Is the day of the "Backyard Inventor" gone?

Factual Questions
41

Wankel rotary engine. Invented by a guy who then got buy in from Mazda.

Metal Storm firearms with no moving parts. Invented by a backyard guy who turned it into a corporation.

At the bottom end of the scale is the upside down tomato plant beloved of TV huckster shows. May not be a world-beating idea, but someone had to think of it, develop it, make a prototype, pitch it to someone who had the resources to come up with distribution, etc.

There are a bajillion of these things. I saw a plastic device designed to make folding shirts easier. And there are stacks of funny little food preparation gadgets too. The corkscrew that you pump like a slot machine without having to twist the damn thing. These can only have been invented by small time guys who managed to leverage the idea up to the point of production.

I once met an inventor who invented a bike whose foot cranks did not turn in a circle. They were geared and engineered to be pressed up and down rather than round and round. The idea was that that motion more closely matched ordinary biomechical walking than did the round and round motion and was therefore “better”. He was very proud of his invention and had put huge amounts of work into it. The huge problem seemed to be that whereas a simple wheel arrangement associated with the pedals serves a conventional bike well enough, the machinery necessary to convert an up-and-down motion into rotary energy for the driving wheels was so heavy that the whole project was pointless, what with weight being kind of a Big Deal in bikes. And the power transfer wasn’t even like it is with conventional bikes - at the top and bottom of the stroke, the effort involved seemed harder than during the middle part.

The real problem for inventors is breaking into what is now a very sophisticated market. An inventor might be a genius of the level of Edison, but without the finance and without the business and marketing skills necessary to convert the idea into reality and put one in every household it is going nowhere. The finance issue is not trivial, and nor is the organisation of distribution networks, inventory, manufacturing runs, being careful not to overestimate nor underestimate the market for the product, etc.

As a result, inventors tend not to make as much money out of even successful ideas as one might naively think. It’s the guys who take the financial risk by stumping up the cash who take the rewards, in the traditional capitalist manner. The inventor has usually had to compromise his rights severely (by diluting his share in the profits) in order to get some person or company on board who can do all that other stuff.

42

The Mazda RX cars are the only production cars using Rotary engines, as I understand it, but I think that qualifies as a valid “major, original backyard invention” otherwise- with the note that Wankel was working as an automotive engineer at the time, of course. :wink:

Which has failed to generate at money at all or be adopted by any military in any capacity whatsoever. It’s the Segway of firearms. Actually, that’s not really an accurate comparison because people use Segways for things; I saw heaps of mall security guys in the US with them and they’re popular for beach tours in some places too.

Now, I’m not knocking O’Dwyer or his inventions at all- I say good on him. I’m just pointing out that even though he invented the Metal Storm gun, it’s completely failed to catch on despite 15 years of trying, and is therefore not a “successful” invention at present. Time may no doubt change that, but 15 years after Samuel Colt introduced the revolver there we

That’s very true and I’m not disagreeing with you, but my OP was really aimed more towards “Big” inventions (like the aeroplane or the hovercraft) that anyone with enough time and a bit of know-how could have come up with, as opposed to “small” (but still useful inventions) that end up getting flogged on “Sunrise” or

I agree completely. A couple of years ago I tentatively came up with a design for a firearm related item that doesn’t currently exist but can’t be patented either due to prior art. Thing is, I don’t have the technical skills to build the item myself and even if I did, I don’t have the money to built it in quantity, and even if I did manage to get it built it’d be reverse-engineered in fairly short order by someone overseas and I’d never see a return on the money I’d spent developing it in the first place, since the design can’t be patented.

So it currently exists as a few sketches/doodles in my “Bright Ideas” dossier and that’s about the extent of it. I’m sure there are lots of people, even on the boards here, with similar experiences.

But the fact it’s so difficult to get something invented and built as an individual these days does rather suggest (to me, at least) that the days of the backyard inventor making major discoveries are long gone. The best outcome seems to be “come up with an initial prototype, see if a big company is interested, then turn it over to their R&D teams and have them throw money at it until it becomes worthwhile”, which is not quite the sort of “inventing” I was thinking about when I drafted the OP.

43

Sorry, that should read “15 years after Samuel Colt invented the revolver, it had been widely adopted and numerous improvements to the design made” and “… getting flogged on Sunrise or 3am Infomercials.”

44

In our times, everybody with a brain understands the value of education. As a result, many talented people get to hang around in a lab with an education instead of hanging around their backyard without it. More than previously, I’d say.

45

How about the Leatherman tool and the SawStop?

46

I was wrong. The backyard inventor lives!

47

The unfortunate story of a motivated teenager who tried to build a breeder reactor.

48

I don’t know if it qualifies as “important”, but my best friend’s husband (an engineer) devised an attachment for longarm quilting machines. The attachment allows the quilter to automate quilting designs using templates. Quiltazoid They’re selling like hotcakes, but not so much that they can quit their day jobs. He got the idea from a combination of the Spirograph and their kitchen mixmaster. He builds them in their garage.

49

How about Robert Kearns? He invented the intermittent windshield wiper on his own in 1964. It may not have been a world changing invention but it was certainly a successful one.

50

Kearns really was a character. The movie really ironed him out to make him a hero. But the man was off his rocker, in more ways than one. One of Kearns’s many former attorneys said that Kearns refused to pick up a multi-million dollar check from the bank – a judgment award from one of his many lawsuits – solely for the reason that he did not want to share the money with his ex-wife.

51

It may not be the best course of action but I’ve seen other men do things like this. They’d rather go without some money rather than know that their ex-wife got a portion of it.

52

I think this product may have made it to market. I saw a dude on one near the beach the other day. It looked sort of like an elliptical trainer on wheels. Granted, it wasn’t the most efficient means of transportation but it looked kind of fun. It looked almost like jogging although easier on the knees. There are boatloads of inefficient but cool modes of transportation that make it to market.

I mean the Rip-stick has to be the most difficult inefficient mode of transportation on the planet, but I still see plenty of kids riding around on them although very very slowly.

53

Is this true? I wound up sitting on an airplane with a woman who handles subcontracted-out drug tests for the pharmacies, and she said that all of the good drugs (in context, pharmaceticals) come from “two guys at a bench”, said the way we would say “two guys in a garage”. They all dream of being bought out by the majors, of course.

It isn’t much of a cite from me, but I offer it as anecdotal evidence.

54

I fear that what happens in real life is that any number of people come up with essentially the same idea, then argue over priority and the signficance of all the tiny technical differences in approach between them that lead to the final outcome.

The guy I met was really too unworldly to ever get his thing off the ground commercially. One of the things mentioned upthread is the tendency to insist on perfection before going to market without realising that a good-enough Mark 1 version might be marketable and provide cash flow for perfection later. I suspect that this was my guy’s problem, and I imagine that someone else has beaten him to the punch.

55

They weren’t talking about backyard inventors.

56

Someone hasn’t seen the Snuggie. The backyard inventor is thriving.

57

No, she was very much speaking of garage inventors, with moderately low cash flow. Not software level low, but yes, she was very much talking about garage inventors. If making it to proof of concept stage and then getting funding rules them out from being inventors, and as others have stated up thread, the chemists in question in man cases had day jobs in the industry, but I’m not sure that a small lab is out of the range of the back yard inventor.

58

Holy crap! That’s a resourceful kid… but possibly the definition of “knowing just enough to be dangerous.”

59

That is the way of things, I fear. There was an interesting article on the invention of zubbles (colored bubbles) that chronicled the 11 year history of the invention. Then, near the end of the article:

the inventor hired a chemist to solve the problem he had wasted 10 years on. A brilliant chemist that solved a problem few people could, sure, but it was disappointing in the context of the article. The article spent so much time on an ultimately pointless story.

I’m not sure whether that’s a lament about the state of the world or of the editors of Popular Science.

60

My 2¢ on the matter is that the backyard inventor was always largely a myth. It makes a great story; the little guy taking on the big corporations, winning by building a better widget and getting rich selling the fruits of his labor. It’s a very appealing myth for Americans and it does happen, just nowhere near as often as we’d like to believe. I suspect that useful money-making inventions from garage shops are roughly as common now as they were 50 years ago, and that we’d be lamenting their disappearance if we were discussing this back then.