*I* Invented Cell Phones and Hand Sanitizer!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Well not recently or in any way I could claim a patent. But I’ll tell you all the story anyways.

I was about 7. (This would be 1975 or 6, to save you the math.) And I was interested in mobile phones. Back then, they did exist. The the smallest one fit in a suit case, which was amazing at the time. Only the very rich had them, if even them. And you called a mobile operator. No cell towers. No cell zones period, in fact.

Anyway I asked the adults in my life why they couldn’t be smaller. They could just use touch tone, I pointed out. Oh, and I was also somewhat enamored with TV’s fictional Maxwell Smart, and his shoe phone. (His shoe phone was a rotary. WTH? Kind of silly even back then, when you think about it. I digress.)

Anyway, partly to prove point, I made all these little phones with my Lego’s, and scattered them around my room. No, they didn’t really work. But I got to tell you, at age 7, they certainly were my first cell phones. Think about it. Then my mother told me to get all that clutter off my bedroom floor, and that is all I can remember.

Then more recently, 1992 I seem to recall (when I was certainly an adult), I came up with another idea. I have always had a thing about germs. I won’t even touch something if it’s on the floor. And if I do, I wash my hands immediately.

Anyway, it occurred to me then, that rubbing alcohol sanitizes. They use it even when you get a shot. Heck, they even use it for that reason in lethal injections. Anyway, long-story-short, I used to carry a little plastic bottle of Isopropyl Alcohol with me to briefly sanitize my hands as needed. It didn’t have moisturizer in it, like hand sanitizer does today. Oh, and this was shortly before hand sanitizer came on the market. But it was definitely the same idea.

Maybe with that last one I should sue. I would never have a valid case. But I did come up with the idea first.

Anyone have a similar story? I would love to hear it, as I am sure would others:).

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

2

Aww, crap. Yes, I do have similar stories. Do I remember them? Nope. I just trust the gut feeling that this has happened to me many times as I grew up. It’s both exciting and enraging at the same time when a new product will come out that you thought of first. It’s like you want to brag about it, but then you stop and think… Well. I didn’t get to it first. Damn.

3

I invented the grunge look of blue jeans, colored T-shirt, and an open and untucked flannel shirt, topped with a bandana, while tossing bags at Chicago’s Greyhound station in the Summer of '73. At least I was the first person I saw dressed like that, and it followed Greyhound’s [strike]testicles[/strike] tentacles* across the US of A.

    • I have a story about that, too, but I’ve told too many stories already.
4

A friend tells me his father invented the microwave oven. Well, his father used microwave antennas that sent a signal during world war II, and he and his buddies used to heat food in the beam of the microwave. They didn’t think of turning it into a consumer product, though.

5

Okay, you forced my hand. :wink: Dropdad was a lawyer for Greyhound, which in the '60s meant dinner was an immersion in antitrust law, with The Dog playing The Big Bad Wolf. In one trial a plaintiff accused Greyhound of “spreading its testicles across the country.” Dad couldn’t wait to tell us.

6

I wrote* Party of Five*. When I was in intermediate school, I wrote six or seven chapters of what was supposed to be a novel about five siblings who tried to stay together when their parents were killed by a drunk driver. I was only 12, and research meant going to the library, and looking stuff up in books, but I looked up a bunch of stuff in the Columbia U. law library for the custody hearings, and the trial of the guy who hit the parents.

There was an oldest brother, who was 18, and got custody of the younger kids, and a 16 year old brother, who was emancipated in the parents’ will, but chose to stick around and help the oldest. There was a 12-year-old daughter, a 7-year-old boy, and a baby girl. They had to sell their parents’ house and move into a little apartment, where they no longer had their own rooms, but they 7-year-old had a tent in the living room so he had some private space.

I read a book on how to write a novel, and it said to make an outline, so I did that, in a format similar to how I sketched out the basics when I was starting a new dungeon when I was DM for a D&D game. I outlined the whole thing, and got about 1/4 of the way through writing it, with a few other chapters written (in notebooks, in longhand), when I decided the idea was just too stupid, and I stuck it in a box in my closet. I don’t know what happened to it. My mother probably threw it away when she cleaned out my room after I moved out.

When someone came up with a TV show with exactly the same premise, for about one second, you could have knocked me over with a whiffle bat. Then my senses came back, and I realized it was still a stupid premise, and would flop.

Right.

Only major difference was that my family was Jewish, and my title was “We’re Still the Steinbergs.”

7

Ugh!

Greyhound testicles.

The Worst!

8

When on a long car trip with preteens, I personally dreamed up a TV that you could hold in your hand. I decided they each would have to have their own to reduce arguments on what to watch. Who knew by the time they grew up everyone would be carrying a streaming device in their hands. Steve Jobs robbed me.

9

I invented the teleprompter. In 1960, a studio hand would just strand next to the camera, with b ig sheets of paper with the scrip hand printed with a marker. By a couple years later, there was a machine that would type with a big font on accordion fold paper, which could be motor-fed through a frame next to the camera.

In '63, I was a news anchor in a little town in Canada, and I suggested to my cameraman what is the principle now in use. (I think – I’ve never seen one) I said I could sit behind a pane of glass at a 45-degree angle, and read the reflection of a well-lit script, looking through the glass at the camera. He agreed that it would probably work, but we never got around to building a prototype.

10

Purell has been around since 1988.

11

That gives ‘Riding the dog’ a whole new meaning.

12

When I was in grade nine, I came up with the idea of good bacteria to fight and replace the bad bacteria that cause tooth decay. You would just use a mouthwash instead of having to get your teeth scraped, drilled, etc. (Then as now, i hated going to the dentist.) I did a comic about it and everything.

Fast forward to 2018 and all the research being done about our personal microbiomes and the effect changing them has on us… Here’s a mouthwash that claims to go after just theccavity-causung bacteria…

13

I thought, “wouldn’t it be great if there were a fruit that grew on a vine and was acidic, but maybe more vegetable like. Something you could puree and then make sauces with.”

Then someone handed me a tomato.

14

I was in line with my sisters at about age 10 (1981) at an amusement park. We were going on a log flume and I boasted that there would be roller coasters that landed in water soon. No, I’m stupid, is what I was told. Everyone would be electrocuted!

Sure enough I was with one sister in Sea World San Diego in 2010…

15

Shortly after compact discs first came out, my friends & I were speculating about what the next format would be that would eventually replace them, in the way CDs replaced records & tapes. My idea was that there wouldn’t be any new format in the traditional sense; instead, all music would be on computer chips. So I basically invented digital music.

16

My college buddy would have invented bottled water one summer in the 1970’s during Spring Fair, when he bemoaned his thirst and the lack of easily available water and proposed to bottle and sell it. I told him not to be an idiot, nobody would pay for water.

He still brings that up from time to time.

17

My grandmother claims to have thought up the idea of pre-stringing Christmas Trees with lights before selling them well before anyone actually did such a thing. When they became popular she would probably tell us every Christmas.

18

Seeing the thread title, for one shining moment there I thought we’d added Al Gore as a Doper. :frowning:

19

I invented the question mark.

20

In the late '60s, as a pre-teen, I invented ski brakes. I hated doing and undoing the safety straps on my skis, and created in my mind almost exactly what is now a standard feature of downhill skis. The only difference between my concept and the real-life version (introduced in the early '90s) was the orientation - mine had the prongs facing forward, real ones backward. But they would have worked perfectly either way.