Flying Solo
In basements, garages, and start-up companies, lone inventors are still on the quest for "Eureka!" moments
Tuesday is special at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That's when the agency puts out the weekly Official Gazette, which lists newly granted patents. The date shown on every new patent is always a Tuesday as well. What's with Tuesday? Nobody knows. It's just a tradition, like "shoes," which is what everybody calls the cases that hold paper copies of the 6.3 million-plus patents granted since 1790.
Another tradition that hangs on is the stubborn presence of the little guy. Of the 1,500 or more "notices of allowance" mailed out in a typical week from the patent office's high-rise quarters in Alexandria, Va., to let American applicants know they succeeded, nearly 1 in 5 goes to people working on their own. More than 16,000 independent inventors received patents in the year 2000--almost 30 percent more than in 1990.
These folks don't work for big companies or universities with well-heeled R&D labs, fancy equipment, and helpful assistants. Often they are people like Frampton Ellis, who in 1981 earned his first patent for an athletic shoe designed to cut down on ankle injuries by mimicking the bare foot. In 1988 Ellis, then a budget analyst for the federal government, decided to go all out to get his shoe to market. Over the next seven years he drained his savings--spending tens of thousands of dollars to apply for U.S. and foreign patents and $30,000 to create a prototype that looked good enough to shop around to shoe manufacturers--and sacrificed nights, weekends, and vacation time. "My personal life took a huge hit," says Ellis. But the payoff was also huge, although Ellis won't say just how big. In 1996 Adidas brought out a line of "Feet You Wear" athletic shoes based on his design, and millions of pairs have been sold.
America has long lionized the lone inventor as a mythic if eccentric figure, an embodiment of the creative, can-do spirit of a restless nation. Like most appealing myths, it can be misleading. Thomas Edison, in most people's minds the consummate inventor, was also the inventor of the R&D lab. While he took personal credit for a long list of inventions, many emerged from the collaborative hothouse of talented employees in his "invention factory," as he called it, in Menlo Park, N.J.
Small-time triumphs. Nonetheless, through the 19th century most patents went to corporations, not to individuals. Later, solo inventors continued to make their mark. It was not Samuel Langley, backed by $50,000 in government funds, whose airplane was the first to fly successfully (his version nose-dived into the Potomac River), but Wilbur and Orville Wright, financed by about $1,000 from their bicycle shop. It was not a corporate engineer but Edwin Armstrong, working in a basement lab that he rented from Columbia University, who devised FM radio in 1933, trading fading, staticky AM reception for clear, high-fidelity sound.
In 1958, British economist John Jewkes assembled a representative list of about 60 major inventions from the previous half century, ranging from acrylic fiber and the long-playing record to television and the zipper. More than half, he found, had come from individuals working on their own. One reason, he wrote, was that "men with great powers of originality are in many ways a race apart." They tend not to play well with others, Jewkes decided, "because their great gifts arise from the habit of calling everything, even the simplest assumptions, into question."
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