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."
Over the years since, independent inventors have continued to break new ground, even in demanding, high-technology fields. A patent for the first implantable heart pacemaker was issued in 1962 to Wilson Greatbatch, who did the work in a barn on his property. Later he devised a type of battery still used in the space program. Robert Rines, a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame for advances over the past 60 years in areas such as radar and sonar imaging, helped create an Internet-based distance learning system, patented just three years ago.
"I don't think there's any part of the market that's off limits to independent inventors," declares Joanne Hayes-Rines, editor of Inventors' Digest and fervent cheerleader for the magazine's circulation of 20,000 innovators. (She's also married to Robert Rines, whom she met, of course, at an inventors' conference.) Computers and engineering software have put new tools in the hands of solo inventors and have made it easier to search existing patents in the patent office's online database (www.uspto.gov). And although big companies may have their own research labs and R&D units, they are always on the prowl for ideas they can snap up, says Hayes-Rines, because it's easier, and perhaps cheaper, to pay licensing fees to an inventor than to create breakthrough products themselves. "Independent inventors are risk takers," she says. "They have that fire in the belly."
But the flames can blind inventors to realities and risks. Great ideas sometimes languish until advances in other areas catch up. A predecessor to the long-playing record was on the market in 1932, but the arms on record players of the time were so heavy that the needles sliced the records into uselessness after a few plays. Not until 1948 did the LP appear in modern dress. Inventors also need to be wary of the scams that lurk on radio and late-night TV, where invention-marketing firms offer their services. They take all comers and generally want an upfront fee, yet success stories are rare.
The annals of inventing also tell many stories of companies that stole patents, knowing that few independent inventors could mount a prolonged legal battle. "I can guarantee you that if you contact 10 companies, two will try to infringe [on the inventor's patent], and whether they settle depends on whether they think you're a threat," says Ronald Riley, who invents from a farm in Grand Blanc, Mich. He earns a comfortable income from licensing an industrial patent--and from companies he caught infringing on it.
Inventing poses a special challenge for women. Buttons to Biotech, a patent office report, relates that from 1790 to 1895, women accounted for about 1 percent of patents granted. Even by 1954, a woman was the inventor of record only about 1.5 percent of the time. Recently the number of patents going to women has skyrocketed, mostly for innovations in biotech and pharmaceuticals, but they are still underrepresented in the statistics.
Hiding their light. The numbers may understate women's contributions, however. An unknown number of patent applications were submitted by women using their initials to hide their gender, says Fred Amram, a University of Minnesota professor of communication and creativity who has studied female inventors. Some, he says, didn't receive credit for inventions because they turned their ideas over to husbands or fathers, who had the money to see them through. And some have been the victims of simple discrimination.
Take Margaret Knight, who as a young woman in Springfield, Mass., in 1868 invented the first machine that could make the square-bottomed paper bag found in supermarkets everywhere. Knight built models, first of wood and then of iron, to try out her idea. Before she could file a patent application, a man who had seen her drawings and models stole her idea and beat her to the patent office. She sued. During the trial, her opponent argued that she couldn't have invented the bag-making machine. What did women know about machinery? Knight won anyway, receiving her patent in 1870, but other women lacked the resources or will to fight the boys-only system.
Not that women are the only targets of discrimination. When black inventor Garrett Morgan wrote to fire departments about a gas mask he had patented in 1914 with its own air supply to protect firefighters in burning buildings, the response was invariably enthusiastic. But when Morgan showed up to demonstrate the mask, he got nowhere. "So he hired a white guy to go around the country and he'd say, `Hi, I'm Garrett Morgan,' and the masks sold like hotcakes," says Amram.
The joy of the "Eureka!" moment fades in the long struggle to turn an idea into a product. Why did someone like Frampton Ellis bother? He had done well in the stock market and could have coasted, instead of spending years on his shoe. "There's the issue of personal satisfaction," he says, groping for an explanation.
After an evening hanging out at an inventors' club meeting, another possibility comes to mind. Perhaps it's more a matter of dissatisfaction--a quirk of personality that sees a problem and can't help but gnaw at it like a terrier until it gives up a solution, then hang on bulldoglike to make the solution real. The truly inventive mind won't be satisfied with one problem, either.
Looking for trouble. Jamie Page came up with his first invention when he was a high school junior. Seeing elderly relatives spill their pills when they only wanted a single one, he created a device to fit on top of a bottle and dispense one pill at a time. When he did a patent search, "of course I found 30 other people had worked on it," he says, so he looked for new problems. In 1995, while in his early 20s and working at a product development company in California's Silicon Valley that he and a friend had cofounded, Page was bothered that the nearby mountains never had snow. If only he could find a way to get the skiing sensation on those snowless trails.
Page began playing with the idea of a complicated marriage of mountain bike and ski. He wanted users to be able to steer and to brake. He wanted them to be able to lock the wheels and climb a slope. He wanted big tires and a strong but light frame. He started by fastening hardware casters to lengths of two-by-four lumber. Later he cobbled a Frankensteinian combination of in-line roller skates and cross-country ski bindings.
Two years later, Page was convinced that it would work and that a market existed. Then came three years of working out kinks, searching patents, and setting up a business, which he named for the product, Crosskate, in a suburb of Boston. "Fourteen-to-18-hour days were absolutely the norm," he says. "If I wasn't sleeping, I was doing Crosskate."
Even after coming up with a final version, it took a year to get the Crosskate into a few stores--"that's very quick, but it seemed like a long time to us," says Page. The young entrepreneur projected five-year sales of $50 million but then ran headlong into last year's recession. He now expects his company to be bought out before hitting the $50 million mark, and that's OK with him. He has more ideas.
FROM THE PATENT ARCHIVES
WINDSHIELD WIPER Mary Anderson patented the "window-cleaning device" in 1903. It was hand-operated but had features of today's wipers, including a spring-loaded arm and a rubber blade.
PHOTOCOPIER Physicist Chester Carlson patented the process used in the Xerox copier in 1942. Developed in his kitchen, it converted an image into a pattern of electrostatic charges, which attracted a powdered ink.
IMPLANTABLE PACEMAKER Pacemakers were cumbersome devices until independent inventor Wilson Greatbatch invented one that could be sewn into the body, patented in 1962.
STAIR-CLIMBING WHEELCHAIR Inventor Dean Kamen's creation can cross rough ground on all wheels and balance on two to lift an occupant to standing height, as well as climb stairs. He and colleagues won this patent last year.
This story appears in the February 11, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.