LITTLE ROCK — How many people have ever dreamed of inventing a teleporter, a ray gun, an automated makeup and hair booth?
Chad Collins has met a lot of inventors, seen a lot of ideas. He founded the Arkansas Inventors Network in 2006, and that was the first thing out of his mouth: “I see a lot of inventors and ideas.”
Know what he wishes?
“I wish I had invented the dang Pillow Pet.”
If, like me, you don’t know these Pillow Pets, they’re pretty standard stuffed animals that can be flattened out into a pillow. They don’t fold up like a blanket-pillow. They just fold once. In fact, Collins is sure there’s no Pillow Pets patent.
“You’re talking about a pillow with a head on one end and a tail on the other. Talk about a simple, easy - I doubt it has a patent out there. It’s a pillow! With an animal on it! Over the last 200 years, someone’s probably patented a pillow with an animal head on it.”
Collins’ point, and it’s one you’d hear from others who take ideas to market, is that breakout inventions just isn’t the business of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office or, by extension, entrepreneurship. The patent bulletin the office publishes weekly has every award made in the country that week - it isn’t filled with telephones and penicillin and cellophane.
It’s filled with things like what follows. This sampling of ideas made by Arkansans (or, at least, people living in Arkansas the year they filed).
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW ...
Pet supplies.
In 2010, two names dominated the state’s patent awards - Jill Seliskar of Morrilton-based Cat Claws, Inc., and Billy Pennington over at Personal Security Products in Little Rock. Both had six apiece.
Seliskar designed another half dozen cat scratchers for her pet supply company last year, but another pet supplier broke away from the patent pack.
The team at Stout Stuff, LLC, in Bentonville - Christopher Chance, Andrew Bojie, Thomas Lawson and Erin McCracken - topped the list with 10. Like Seliskar’s, these are all design patents - that is, rethinking existing “inventions” - and all pet supplies.
With the exception of a cute paw-buckle collar, these were feed bowls and litter boxes.
CONSECUTIVE AWARDS
Others awarded patents in 2010 and 2011 are Wayne Woolsey of Fayetteville, for a self-tightening rifle shoulder strap, and Wayne Crolley of Bryant, for a system of passing advertisements to vehicles traveling along the interstate. Both are addenda to earlier patents.
Pennington, meanwhile, logs two new patents, one for a high-voltage stun baton, another for a pepper spray canister holster.
But the trophy for an Arkansas inventor in the category Consecutive Award in a Completely New Field goes to 73-year-old Richard McKelvey of Rogers. The inventor of 2010’s Stretch-N-Ketch fishing tackle device won a patent last year for a sliding bed tray for a pickup or sport utility vehicle.
This one is already being manufactured by his old employer, Assembled Products Corporation, and sales director Stuart Sage says the company has sold thousands. You can check it out at GoJotto.com.
“If you have a pickup with a tonneau cover, this is ... ideal, where you’ve got decreasing access as you reach forward,” McKelvey says.
Now 73, he is surely out of fresh ideas.
But wait!
Call now and listen to McKelvey’s plans for a vibration-dampening camera mount.
THE FUTURE OF CHECKOUT
For every “automated scissors” or “better snowman” - yes, that was a real patent awarded last year - there’s a patent like 7,997,486 B2. Find it filed under why don’t we have this yet!
Awarded to Richard Ulrich, solutions architect on Wal-Mart Stores’ radio-frequency identification (RFID) strategy team, and Nicholaus Jones and Justin Lewis of Bentonville, Jason Todd of Lowell and Tim Webb of Rogers, the patent outlines an RFID point-of-sale station that tallies the total of all goods in a shopping cart simultaneously and instantaneously, and without removing them from the cart.
This would:
Solve the occasional bottom-of-the-cart item that accidentally-on-purpose is left off the conveyor.
Eliminate the onerous and silly chore of taking items out of the cart just to return them moments later.
Encourage shoppers to take reusable bags with them. After all, wouldn’t we simply bag our items as we mosey along?
When asked when Arkansas shoppers can expect to see this technology in any of Wal-Mart’s 101 Arkansas stores, spokesman Dan Fogleman was unable to share any information “beyond what the patent office published.” GREEN MACHINES
U.S. Patent 8,074,435 B1, “grass cutting device,” is held by Hot Springs internist Dr.
Sudhir Pandit, 64.
This small sled with a push handle on one end and a comb of spiny blades on the other employs no moving parts and still cuts grass “automatically,” says the doctor.
All right, so this is not so appealing on paper. To our American eyes. Pandit says he is working on a prototype for another device that deigns to replace oars. Imagine a seagoing craft that paddles “automatically” on the energy of the wind and the waves.
“Eventually, my goal is to have a craft go around the world without using any fuel.”
A native of India, Pandit says he has a Third World appreciation of the scarcity of combustible fuel.
MEALS TO GO?
The best-worst patent of the year goes to Ronald W.
Long of Dover - a “steering wheel table.”
The sketch-diagram looks very much like a little tray table one might saddle to a steering wheel in time for his Baconator.
Surely, with the National Transportation Safety Board last month calling for a ban on all cell phone use - texting or calling - while driving, Long intends for his tray table to be used by folks like Realtors and adjusters who spend a lot of time writing in their vehicles.
Long could not be reached for comment.
A PACIFIER THAT PAYS OFF
Shanina T. Everett of Hot Springs didn’t respond to requests for a comment on her “Combined Pacifier and Beverage Container.” She didn’t have to. The diagram says it all.
For too long, withered American baby has felt her appetite flamed by inborn digestive mechanisms only to learn - over thousands of involuntary, fruitless sucks - that this silicone flimflam would never pay off.
Enter sweet Everett.
Where the world would have baby suck air, Everett would wish her to swig ambrosia.
WENT OFF LIKE A LIGHT BULB
Cindy A. and Arch C. Bradley Jr. of Conway didn’t set out to invent. They came to it after seeing too many folks needlessly struggle with smoke alarms.
Cindy Bradley, 54, is a handyman. That’s right. And she has replaced a bunch of smoke alarms damaged after people tried to replace the battery or turn them off.
“One went off in the night, and this couple couldn’t get it shut off, and their son knocked it down with a baseball bat.”
Their design makes a few changes to existing technology. Instead of a unit that is wired into existing wiring, it screws in like a light bulb, which activates and deactivates the alarm.
They have no current plans to manufacture.
THE PERFECT SHAVE
It’s hard to believe that a simple device in pursuit of the perfect goatee would be rejected by the patent office twice, but Scott Bonge, creator of the Goatee Saver, has fought for three years to get credit for his intellectual property.
This device is a kind of rounded plastic stencil. On one side is a kind of rubbery bit the user holds between his teeth so that his hands are free to shave. On the other are three turnbuckles that can adjust the outline to suit the face.
“It takes the guesswork out of goatee grooming,” says one user on the company’s website.
Say what you want, Bonge first got the idea 20 years ago, as an undergraduate at Ouachita Baptist University. His stick-to-it-iveness paid off. He’s one of the few patent awardees last year who didn’t develop his invention for the profit of a larger company, but took it to market himself.
Online sales, he says, have risen into the five figures.
Many of these inventions dream of reaching a tiny space on a shelf in Wal-Mart or Target, PetCo or Big Lots!, Home Depot or Lowe’s.
That’s exactly what a patent should aspire to, Collins says.
“An inventor, he’s got a little baby that he thinks is the cutest baby in the world. It’s solved his problem, and if it’s solved his problem, by golly, it’s going to solve everyone’s problem.
“Everyone will say ‘Good idea! I like that idea.’ No one wants to give you that real hard, American Idol type review of your product, but your item isn’t good until someone pulls out their wallet and gives you money for it.” To find out whether your idea has potential, or to learn more about the patent process and network with other Arkansas inventors, check out the Arkansas Inventors Network at ArkansasInvents.org.
Style, Pages 47 on 01/15/2012