I have to take a lot of Arthritis Strength Tylenol. Taking it more than every 8 hours can damage my liver so I try hard to stick to that. Sometimes I’m in such pain that I’m not thinking straight, sometimes I’m just forgetful, and sometimes I’m taking it so often it just becomes one big blur. Like I’ll think, ok I can take more at 6pm, but then at 4pm I’ll remember memorizing 4pm yesterday and think 4pm is the time for today. It’s just hard to keep track of in your head. So I came up with the perfect solution one night! A pill bottle that has a button on the lid that when you close it a timer starts that prevents you from opening until a programmed number of hours go by, then the button pops up so you can tell it’s ok. Kind of like a turkey timer. I told my hubby thinking how millions of people could benefit from it and it could seriously be marketed. He wasn’t so impressed. Just write it down, he said. Anyway, the next day I decided to see if there was anything like it and darned if somebody didn’t already think of it! RX Timer Cap. Part of me was happy I could prove to hubby that it was indeed something other people need too, but part of me was bummed it wasn’t my idea first. We won’t get rich. Dernit!
Have you ever invented something that’s already invented?
Back when I was in graduate school (around 1979-1980) I was trying to brush the lint off a dark suit. I suddenly had this idea that if you could turn a roll of masking tape inside out (so that the sticky side faced out) you could roll it on things to get lint off them.
Some time after that, I started seeing lint rollers in stores. Of course, my first thought was “DAMN IT! Somebody beat me to it! I could have made millions!” Later I learned that lint rollers had been invented in 1956 and I had somehow not noticed them.
I have never invented anything, but my work allows me to see plenty of inventions other people think of… And in my experience, 90% (or more) of them already existed.
I work as a patent examiner at the European Patent Office in The Hague. You get to see quite a few interesting things in this line of work
Missed edit window – by the way, PurpleClogs – I have been thinking. As far as I can see, the “RXTimer” system works with a digital clock that counts down to zero and would require a battery to work. It also does not prevent the container from being opened while the timer is still running.
Your system, as described, does not have a clock, simply having a button that pops up (therefore unlocking the cap, which is kept locked until the timer runs out). Possibly you could make it work with less energy expenditure than the timer version – or perhaps even make it mechanical (although you would lose precision in the timekeeping).
Those differences might make your invention patentable… Although I’d have to check out whether there is something like that already existing…
Oh, crap, edit window missed again. Oh well… PurpleClogs, I am sorry, but fuhgeddaboudit. Out of curiosity I spent 5 minutes checking our databases and I found a US patent from 1964 that does what you thought of: A “timing dispenser which will protect against the possibility that the medicine can be administered more often than required” – Patent number US3129845. It has a timer, it has a locking mechanism that will prevent the medicine from being accessed, and it is mechanical.
The patent is available via Google Patents in this link.
It does not look like your standard pill container, though. So… The only possibility would be for you to invent something that can adapt to existing standard pill containers, will allow you to prevent the lid from being unscrewed before the proper time, and can provide a power consumption advantage over the existing timer caps (either by using less energy from a standard battery, or by using a wholly mechanical timer).
I do not see how it would be possible to lock a screwing cap that can be used with a standard pill container, though.
I was doodling during a boring maths lesson when I was a T.A. - when I say “doodling” I mean doing maths that was a bit more challenging than what the teacher was setting the kids – and after a bit of ferreting around I came up with a lovely proof about divisibility.
The exhilarating feeling lasted until I found out that Fermat had got there ages ago, probably while he was waiting for the kettle to boil. (Fermat’s Little Theorem – not the Last Theorem…!). Ah well, there goes fame.
Back in the late 80s I was at an interview with the BBC technical department. They challenged me to come up with a new idea to improve television. I had this brilliant idea to make programming a VCR easier by assigning codes to each time slot and channel. You could then print them in the tv listings. I went into great detail about how you could even broadcast a code if a show was delayed. I was describing VCR plus with PDC which was launched about 6 months later. I’d never heard of the system, but I’m sure the guy interviewing me had and assumed I was just repeating something I’d read. I didn’t get the job.
I’m not tall and using a standard car snow brush to clear a couple of feet of snow off a car is disastrous. The brush isn’t long enough to push the snow off the other side of the car, and you end up pulling it onto yourself. Like it’s not irritating enough to fill the driveway that you shovelled your way into, with the snow off the car, so you’ll have to shovel that up too.
I was engaged in this ridiculous activity when I remembered I had a broken broom and the handle. When I next needed to clear lots of snow off the car, I fashioned, with duct tape, a double long pole with a broom head correctly positioned to plow the snow away!
And it worked brilliantly. Little me could stand a little back, so as not to get covered in falling snow, and push all of the snow from the roof and hoods off the other side of the car. It was a little heavy but that kind of worked in its favour! Also it was so long as to be unsuitable to store anywhere but outside along the house. And I’m sure passers by found it amusing, but it really did work a charm.
A couple of years later I saw a thing at the Rona, telescoping aluminum pole, broom like brush, positioned to plow. Plus I think you could hook your hose to it and use it to wash your car or boat. Very light too.
It was orders of magnitude better than mine, but mine was a lot of fun that winter!
I’ve come up with several ideas for simple smartphone apps that already exist, always disappointing, especially since I know a programmer that could code them!
Along those lines, I swear this comic almost perfectly describes my thought process one afternoon a couple of years ago. I started thinking about designing an “uber-app,” that would encapsulate a whole bunch of different base functions and download dynamic executable content on the fly to keep its size and scope manageable. I was really thinking this was a conceptual step forward, and what color my first yacht would be.
In High school I was taking a small engine course and came up with a way of connecting two pistons on one connecting rod so you could minimize the number of bearings on the crankshaft. Turns out it was a WW2 German submarine engine design.
When I was in grad school I initially was coming up with things that had already been published. But the time since publication was getting shorter and shorter. Soon I was ahead of the crowd and was well on my way to a PhD. It’s something that no doubt happened to a lot of researchers.
My favorite memory is I came up with a new bound on something. Went and told my (future) advisor. My advisor reached over to a tall stack of papers and yoinked out one particular one written by a buddy. The buddy had come up with a slightly better version of my bound. But the paper had just come out within the year. Too soon for textbooks and such that I was going on that early. Doing stuff like that impresses advisors.
Please, please start a thread and tell us some of your interesting stories…
Funny stories would be great, sad stories would be interesting, and best of all would be the stories about really stupid ideas that somebody took seriously enough to try to patent.
(I’m assuming you are not bound by privacy/confidentiality issues, like doctors and lawyers. A patent is a public document, isn’t it?)
I have an idea about future cars that reduces the number of the things you must be able to control that puts them all in one place, one hand only needed to operate. I wonder…
In the mid-60s, I invented ski brakes. Obviously, at nine years old, I never made a prototype, but my concept was exactly like what came to market in the mid-70s, except that mine faced forward rather than backward. They would have been every bit as effective.
I did a similar sort of thing in my 8th grade math class. While not paying attention to what the teacher was going on about I discovered that adding odd numbers in sequence produced perfect squares in sequence. ie: 1 is the first odd number and is also the first perfect square. Add 3 (the next odd number) and you get 4 (which is 2 squared). Add 5 you get 9. Add 7 you get 16, and so on and so on.
When I excitedly shared that with my teacher, he commended me for my excellent work, then busted my bubble by telling me that some Greek had figured that same thing out a couple thousand years ago.
