act on the idea.
I also envisioned movies on-demand, back around, oh, 1992. Noting the way that recorded media was progressing from vinyl to cassette to CD, I reasoned that the next step would be delivery of information without the need for intermediate storage. Someday, I told myself, you’d be able to request the movie you want to watch from some centralized service, and have it play on your own TV whenever you requested it.
In the late 70’s I was living in near the border of Oregon and California and I was constently driving up and down really big hills, back and forth to college. I kept thinking that there has to be a way to harness the energy of rolling something large, like a car, down a big hill. If you could store that energy in say a battery that could power a large enough motor you could really save on gas (which as a starving college student I could barely afford). I invented the Hybrid engine… I just didn’t know it.
While in the Navy in the mid 70’s, satellite communications was in it’s infancy. I was stationed at a Naval air station and my shop set the on base communications link between the base, squadrons and the satellite network. One of the techs from the vendor told us that the US had an aggressive plan to blanket the earth with satellites and that the 15 foot dishes we were installing would be much smaller in the future. I started thinking with enough satellites and small enough receivers, why couldn’t we have satellite radio. You could drive cross country and listen to the same station. My co-workers and the vendor techs thought I was crazy and said there would never be such a thing. Today you can buy a satellite ready radio for less than $100 and in a newspaper article this week, a XM executive said the cost of his and Sirius’ service could go as low as $5 a month in the near future making it affordable for just about everyone.
15 years ago when I decided that sunbathing was Bad and wearing sunscreen with an SPF 30 or higher was Good. I couldn’t find a sunscreen anywhere for my face.
The body stuff was too thick and gooey and pimple making and every morning for years I groused, " Why can’t these companies make a facial moisturizer with an SPF 30* that doesn’t cause blindness or worse, pimples?"
*Spf 30 is only about 2-8% longer lasting than the SPF 30, which has the goo factor involved. Leaving you to see only 15 to maybe a rare 20 on the shelves.